Khieu samphan biography of albert

The son of a local magistrate in Svay Rieng province, where he was born in 1931, Khieu Samphân attended the same junior high school as Pol Pot, who was in the class above him.

A precocious and exceptionally gifted student, he won a scholarship to France in 1953, where he joined the PCF and succeeded Ieng Sary as head of the Cercle Marxiste. His fellows considered him as particularly clever and ambitious (Chandler, 1993: 41).

He first studied in Montpellier, then in where he completed in 1959 a doctoral thesis on Cambodia’s economic development, in which he argued for economic autarky and the reduction to an absolute minimum of “unproductive activities”, among which he included commerce and government bureaucracy (L’économie du Cambodge et ses problèmes d’industrialisation).

His ideas influenced the debate among Cambodian progressives in the 1950s and ’60s, and helped to frame the policies which the Khmers Rouges would enforce when