Khieu Ponnary, the first wife of the late Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot and a member of his regime’s inner circle, died Tuesday of cancer. She was 83.
Khieu Ponnary was the first female Cambodian to graduate from high school, and the first Khmer woman to earn a bachelor’s degree from Phnom Penh’s elite Lycee Sisowath. She married Pol Pot in 1956.
Khieu Ponnary participated in her husband’s communist revolutionary activities during the 1950s. She went underground in 1965 and then served as the head of the national women’s association from 1975 to 1979.
In 1978, after being introduced to cheering crowds as the mother of the revolution, mental illness took hold of Khieu Ponnary. She received treatment in China, but it did nothing to help her condition. In the 1980s, Pol Pot separated from Khieu Ponnary and took another wife.
July 3, 2003 by
Khieu Ponnary
Categories: Politicians
I wonder if things would have turned out better if she never went insane.
I hope she’s burning in Hell. I have no sympathy for communists/marxists/socialists, who are responsible, one way or another, in the deaths of millions of people.