The Sexual Abuse Of Cambodia’s History Is No Longer Invisible

[Jonathan Fairfield]

The Sexual Abuse Of Cambodia’s History Is No Longer Invisible

Jina Moore

For decades the terrible crimes perpetrated against women under the Khmer Rouge were hidden from view. BuzzFeed News’ Jina Moore talked to the victims of the dictatorial regime who are now getting their day in court.

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — In the early days of the new regime, Chan Phay lived a mostly normal life. By 1975, the Khmer Rouge had taken control of Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, and began driving out its residents.

The new leaders were hardened Communists, determined to reform their people’s materialism by driving them from the city and forcing them into physical labor. But Chan and her husband were far from the capital, unsullied by modernity. They ran a small business, selling pigs and chickens, that kept them housed and fed. They were young — Chan was 20 — and the couple didn’t have any children, or any special education. They existed, modestly, happily.

But then things changed. “One day, it was fine,” she remembered. “The next day, it’s like this: We cannot earn money any more. We cannot cook in our homes, just go and cook out all together. They took away our chickens and pigs and cows. They took everything, even the gold. I didn’t want to give it to them. I wanted to fight them! But they had guns, and grenades, different kinds of grenades, the big ones, like a jackfruit.”

What Chan couldn’t know was that the Khmer Rouge had already slaughtered thousands of Cambodians — doctors, teachers, lawyers, anyone with education. Intellectuals were cast as traitors in the new Cambodia, which the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot wanted to drag back to “year zero.”

In less than four years, he and his senior leadership would murder 2 million Cambodians, a quarter of the country’s population, many of them at mass execution sites known as the “killing fields.” Pol Pot killed anyone who didn’t fit his plan for a perfect society, a social utopia without inequalities.

Thirty years later, most of what was done in that “utopia” would be tried as a crime. Pol Pot died in 1997, but several of his most senior leaders face war crimes charges at an United Nations–backed tribunal that opened in Phnom Penh in 2005.

Prosecutors and court investigators have spent a decade amassing evidence of torture and murder in prisons, of forced relocations and forced labor all around the country, of genocide against minorities.

But the legal investigators, like so many historians before them, largely missed one of the most common crimes of the Khmer Rouge, the crime that would come to define the lives of women like Chan: sexual violence.

Read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/jinamoore/theres-no-more-hiding-cambodias-history-of-sexual-abuse#.xy1PpAjA8

[empireboy]

May she and all other living sufferers of these hideous crimes find justice but more importantly, peace!

[BlackJack]

tragic

and now the countries being screwed by developers

[Ulic]

A complete cover-up by the UN to hide its complicities. Wait until the guilty

are old or dead, the witnesses are dead, and then convene an inquiry

that will take years and years. A United Nations–backed tribunal that opened in

Phnom Penh in 2005. About 30 years too late and a complete waste of time.

May as well wait another 30 years, it would be just as effective.

[HerbalEd]

A complete cover-up by the UN to hide its complicities. Wait until the guilty

are old or dead, the witnesses are dead, and then convene an inquiry

that will take years and years. A United Nations–backed tribunal that opened in

Phnom Penh in 2005. About 30 years too late and a complete waste of time.

May as well wait another 30 years, it would be just as effective.

Timely? By no means. "A complete waste of time"? No, it's not.

[ericthai]

A complete cover-up by the UN to hide its complicities. Wait until the guilty

are old or dead, the witnesses are dead, and then convene an inquiry

that will take years and years. A United Nations–backed tribunal that opened in

Phnom Penh in 2005. About 30 years too late and a complete waste of time.

May as well wait another 30 years, it would be just as effective.

A complete waste of time..Really???? So what should the UN do..nothing?

It's better late than never. The men that committed these atrocities need to be held accountable for their actions.

[khunPer]

A very sad story indeed – and good it’s finally start being told – and difficult to state whom to blame under the top leaders; how many acted in fear, and who used the situation...?

[VBF]

A complete cover-up by the UN to hide its complicities. Wait until the guilty

are old or dead, the witnesses are dead, and then convene an inquiry

that will take years and years. A United Nations–backed tribunal that opened in

Phnom Penh in 2005. About 30 years too late and a complete waste of time.

May as well wait another 30 years, it would be just as effective.

A complete waste of time..Really???? So what should the UN do..nothing?

It's better late than never. The men that committed these atrocities need to be held accountable for their actions.

I agree - and at the very least the world will finally know.

A similar situation to that of the Nazi war criminals during the 1930s and 1940s.