Posted on 07/18/2002 10:48:11 AM PDT by robowombat
The Tragedy of Pol Pot Women by Richard S. Ehrlich Asia Correspondent
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- Under Pol Pot's regime, thousands of women suffered "forced marriages" which produced thousands of Khmer Rouge babies, and those who survived such sexual experiments are not only in Cambodia but also in the United States and elsewhere. American researcher Eve Zucker, who worked at Yale University and in Cambodia for the Cambodian Genocide Program, said she discovered one victimized mother and daughter and, with the help of the US Embassy, was able to unite them in California.
Zucker said she became interested in "a gender perspective on the genocide," and is still tracing other "women as perpetrators, as well as victims" who existed under Pol Pot.
Pol Pot, who died in April, was held responsible for leading a communist Khmer Rouge regime which killed up to two million Cambodians in 1975 to 1979.
Most perished through executions, torture, enslavement, starvation and other brutal policies designed to purge this Southeast Asian nation of foreign, urban and modern influences.
To ensure sexual intercourse created a new society, mass weddings were also performed.
"The Khmer Rouge would mandate that there be forced marriages. What they wanted to do is deconstruct the entire system that had existed in the past," Zucker told The City Times in a one-hour taped interview.
"And part of that was also deconstructing the families, and then reconstruct this new society, starting at the 'Year Zero'.
"They would arrange certain people that they felt were suitable for each other, and those people would be required to marry each other.
"There were some times when the people were able to work it out so that they ended up married to someone who they wanted to be married, but that wasn't always true.
"Out of those forced marriages, there were often children being born. And a lot of these marriages ended up in divorce later on.
"So this was a long-standing issue for the women who had the children, because they had to keep the children from a marriage that they would not have chosen to be in."
Compared with Cambodia's small population of about eight million people at that time, the number of forced marriages and their babies is enormous.
"It was fairly common. It comes up frequently if you read biographical or autobiographical text. It's an issue that comes up continuously.
"I would say there were thousands of forced marriages," Zucker said. "They often held weddings with 100 to 200 couples at a time. There are no exact numbers in total, but it's definitely safe to say thousands.
"There are at least thousands of children as a result," she added.
"A lot of times they would take someone from the city, a woman who was educated, and marry them to an illiterate farmer. And clearly that relationship often didn't have much future.
"These women that ended up being raped, or ended up in one of these relationships, had to face being ostracized later."
When Pol Pot first seized power, most of his gritty rebels were males who had fought for years against bombardments by American warplanes and ground assaults by US-backed Cambodian troops.
Many of these men, and the civilian women they forcibly wed, produced children. But many of these families, or at least some members, died due to wretched conditions under Pol Pot's disastrous government, Zucker said.
Some were deliberately slaughtered when paranoid Pol Pot's followers turned on each other.
Countless family members survived, however, resulting in men, women and children who are either still together, or are now the living remnants of broken homes, scattered across Cambodia and among refugee communities around the world.
Of the babies who lived, the eldest who were conceived at the start of Pol Pot's regime would be celebrating their 23rd birthday around now.
And the youngest offspring from Pol Pot's forced marriages would be around 20 years old.
It is impossible to estimate the number, or location, of the men, women and children who survived the forced marriages, or where they are dwelling today.
In addition to marriages arranged by the state, some women desperately offered themselves as brides to the Khmer Rouge, simply to avoid death.
"There are the instances when women had boyfriends, or possibly who married people, to try and protect their family, or get them food," Zucker said.
Other females were less fortunate.
During Pol Pot's rule, anyone who fell foul of even petty infractions were tossed in dungeons where death was frequently meted out.
"What's interesting about the Khmer Rouge is they were very puritanical in a way. People could be killed for raping a woman, or so forth. Sexual misconduct was frowned upon heavily."
But inside the prisons, puritanism disappeared.
"If women are seen at the prisons, and they are going to be killed anyway, the men have no qualms about raping them.
"Their babies were taken and smashed against trees, and various sexual tortures were done" to female inmates, Zucker said.
"There's a painting done at Tuol Sleng of prisoners that pretty graphically shows that," she added, referring to Pol Pot's infamous torture and execution center in Phnom Penh which has been turned into a museum.
