Veteran revolutionary Chea Soth dies

PHNOM PENH (Cambodia Herald) - Former Deputy Prime Minister Chea Soth, dean of the National Assembly and key architect of Cambodia's economic recovery from the Khmer Rouge regime, died on Saturday. He was 84.  

He died of diseases in Phnom Penh after he had been sent back Friday from Singapore where he was unsuccessfully treated.

Chea Soth, ranked eighth in the Politburo of the ruling Cambodia People's Party (CPP), was among more than 1,000 resistance fighters who fled to Vietnam after the Geneva Conference on Indochina in 1954 which followed France's defeat by Vietnamese forces at the battle of Dien Bien Phu.

In Hanoi, he worked for the Khmer-language service of the Vietnam News Agency (VNA) and later became one of the first Cambodians recruited by Vietnam in 1977 to rid the country of Pol Pot. 

Others who fled to Vietnam in 1954 included Bou Thong, an ethnic minority leader who is today ranked seventh in the CPP Politburo, and former prime ministers Pen Sovann, now with the Human Rights Party, and Chan Si, who died of a heart ailment in Moscow in 1984.

Following national elections in 1981, Chea Soth was appointed to the powerful position of planning minister, overseeing the ministries of agriculture, commerce and finance as well as the newly-reconstituted National Bank of Cambodia. 

He also led efforts for the proper treatment of the hundreds of thousands of corpses left over from the Khmer Rouge regime between 1975 and 1979.

As planning minister, Chea Soth acknowledged the re-emergence of the private sector as early as 1983 when he noted that "there are some who have started to become capitalist businessmen already."

In 1984, he spearheaded a crackdown on corruption and bribery among party officials, police and soldiers, calling for official receipts to be issued within two days, politeness and a halt to the acceptance of unofficial payments.

"Had the the party's cadres paid heed to these simple directives, perhaps Cambodian society could truly have been transformed," Australian historian Margaret Slocomb wrote.

In 1989, Chea Soth was among eight key planners and policymakers who met at the Council of Ministers to discuss Cambodia's long-term socio-economic plans for 1991 to 2005. 

"We only had an economic program, not a five-year plan," he said, referring to the program adopted by the Khmer People's Revolutionary Party, the predecessor to the CPP,  at its fifth congress in 1985. 

"The provinces did not provide sufficient information for us to make a balance, and up to the point of implementation, we only knew rough estimates," he said.

Prime Minister Hun Sen agreed. "We should change the words 'economic strategies and long-term planning' to long-term development objectives," he told the meeting. Referring to Soviet economic restructuring known as perestroika, he said: "In this transition, we do whatever is the least not yet done."

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