Pen Sovann, Cambodia’s first prime minister after the Khmer Rouge and to some a “father” of the rebel forces that helped topple them, died on Saturday Oct 29,2016 at the age of 80 after a storied if rocky political life.
In a statement on Sunday Oct 30,2016, the opposition CNRP, which he joined in 2012, said he died at his home in Takeo province just after 7 p.m. on Saturday following a long fight with high blood pressure and diabetes. He suffered a stroke last year that left the right side of his body paralyzed.
A lifelong Marxist branded with a fervent nationalism growing up under the thumb of colonial France, Pen Sovann maintained to the end that the only trouble with socialism was with the people who tried—unsuccessfully—to put it to practice. Sidelined at the height of his career in 1981 when he was arrested as prime minister for bristling at the control of the Hanoi government that installed him, and mostly forgotten during a decade in exile, Pen Sovann returned to Cambodia Lazarus-like in the 1990s and enjoyed a minor political comeback in his final years as a lawmaker for the CNRP.
Pen Sovann had been the first prime minister of the newly formed Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party for less than six months when he was arrested in December 1981, having fallen out of favor with Hanoi, which effectively controlled the country until the end of the decade.
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