Khieu Samphan

Khieu Samphan was born on 27 July 1931 in Rumduol district, Svay Rieng province, the son of Khieu Long, a judge under the French protectorate government. After his father was punished on corruption charges the family's fortunes declined, and his mother supported them by selling fruit and vegetables in Kampong Cham province, where he grew up. He nevertheless won a place at the Lycée Sisowath, graduated in 1951, worked as a teacher, and began studying law in Phnom Penh. At that school he studied alongside Saloth Sar, later known as Pol Pot.

In 1953 he received a government scholarship to continue his law studies in France, where he joined the Marxist Circle alongside Ieng Sary, Ieng Thirith, Hou Youn and Son Sen. He joined the French Communist Party in 1955, and from 1956 to 1959, while undertaking a doctorate in economics in Paris, he served as chairman of the Union of Khmer Students and leader of the Marxist Circle. That circle of leftist Khmer intellectuals in Paris became the seedbed of the left-wing revolutionary movement that would later become the Khmer Rouge. He was one of the founders of the Khmer Students' Association (KSA), and when French authorities shut it down in 1956 he founded the Khmer Students' Union in its place. In his 1959 doctoral thesis, Cambodia's Economy and Industrial Development, he advocated national self-reliance and took a position close to dependency theory, blaming the wealthy industrialized states for the poverty of the Third World.

Returning home with his doctorate in 1959, he took a law faculty position at the University of Phnom Penh and founded L'Observateur, a French-language leftist publication. The paper was viewed with hostility by the government and banned the following year, and police publicly humiliated him by beating him, undressing him and photographing him. He was nevertheless arrested and detained in 1960, and in 1962 was elected to the National Assembly for the Saang district of Kandal province as a member of Sihanouk's Sangkum, and appointed Secretary of State for Commerce. In March 1963 Sihanouk named him one of 34 "leftists", costing him his ministerial portfolio though he kept his assembly seat, and he was re-elected in 1966. In April 1967, accused by Sihanouk of inciting a peasant uprising in Samlaut, he fled Phnom Penh and took refuge under the protection of Ta Mok; between 1967 and 1970 he moved between Kampong Speu, Kampong Chhnang and Takeo provinces with support from the clandestine CPK network. In 1969 he was formally inducted into the party and stayed with Ta Mok at his headquarters in Kampong Speu.

This period shows him not merely as the public face of a regime but as a leftist intellectual moving toward the leadership of an armed revolutionary organization. The organizational experience and theoretical grounding formed in France, together with the political setbacks he suffered inside and around the Sangkum government, were the conditions for his later adherence to the Khmer Rouge, giving this phase a distinct significance in his life.