Forced to wed years ago, couples take proper vows

Prum Son and Uk Huy at their formal wedding ceremony, which was paid for by an American Vietnam War veteran. (Photo by Nick Meo, special to the Chronicle)

Cambodians confront a legacy of Khmer Rouge ahead of trials of former dictatorship's leaders

Sunday, April 29, 2007
Nick Meo, Chronicle Foreign Service
San Francisco Chronicle (Calif., USA)

Phnom Penh, Cambodia -- The first time Prum Son married her husband, in August 1977, she was not a willing bride. But she knew that refusal would mean her execution.

The five-minute ceremony was held late at night, without notice, after a day of backbreaking work digging irrigation canals, followed by a routine, hourslong indoctrination session at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.

With 21 of her female friends, all in soiled work clothes, she was summoned to a bare room lit by a single lightbulb where male workers were waiting. A party official instructed her to clasp the hand of a complete stranger and promise to stay with him for life. Everyone pledged allegiance to the party. Then she was sent back to the women's quarters of her labor camp to snatch some sleep before another day of toil.

Prum kept the details of that joyless day a secret from her four children until early this year, when she finally had a chance for a traditional wedding to her husband of nearly three decades. She was 50 -- the oldest woman ever to marry in her village of Kbal Sen, near the capital Phnom Penh.

This time it was a proper Khmer ceremony with chanting monks, a silk wedding dress, traditional music, friends and family, paid for by an American Vietnam War veteran who was aghast to learn that so many Cambodians had been forced into miserable marriages.

F.J. Chuck Theusch, a businessman from Milwaukee, said, "They certainly looked happy in their wedding photos -- they looked young again!"

Some of those married strangers divorced as quickly as possible when the Khmer Rouge regime fell in 1979. But for some, like Prum Son and Uk Huy, the haphazard choice was fortuitous. They grew to love each other, and during the terrible years of starvation and mass murder, they forged an enduring bond.

Prum said, "I was very worried when they picked this man who I didn't know for me to marry. What would he feel for me, and would he be a good man or bad? But I have been lucky. He was a good man."

Her second wedding, when she was showered with petals in her own village and blessed by Buddhist monks, was the proudest day of her life, she said.

Uk, a 55-year-old noodle seller, said of that occasion, "It made us so happy and excited. Our children were shocked to hear about our first wedding day. We feel so much better now the religious ceremonies have been carried out."

Nine other couples who were forcibly married took part in the same ceremony, attended by guests from the whole village -- including some former low-level Khmer Rouge guards.

The ceremony caught Cambodia's imagination at a time when the country is trying to understand its terrible past in the run-up to a trial of senior Khmer Rouge leaders planned for later this year.

Even Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former low-level Khmer Rouge member who left the party before the genocide that killed 1.7 million people, said he was so impressed that he and his wife were themselves considering a similar traditional ceremony, which they too missed out on.

Researchers from the Documentation Center of Cambodia, or DC-Cam, believe that about a quarter of all marriages between 1975 and 1979 were of strangers forcibly married to each other. The center was set up by Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program to research the terrible period when the Khmer Rouge murdered and starved the population while trying to remake society.

The party, led by Pol Pot, wanted to destroy the traditional family, taking over its role in arranging marriages and the clergy's role of performing ceremonies.

Hard facts about what happened during the tumultuous period are difficult to establish in the grindingly poor nation.

Youk Chhang of DC-Cam said, "It has never been counted exactly how many forced marriages there were under the Khmer Rouge. After the regime fell, there were many divorces."

He described the forced marriages as part of the totalitarian regime's attempts to control every aspect of life. "Love was forbidden under the Khmer Rouge unless people were told to love. They wanted to control both you and your feelings."

Cambodian weddings are traditionally arranged by parents, so many couples are used to having little say over their prospective spouses.

Researchers believe most of the state-ordered marriages survived. Peg LeVine, of the University of Tasmania in Australia, found that many of the forcibly married couples in her study chose to seek out each other after they had been separated in the turmoil surrounding the regime's fall. She found that most of those who divorced did so because of drinking or gambling. Although the regime may have married tens of thousands, she found no evidence that it forced couples to divorce.

Beang Pivome, a DC-Cam researcher, said some of those forcibly married still fear they may bring bad luck on their children because proper rites weren't carried out.

Life as a newlywed was extremely difficult under the Khmer Rouge, with spies sent by the party to see if couples were quarrelling.

"In those days, you had to make sure you didn't fall in love," Prum said. "If you so much as flirted with a boy, you could be executed by the party. They didn't like love; they wanted to control everything."

Nearly every Cambodian couple lost relatives in the mass murder. Prum, who said she had three siblings and numerous friends summoned from the work camp to be murdered, hopes to attend the war-crimes tribunal in the capital.

"I never understood why such terrible things happened," she said. "Perhaps now we will have a chance to learn why."