Tuol Sleng currently displays a set of large, framed paintings by a survivor which shows Khmer Rouge soldiers swinging naked babies by their legs, battering the infants' heads against palm trees -- to save the expense of a bullet.
Not all females were victims. Some committed atrocities.
"There are women who are responsible for the deaths of large numbers of people, as prison guards or people who were in charge of certain work camps.
"There were women basically throughout the different levels," of Pol Pot's hierarchy.
"While there were certainly a lot of women in high positions under the Khmer Rouge, the majority of Khmer Rouge cadre were definitely men that were holding positions of power.
"But there are very significant women in the list," Zucker said.
"Yun Yat was definitely up there. She was the wife of Son Sen."
Her husband, Son Sen, was Pol Pot's deputy prime minister in charge of defense, and ran the Tuol Sleng execution camp.
The late Yun Yat, born in 1934, rose to become Pol Pot's minister of propaganda and education.
In 1997, Pol Pot turned against Son Sen and allegedly killed him in their jungle hideout, also butchering Yun Yat and several of their relatives.
"There's Khieu Ponnary and Khieu Tirith, who are sisters, the two Khieu sisters."
Ponnary, born in 1920, was Pol Pot's first wife. They met in the early 1950s when the couple were leftist students in Paris.
Pimply-faced Ponnary was politically in tune with Pol Pot, and seven years older.
During his reign, she was president of the Women's Association, but later reportedly went insane and was consigned to a psychiatric institution in China.
Her sister, Tirith, married Ieng Sary, who was Pol Pot's foreign minister and sometimes represented Pol Pot at the United Nations
Tirith, born in 1931, rose to become minister of social affairs under Pol Pot. In 1986, Tirith was allowed to be president of the Red Cross.
Her husband, Ieng Sary, was recently given "amnesty" by the Cambodian government, and lives in the west border town of Pailin.
In the case of the woman whose daughter Zucker and the US Embassy helped immigrate to America, a threat of execution or starvation was the motive to wed.
"A certain number of her family were already killed, and she knew the guy who was in charge of distributing food in the commune, who was a soldier.
"So she entered into a relationship with him, not only to receive food for her family, but also to save their lives.
"She'd seen her family on the list to be killed. Some of her family had already been killed. She herself was on the list to be killed.
"Out of that, was the birth of her daughter, which was a big shame on the family for a while. It gets very very complicated, because that sort of behavior is not accepted in Khmer culture, despite the fact that it saved everyone's lives.
"At the time, when her daughter was initially conceived and then born, her family wanted her to abort the child, because it was seen as a Khmer Rouge baby.
"It was actually a relationship, not a marriage, more like a common law thing," Zucker said. "They had one daughter.
"She later separated from him, right after the invasion," Zucker added, referring to Vietnam's 1979 blitzkrieg assault which ousted Pol Pot and began a decade-long occupation of Cambodia by Vietnamese troops.
"She certainly didn't love him. Nor did she want to be in a relationship with him."
The Khmer Rouge man she gave herself to is still alive in Cambodia, Zucker said.
But the woman immigrated to America in the 1980s, and settled in California.
In the mid-1990s, she decided to bring her daughter to California.
The American Embassy, however, initially rejected the daughter's application for a US visa, because the mother was unable to prove she gave birth to the girl under Pol Pot's rule.
But while in California, the mother was interviewed by Zucker who was touched by her plight.
"I went with them to the American Embassy. I was told that they wouldn't accept the case. I said, 'Look this was during the Khmer Rouge time, there were forced marriages'."
To get documents proving the girl was the woman's daughter, "we met the sister who raised her, and went to the small village and interviewed the village chief, and the midwife who was there at the time.
"It was successful, us getting her to the States," Zucker said. The daughter "was able to go last January."
Today, the daughter is "about 19 years old, and right now she's in the States attending English school.
"She knows that her father was Khmer Rouge. She knows who he is. She knows he's still alive.
"I believe that she's met him, but she doesn't intend on having any kind of relationship with him.
"She didn't feel ashamed."
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Sounds like the Moonies. Of course, they don't kill half the country when someone tells them "No".
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