The Chicago Tribune has an interesting interview today with former Khmer Rouge’s second in command Nuon Chea. Chea, known as Brother No. 2., is set to go on trial in a tribunal set to start in June.

Nuon Chea is the most senior surviving leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian utopian movement that swept to power in 1975 behind revolutionary Pol Pot, known as Brother No. 1, and led one of the 20th Century’s most extreme and enigmatic frenzies of bloodletting.

As deputy general secretary of the Communist Party, Nuon Chea was the architect of execution policy. That included turning a Phnom Penh school into the jail known as S-21, where 14,000 men, women and children were shackled to the floor while teenage jailers used electricity, suffocation and scorpions to encourage confessions. Just 14 prisoners survived.

Pol Pot died in 1998, never prosecuted, and Nuon Chea and others say they are ready to explain their actions in the upcoming tribunal.

He ended the interview offering a fable he said would capture Cambodia’s tumble through history: “A wolf accuses a lamb of insulting him, eating in his pasture and fouling a nearby brook. The lamb refutes each charge, yet in the end the wolf eats him anyway”, Nuon Chea roared with laughter.

“You see?” he said. “What powerful people say will always be right, and what small people say will always be wrong.”

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