Married off by the Khmer Rouge, into a life of ‘quiet regret’

In a vast courtroom on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, a middle-aged Cambodian woman soberly described a night nearly four decades ago that she said she had never talked about before.

The local leader of the Khmer Rouge government had assigned her to marry one man, but at the last minute decided on another, she told the court. On their wedding night in early 1977, she refused his advances. The man complained to the chief, who raped her and threatened to kill her, before sending her back to live with her new husband.

“I bit my lip and shed tears,” said the woman, identified at the tribunal only as 2-TCCP-274 to protect her identity. She eventually let her husband have sex with her.

The United Nations-backed tribunal investigating the crimes of the Khmer Rouge has turned in recent weeks to an aspect of the radical Maoist regime that has often been overlooked amid its mass killings and other brutalities: Its regulations governing marriage. The panel is considering whether the policies amounted to forced marriage or led to sexual assault, both potentially crimes against humanity.

The people who have testified so far, most in their 60s, have laid bare the scope of a practice that many Cambodians describe anecdotally, if sometimes reluctantly. A wide range of experiences has emerged in court: Women set aside for disabled soldiers, militiamen spying on couples to confirm they were having sex, people corralled into group weddings who engaged in desperate ploys to be paired off with vague acquaintances rather than strangers.

Some couples managed to find mutual compassion under the coercion, and built relationships that endured. Others continue to lead lives of quiet regret over the choices that were taken from them.

Prosecutors have estimated, tentatively, that as many as several hundred thousand people were married in Khmer Rouge ceremonies between 1975 and 1979, although there have been no reliable surveys. The Khmer Rouge’s stated policy was to increase the country’s population, and in a society with a tradition of arranged marriage, the regime assumed the role of parent to an entire people as part of its utopian project to remake Cambodia.

It held group weddings across the country, but without the customary Buddhist rituals and blessings from relatives and neighbours. The practice, some academics argue, was intended to assert totalitarian control by weakening the bonds of family, community and religion.

Lawyers for the regime’s two surviving leaders, Khieu Samphan, 85, the head of state, and Nuon Chea, 90, the group’s chief ideologue, challenge the notion that the marriage regulations were inherently coercive. The defence has yet to present its case, but at least one lawyer has intimated that Khmer Rouge marriages were simply a variation on common, traditional arranged marriages. And any coercion or sexual abuse that occurred, both men’s defence teams have suggested, was the result of decisions by mid-level Khmer cadres, not state policy.

The tribunal was established in 2006 to examine the effects of the Khmer Rouge’s radical policies, which historians say resulted in the deaths of some 1.7 million people.

In 2014, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea were each sentenced to life in prison, primarily for crimes committed during the regime’s drive to move people out of cities to work in rural communes. That judgment is under appeal, and the court has moved on to crimes at detention centres and forced labour sites, and against two ethnic minority groups.

The charge of forced marriage was included late in the development of the sprawling indictment, at the insistence of the victims’ lawyers and women’s rights groups pushing for greater recognition of sexual violence and gender-based abuses in international criminal law. But the tribunal has heard evidence of the policy’s effects on men as well.

One man with broad shoulders and a deep frown, known as 2-TCCP-232, told the tribunal how he had been forced to marry someone other than his fiancee. Speaking with his head down, he recalled that they had worked in separate mobile units in the same district, digging canals and carrying dirt. But they were politically suspect because he had been a police officer, and some of her relatives had been “smashed” — taken away and presumably executed — as enemies of the revolution, he said.

A unit chief warned that he, too, would be “smashed” if he tried to marry his fiancee. When he was told one day in 1978 that the Khmer Rouge would arrange a family for him, he did not dare protest. A group wedding was held, in the dark, for about 50 men and 50 women.

Some, perhaps people “with good biographies”, seemed to have some say in choosing their partners, he said. But that night, he was afraid to even look at the woman he was marrying. They were couple No 42.

The next night, they were directed to a flimsy shack. “We treated each other like brother and sister,” he said. “I did not touch her.” They were too exhausted to have sex, he said. He still had not seen her face. “It was only in the morning that we could see each other clearly,” he said. And then they were sent back to work.

One of Nuon Chea’s lawyers, Mr Liv Sovanna, sought to portray sexual abuse as a violation of state policy rather than the result of it. He argued in court that the Khmer Rouge had held officials to a strict code of conduct, and he read from a provision known as Code 6, which condemned immoral behaviour and stated: “Do not take liberties with women.”

Questioning the woman who said she had been raped by a local chief for refusing to consummate her marriage, Mr Liv Sovanna asked if she understood that rape was a serious offence under the Khmer Rouge regime.

“Of course it was a serious offence,” she replied, unfazed. “But who could I tell? If I told anyone, I would be dead. Nobody could help me. He was a person in authority.” THE NEW YORK TIMES