During my “Holidays in Cambodia” I remember myself hanging out in Batambang with some locals. I had a stupid attention this time to visit brother number two, Nuon Chea, Pol Pot’s left hand. He was parting the peaceful and quite life of the elderly pensioner surrounded by his beloved family and charming grand-sons in the near city of Pailin, close to Thai border. In the matter of fact so close that locals used to utter silently that Brother Number Two lives in his own kingdom between Cambodia and Thailand.   I deadly wanted to arrange some sort of interview with Mr. Death, but the locals became outraged every time I started this “O, how I could meet Nuon Chea?” banter. They used to start on weeping about hazards of such affair and how Nuon Chea’s mercenaries could easily blow my head off and so on. Well, I never accomplished the task, but the questions are still running across my head … Dear Mr. Death ….

Pol Pot’s second-in-command and chief ideologue, Nuon Chea has been called Pol Pot’s alter ego and his most trusted associate.
Nuon Chea preferred to remain behind the scenes; nevertheless, there are “more documents in the archives that implicate him in crimes than implicate Pol Pot,” according to the Cambodia scholar Stephen Heder. Faithful to Pol Pot until the end, Nuon Chea came under Ta Mok’s rule after his 1997 coup against Pol Pot.

After arranging an immunity deal with Prime Minister Hun Sen, Nuon Chea defected with Khieu Samphan in December 1998. The Prime Minister warmly welcomed them back into mainstream Cambodian society, but after a vociferous criticism from the press, Hun Sen equivocated about whether he had in fact granted the pair immunity.

In December 2002 he was called to testify on behalf of the former Khmer Rouge general Sam Bith, who was sentenced to life in prison for ordering the kidnap and murder of three Western backpackers in 1994.

After defecting at the same time as Nuon Chea, the 73-year-old is now said to spend most of his time reading, listening to music or gardening in his Pailin home.

The two returned to the Khmer Rouge-controlled enclave of Pailin after taking a brief vacation at a Cambodian resort, where Nuon Chea was goaded into accounting for his crimes. He responded, “We are very sorry, not just for the human lives but also animal lives that were lost in the war.”