Top Khmer Rouge Leader Claims Ignorance

Former Khmer Rouge number two leader Nuon Chea speaks during an interview at his house at Pailin, Cambodia, on Tuesday September 18, 2007. On Wednesday September 19 police detained the top surviving leader of the Khmer Rouge over his role in the notorious former Cambodian regime that caused the deaths of 1.7 million people in the late 1970s. (AP Photo/Kyodo News) (AP)

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- The top surviving leader of the Khmer Rouge told a U.N.-supported genocide tribunal he sat so high in the regime that he had no idea his followers were causing the deaths of some 1.7 million people, documents released Friday showed.

Unlike some other war-crimes suspects from the Khmer Rouge and other regimes who said they were simply following orders, Nuon Chea told the tribunal that his position, the top aide to late leader Pol Pot, insulated him from the killings across Cambodia from 1975-1979.

"We did not have any direct contact with the bases and we were not aware of what was happening there," the 81-year-old former Khmer Rouge ideologue told two investigating judges after his arrest Wednesday, according to the detention order, which lays out the charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the defendant's response.

The order allows the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia to keep Nuon Chea in its custody pending trial.

It charges that Nuon Chea, once known as Brother No. 2, "planned, instigated, ordered, directed or otherwise aided and abetted in the commission" of crimes that include "murder, torture, imprisonment, persecution, extermination, deportation, forcible transfer, enslavement and other inhumane acts."

The order said Nuon Chea specified that he had no direct contact with lower-level Khmer Rouge units and was unaware of what they may have been doing, and that all real power was in the hands of the group's military committee, of which he was not a member.

He added that as a member of the regime's legislature he had never adopted any law allowing citizens to be killed and that he had "personally lost around 40 family members during the events of the time."

It said his provisional detention was necessary to prevent any pressure on witnesses or destruction of evidence, and that his freedom could provoke public anger that might endanger his safety. It also said he might try to flee.

Nuon Chea responded "that he has no intention of destroying any evidence or placing pressure on anyone at all, adding that he is not of a cruel nature, having been a Buddhist monk," it said.

He said that "he is a patriot and not a coward and that he does not intend to tarnish the honor of his country by fleeing."

Born into a wealthy Sino-Cambodian family, Nuon Chea was educated in Thailand and returned to Cambodia in 1950, where he joined the precursor of the Cambodian Communist Party that became the Khmer Rouge.

A month after the regime took power in 1975, Nuon Chea addressed a meeting of the movement's leaders and laid out its "master plan," which called for abolition of money, the market economy, religion, monks and faith and the expulsion of ethnic Vietnamese, according to the Documentation Center of Cambodia, an independent group gathering evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities.