Forced marriage in focus as Khmer Rouge leaders face trial

Jun 14, 2011
By Robert Carmichael
DPA

Phnom Penh - When Pen Sokchan was just 16 she was ordered to marry a Khmer Rouge soldier, a man she had never met. Pen Sokchan cannot recall his face but she does remember he was cruel.

She did not want to consummate the marriage, so he was ordered to rape her and did. Pen Sokchan kept the story hidden from her neighbours, her friends and her family for three decades.

'I want to cut the parts of my body my husband touched at the time,' Pen Sokchan says of those terrible few days in 1978. 'I am dishonoured.'

Her words come from a new documentary screened this month in Phnom Penh, titled Red Wedding. Director Lida Chan says the issue it covers - forced marriage - remains relatively unknown among young Cambodians.

A key reason for the lack of knowledge is the conservative nature of Cambodian society: People simply don't discuss it.

Yet under the Khmer Rouge's rule between 1975 and 1979 the policy extended across the country. Lida Chan says around 250,000 women were forcibly married.

'So I hope this film will encourage other victims who never talk about their history to tell their children and their relatives what happened,' she says. 'I hope it gives them courage, because what happened to them is not their fault.'

The timing of the documentary's release is no coincidence. On June 27 the four surviving senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge will stand trial at the UN-backed tribunal on charges of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and a string of other crimes.

Among those is the crime of forced marriage. The Khmer Rouge devised the policy to boost the population, and used death threats to ensure couples consummated their union.

More than 650 of the nearly 4,000 registered victims - known as civil parties - in the upcoming case are victims of forced marriage.

In the documentary Pen Sokchan recalls her wedding as a joyless affair presided over by black-clad Khmer Rouge cadres, and which took place after she was summoned to a room with five other sets of men and women.

It was nothing like a typical Cambodian wedding, a normally colourful affair of Buddhist prayers, family, food, music and numerous changes of clothing.

Duong Savorn is the project coordinator for a legal advice nongovernmental organization called the Cambodian Defenders Project (CDP), which helped Pen Sokchan and more than 120 others file their civil party claims. Around a quarter of CDP's forced marriage civil parties are men.

He says victims of forced marriage were often given just one or two hours' notice that they were to be married.

'And sometimes they were called straight from the rice fields to be married without any notice at all,' he says.

After the ceremony the couples were led off to separate huts to consummate the marriage. The Khmer Rouge leadership, known as Angkar, demanded complete obedience from its people on pain of death.

Khmer Rouge cadres would stand near the huts and listen to the couple. Those that refused to have sex would be taken away for 'education,' and if after the second and third night they still refused, they could be executed.

'They had to follow Angkar's orders otherwise they would be killed,' Duong Savorn said.

The logic was to boost the population from 8 million to 20 million, and to create a new generation untainted by the regimes the ultra-Maoist movement had replaced.

'The Khmer Rouge wanted a pure product - the children belonged to Angkar, not to their parents,' he says. 'They strongly believed the new generation would benefit the revolution and increase the population.'

Lida Chan's documentary reveals that Pen Sokchan managed to flee her brutal first husband, who died two years later. She eventually remarried and had six children. The documentary shows the wedding of one of her daughters, a stark contrast to her first marriage.

But it also shows how she failed in her quest to find out from the former Khmer Rouge cadres, who still live in her area of rural western Cambodia, precisely who ordered her to get married and why.

Director Lida Chan says despite that failure, the process of making the film changed Pen Sokchan.

The 48-year-old was originally scared of the former cadres living in her area. But questioning them, even though they failed to provide answers, removed that fear and allowed her to show them that they no longer control her life.