Death
Yuon's death is thought to have been ordered by his fellow-members of the Khmer Rouge sometime after they seized power in 1975. His previous tendency to openly criticise the regime's excesses appears to have continued unabated: when entering Phnom Penh, which had been divided into several sectors each run by the administration of a different zone of the country, he is reported to have remarked "It's Berlin!". Several accounts exist of his death, the most common of which is related to the controversial order to evacuate Phnom Penh given after the communist victory, which Yuon is known to have opposed. In one version, related by a CPK cadre from Kampong Cham, Yuon was said to have been shot in August 1975 by a group of Khmer Rouge soldiers after he sympathetically addressed a group of evacuees at Prek Por, Srey Santhor District, and his body thrown into the Mekong.
Other witnesses claim that Yuon was seen at a camp in Stung Treng late in 1976, and most probably either died of disease, or committed suicide, while being held in the camp system. Another Khmer Rouge source claimed that Yuon was mistakenly shot by a bodyguard after being recalled to Phnom Penh.
It has been noted that in Khmer Rouge discourse after 1978, Yuon was referred to in terms indicating that he had been posthumously rehabilitated.
Read more about this topic: Hou Yuon
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life.”
—Joseph De Maistre (1753–1821)
“The child who enters life comes not with knowledge or intent,
So those who enter death must go as little children sent.
Nothing is known. But I believe that God is overhead;
And as life is to the living, so death is to the dead.”
—Mary Mapes Dodge (1831–1905)
“...there is death in the pot!”
—Bible: Hebrew, 2 Kings 4:40.