Khieu Ponnary

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Khieu Ponnary

Khieu Ponnary (born February 3, 1920 in Battambang Province , Cambodia , † July 1, 2003 in Pailin ), khm. ខៀវ ព ណ្ណា រី, was a Cambodian politician best known as the wife of Pol Pot , the leader of the Khmer Rouge . During the rule of the Khmer Rouge, which lasted from 1975 to 1979, she was referred to as the "mother of the revolution".

biography

Family background

Khieu Ponnary was the daughter of a judge who worked in the Cambodian capital. Her younger sister was Ieng Thirith . A relationship to the later head of state of the Democratic Kampuchea , Khieu Samphan , did not exist, contrary to individual claims.

The family led a privileged life in Cambodia, which was part of the French colonial empire . Her father left the family in 1944 and started a new existence with a Cambodian princess.

education

Khieu Ponnary attended the elite school Lycée Preah Sisowath . She was the first Cambodian to earn a Baccalauréat degree in 1942 .

In 1949, Khieu Ponnary moved to Paris with her younger sister and her friend Ieng Sary , where she studied the Khmer language . Ieng Thirith and Ieng Sary married there in 1951. In Paris, Khieu Ponnary met Pol Pot, five or eight years older, depending on the source, and began a relationship with him. The four came into contact with Cambodian communists in Paris and took up their ideas.

Marriage to Pol Pot

After returning to Cambodia, Khieu Ponnary and Pol Pot married on July 14, 1956 in the capital. They had deliberately set their wedding anniversary on the anniversary of the storm on the Bastille . Regardless of the couple's revolutionary goals, Pol Pot demanded that his wife, according to tradition, prostrate herself to his father at the wedding. Khieu Ponnary founded the women's magazine Neary and worked as a teacher at the Lycée Preah Sisowath in the following years . Pol Pot was teaching at another school at the time. In the second half of the 1950s, Khieu Ponnary developed uterine cancer . She was operated on successfully but became sterile. That put a strain on the relationship with Pol Pot.

In 1965, Khieu Ponnary, Pol Pot and some of their colleagues went underground. They lived in the jungle on the border with Thailand for a few years.

Functionary of the Khmer Rouge

During the rule of the Khmer Rouge over Cambodia, Pol Pot ("brother no. 1"), his wife Khieu Ponnary ("sister no. 1"), their sister Ieng Thirith and her husband Ieng Sary ("brother no. 3") as the "Gang of Four Cambodia". The intertwined family circle, which was expanded to include Khieu Samphan, is regarded as the central body of power in Democratic Kampuchea. Accordingly, Khieu Ponnary nominally held some high positions. As early as 1973 she was party secretary in Kampong Thom province , from 1976 she was the chairman of the national women's association in the Democratic Kampuchea . Whether she actually had any influence on the policies of the Khmer Rouge during this time is generally doubted in view of her progressive illness. The National Women's Association is an organization that only existed in name.

illness

It is widely believed that Khieu Ponnary suffered from progressive mental illness in the 1970s. In 1970, while she was hiding with Pol Pot, she had developed a mental illness that some sources describe as paranoid schizophrenia . The anxiety disorder was directed against Vietnam and against the Vietnamese, whom it alleged to want to kill. In the first few years there were long phases in which the disease did not emerge, but after the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975 the disease continued to develop. The exact course of the disease is not clearly understood. According to one source, she was "no longer accessible" in 1975. She ceased to appear in public in 1976 and was repeatedly excused by Pol Pot as “ill” on public occasions. Only at a party event in 1978 at which she was celebrated as the "mother of the revolution", according to a source, she was seen again in public; according to another source, she was not personally present at the event.

A therapy in China at the beginning of the 1980s ended unsuccessfully.

Pol Pot divorced her in 1979 or 1985, depending on the source. Khieu Ponnary then lived with her sister, who she looked after, until her death.

Khieu Ponnary died in 2003 of complications from cancer.

literature

  • Ben Kiernan : How Pol Pot Came to Power. A History of Cambodian Communism, 1930-1975. 2nd Edition. Yale University Press, New Haven (CT) et al. a. 2004, ISBN 0-300-10262-3 .
  • Philip Short: Pol Pot. The History of a Nightmare. Murray, London 2005, ISBN 0-7195-6569-3 .

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Pol Pot's year of birth (actually: Saloth Sar) has not been clarified beyond doubt. The records of the colonial authorities of French Indochina show May 19, 1928 as the date of birth, but his siblings give the year 1925. More recent biographies do not consider the official registrations of that time to be reliable sources, because subsequent entries with incorrect data were common at the time, especially in rural areas. See Philip Short: Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare. Murray, London 2004, ISBN 0-7195-6569-3 , p. 15.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Trudy Jacobsen: Lost Goddesses. The Denial of Female Power in Cambodian History. NIAS Press, Copenhagen 2008, ISBN 978-87-7694-001-0 , p. 232.
  2. ^ Daniel Bultmann: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. The creation of the perfect socialist. Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2017, ISBN 978-3-657-78692-3 , p. 225.
  3. ^ Marie Alexandrine Martin: Cambodia. A Shattered Society. University of California Press, Berkeley 1994, ISBN 0-520-07052-6 , p. 156.
  4. ↑ a b Elizabeth Becker: Khieu Ponnary, 83, First Wife Of Pol Pot, Cambodian Despot. In: New York Times . July 3, 2003, accessed June 30, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Ben Kiernan : Blood and Soil. A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. Yale University Press, New Haven (CT) 2007, ISBN 978-0-300-10098-3 , p. 543.
  6. ^ A b Philip Short: Pol Pot. The History of a Nightmare. Murray, London 2005, ISBN 0-7195-6569-3 , p. 117.
  7. ↑ Died: Khieu Ponnary . In: Der Spiegel . No. 28 , 2003, p. 166 ( online - July 7, 2003 ).
  8. ↑ Tom Fawthrop, Helen Jarvis: Getting Away with Genocide? Elusive Justice and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. UNSW Press, Sydney 2005, ISBN 0-86840-904-9 , p. 266.
  9. ↑ Gina Chon, Sambath Thet: Behind the Killing Fields. A Khmer Rouge Leader and One of His Victims. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia / Oxford 2011, ISBN 978-0-8122-0159-8 , p. 93.
  10. ↑ Philip Short: Pol Pot. The History of a Nightmare. Murray, London 2005, ISBN 0-7195-6569-3 , p. 132.
personal data
SURNAME Khieu, Ponnary
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Cambodian politician, Mrs. Pol Pots
DATE OF BIRTH February 3, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Battambang Province , Cambodia
DATE OF DEATH July 1, 2003
Place of death Pailin