
Nuon Chea (7 July 1926-4 August 2019) was President of the Standing Committee of the Kampuchean People's Representative Assembly from 13 April 1976 to 7 January 1979.
Biography[]
Nuon Chea was born on 7 July 1926 in Voat Kor, Battambang, French Indochina, the son of a corn farmer and a tailor, both of Chinese descent. Unlike other Cambodian communist leaders, he did not study at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, and he instead studied in Thailand and joined the Communist Party of Thailand. In 1970, he communicated with North Vietnam and secured their assistance in an invasion of Cambodia to overthrow Lon Nol's government during the Cambodian Civil War, and he would have been the new Khmer Rouge leader of Cambodia had he not constantly lied to Vietnam. On 13 April 1976 he was appointed President of the Standing Committee of the Kampuchean People's Representative Assembly, and he held this post until the fall of Democratic Kampuchea in 1979 during the Cambodian-Vietnamese War. In December 1998, Nuon Chea ordered the surrender of all remaining Khmer Rouge forces that were resisting the government of Cambodia, and in 2014 he was sentenced to imprisonment for the rest of his life due to his role in the Cambodian Genocide. He died in prison in 2019 at the age of 93.