Background
Khieu Ponnary was born in 1920 in Battambang Province, and her sister, Khieu Thirith, was born about 12 years later.
Khieu Ponnary was born in 1920 in Battambang Province, and her sister, Khieu Thirith, was born about 12 years later.
As a member of a privileged family, she was educated at the Lycee Sisowath. Her younger sister, Khieu Thirith, and their future husbands, Ieng Sary and Saloth Sar (later Political Pot) also attended. In 1949, she left Cambodia with her younger sister (who was engaged to Ieng Sary) for Paris where she studied Khmer linguistics.
Their father, a Cambodian judge, abandoned the family during World World War II, running off to Battambang with a Cambodian princess. Graduating from the Lycee in 1940, she became the first Cambodian woman to receive a baccalaureate degree. Information about her role in party activities during the 1960s is fragmentary.
However, she was the Party Secretary for Kampong Thom Province in 1973 and the President of the Democratic Kampuchea Women's Association in 1976.
By at least 1975, Ponnary was growing increasingly disturbed from the onslaught of chronic schizophrenia. Political Pot divorced her in 1979 after the Vietnamese invasion and took a second wife.
She died in Pailin on July 1, 2003. She knows nothing. Even me she does not remember.
I pity her very much, but I don"t know how to help her, as she has a disease which is difficult to cure.—Ieng Sary.
Quotations: She knows nothing. Even me she does not remember. I pity her very much, but I don"t know how to help her, as she has a disease which is difficult to cure.—Ieng Sary.
