Sexual Violation Under Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge

New evidence confirms a brutal legacy of forced marriages and state-sponsored rape.

For decades, the Khmer Rouge – the infamous ruling party of Cambodia in the mid- to late-1970s which orchestrated a genocide there – along with its sympathizers have sought to play down allegations of state-sponsored sexual offenses. They argued, rather curiously, that their leader Pol Pot, as well as his lieutenants, were simply disinterested and had modeled themselves on the life of a eunuch.

Those arguments were always received with a healthy dose of skepticism. In recent months, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, a court established to try the most senior regime officials, has lifted the veil on the crude and atrocious behavior inflicted by the communist cadre against ordinary Cambodians who had the misfortune to fall within Pol Pot’s cultural cross-hairs.

Now, that legacy of forced marriages and state-sponsored rape has been captured at a small exhibition staged at S-21, the notorious extermination camp in Phnom Penh where thousands were processed before being sent to their deaths in the so-called Killing Fields in the outskirts of the capital.

Seven women from a broad cross-section of Cambodia, whose lives were irrevocably and violently shattered and reshaped by Pol Pot’s marriage policies, were chosen and their ordeal portrayed amid a grim backdrop of absolute tragedy.

“It’s about the gender aspects of genocide,” said Theresa de Langis, a technical adviser to the project, in regards to women and the Khmer Rouge, whose brutal rule cost the lives of about two million people, or a third of Cambodia’s population at the time.

It was not until the wars subsided in the late 1990s that Cambodia went to the United Nations (UN) and requested a war crimes tribunal designed to put senior Khmer Rouge leaders in the dock. But bickering with the UN over the structure of the court followed and the judges were not sworn in until 2006.

Surviving leaders Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan are currently on trial for genocide. They have already been found guilty of crimes against humanity, along with Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, who ran the S-21 center where the exhibition is currently being held.

All three will spend the rest of their lives behind bars.

Pol Pot’s Minister for Social Affairs, Ieng Thirith, was ruled mentally unfit for trial and died last year. Despite her death, the tribunal is hearing charges of rape and forced marriage as an inhumane act in Case 002/02.

“There was this idea that sexual violation did not happen under the Khmer Rouge. There’s just no way you can . . . .

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