The top surviving leader of the Khmer Rouge, admitting he made "mistakes," says he is willing to face an international genocide tribunal but denies that millions died during the group's reign of terror.
"I admit that there was a mistake. But I had my ideology. I wanted to free my country. I wanted people to have well-being," Nuon Chea said in an exclusive interviews in Pailin, the movement's former stronghold.
Second-in-command under Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, Nuon Chea claimed that his key error was in not checking up carefully on the work of the regime.
The Khmer Rouge is implicated in the deaths of at least 1.7 million Cambodians from disease, overwork, starvation and execution during its 1975 to 1979 rule. Some estimates place the deaths at more than 2 million, with historians saying the exact toll will probably never be known.
"I didn't use wisdom to find the truth of what was going on, to check who was doing wrong and who was doing right. I accept that error," Nuon Chea, 77, said in the interview on Saturday at his bungalow on the outskirts of Pailin in northwestern Cambodia.
He implied that he himself was not directly involved in the killings.
Wearing sunglasses labeled "Gucci," a black shirt and shorts with a blue-and-white scarf tied around his waist, Nuon Chea said he is willing to face a court to set the historical record straight.
The Cambodian government and UN agreed last June to establish a tribunal to try former Khmer Rouge leaders like Nuon Chea.
During their heyday, when Nuon Chea served as the movement's ideologue and Pol Pot's close comrade, the Khmer Rouge emptied cities, abolished money and closed schools and hospitals in an attempt to create an agrarian utopia.
Researchers and historians believe Nuon Chea was responsible for Khmer Rouge policies that led to the atrocities.
But the number of people who died was not in the millions, Nuon Chea said, speaking in Thai.
"People died but there were so many causes of their deaths. We have to know the situation, what the situation was like," he said.
The rare admission by Nuon Chea comes three weeks after his Pailin neighbor, Khieu Samphan, the nominal leader of the Khmer Rouge and its best known public face, acknowledged the regime had committed genocide -- the first such admission by a senior Khmer Rouge official.
He and Nuon Chea would likely be among defendants in the UN-backed tribunal.
No senior Khmer Rouge member has ever been convicted for the 1970s atrocities. Only two top officials -- Ta Mok and Kaing Khek Iev -- are in jail after being seized by the government in the waning days of the Khmer Rouge guerrilla war, but have not been convicted. Pol Pot died in 1998, an ill and hunted man.
Pol Pot and Nuon Chea, born of a wealthy Sino-Cambodian family and educated in Thailand, became brothers-in-revolution in the 1950s.
Nuon Chea, known as Brother No. 2, spent most of his life shrouded in self-imposed secrecy.
"We have to take this chance to benefit our country and our people. We will have to explain to people around the world and my people so they can understand who created the conflict back then, who was the enemy," he said.
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