Cambodia & History: The role of female Khmer Rouge activists during Democratic Kampuchea
- Editorial team
- 7 days ago
- 5 min read
While the extent of women's involvement in the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge is poorly understood, researchers believe that it is greatly underestimated, if not ignored altogether.
Child soldier
In 1970, at just 14 years old, Neang Kin, alias Tuy Kin, joined the ranks of the Khmer Rouge guerrilla forces. Ten years later, she was arrested for her involvement in the murder of 300 prisoners in the infamous S-21 prison and torture center in Phnom Penh—a charge she has always denied.
“I fought on all kinds of battlefields from 1970 until the 'liberation' of Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. Then, without knowing what crime I had committed, I was taken to Prey Sar prison for forced labor. After the Khmer Rouge, I was imprisoned when my baby was seven months old. I swear that, although I was a soldier under Pol Pot, I did not kill any of our compatriots. If I am lying, God will punish me.” She made this statement to researchers at the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam).
Unknown
It is not known how many women executives like Kin joined the ranks of the ultra-Maoist regime or what role they played. However, in 2015, a research project initiated by attempted to shed light on this little-known subject. “Our hypothesis is that women's participation in atrocities in Cambodia has been underestimated and, in fact, ignored,” said Dr. Suzannah Linton, a visiting scholar at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law in the United Kingdom and lead researcher on the DC-Cam project. “The study was not intended to diminish the heinous and endemic nature of violence against women,“ Linton said.
”It is humanly logical to recognize that those who have suffered at the hands of women are also victims and that their situation also deserves some attention,” she added.
According to Linton, “the participation of women in mass atrocities has remained an understudied topic in academia. Women participating in group or political violence is not new, even if it is not as widespread as male violence, but we do not have a comprehensive and accurate picture of the extent to which women have been involved in international crimes.”
DC-Cam study
DC-Cam had already begun interviewing women suspected of involvement with the Khmer Rouge in 1998. Since then, it has collected hundreds of interviews with the main aim of answering the question: what role did women actually play in the Khmer Rouge regime? “Women played an important role at the executive, regional, and local levels,” says Farina So, co-principal investigator of the project. According to So, despite significant participation at many levels of the Democratic Kampuchea government, women were generally excluded from the upper echelons of power—with Ieng Thirith being a notable exception.
“Women did not have a strong position at the highest levels of the regime,” she says.
“Although the Khmer Rouge believed that men and women were capable of performing the same tasks, women were expected to fulfill their gender roles: taking care of children, cooking, and procreating,” she says, adding that women at the time were able to attain positions of power, but only at the provincial and regional levels.
Growing role
The DC-Cam report shows that before the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia in 1975, girls and women were generally assigned to behind-the-scenes tasks in the guerrilla movement: medical work, community maintenance, and transporting weapons, supplies, and food to male soldiers on the front lines. But little by little, they were given more important roles. “By the end of 1978, women seemed to have access to everything in the regime,” explains Youk Chhang, director of DC-Cam.
“When the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979, the southwestern zone was home to the most powerful military force in the country at the time, which included a unit made up entirely of women,” he adds.
Surviving witness
Chhang, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime, recounts that during the final years of Democratic Kampuchea, his village was controlled by a brutal trio of young women. “At first glance, they looked like normal girls, but if you got close to them, you encountered evil,” he recalls. Chhang says that when he first arrived in the village of Trapeang Veng in Battambang province in 1975, there were about 1,000 families. By 1979, there were only 100.
“Who did this? Who took us away to be executed? Who starved us? Who forced us to work? It was those three young women,” he says.
Ros Sopheap, founder and director of Gender and Development for Cambodia, an NGO that focuses on gender issues, praised the DC-Cam project at the time. “The study looked at the role of women during the Khmer Rouge, and I appreciated learning more about it. It's something we talked about before, but we only looked at the role of men,” she said. Trude Jacobsen, whose book Lost Goddesses: Denial of Female Power in Cambodian History remains one of the few to focus critically on the role of women throughout Khmer history, said:
“Research showing that women—young, single women, no less—inflicted violence, fought on the front lines alongside men, and were ideologically as zealous as their male counterparts will sweep away the notion that Cambodian women are naturally inclined to timidity and submission.”
According to Linton, “women's participation in mass atrocities has remained an understudied topic in academia. Women participating in group or political violence is nothing new, even if it is not as widespread as male violence, but we do not have a comprehensive and accurate picture of the extent to which women have been involved in international crimes.”
Some female figures in Pol Pot's regime
Im Chaem was a district leader under Democratic Kampuchea. As a young Khmer Rouge supporter between 1975 and 1979, Im Chaem's zeal for applying “Maoist principles” quickly propelled her into the ranks of Pol Pot's ultra-communist regime.
She allegedly oversaw large-scale forced labor and ordered numerous massacres. Chaem, who was the protégée of the feared Ta Mok and district secretary in Banteay Meanchey province in the 1970s, was charged in March 2015 with crimes against humanity, murder, extermination, enslavement, imprisonment, and political persecution. The case quickly became a national dispute that divided the court until Prime Minister Hun Sen's government demanded that the charges be dropped. Im Chaem had repeatedly declared her innocence on all charges and expressed satisfaction that the Cambodian authorities appeared to be publicly siding with her. The tribunal then dropped the charges, officially ruling that her case was not within its jurisdiction because she was neither a senior official nor one of the Khmer Rouge leaders responsible for its crimes.
Ieng Tirith
The widow of Khmer Rouge leader Ieng Sary and former Minister of Social Affairs of Democratic Kampuchea, Ieng Thirith was also the sister of Khieu Ponnary, Pol Pot's first wife. Thirith lived with her husband, Ieng Sary, in a luxurious villa on Street 21, south of Phnom Penh, until 2007. She was arrested by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) in November 2007 along with her husband, Ieng Sary, on suspicion of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
According to CETC documents, Thirith was not a member of the regime's powerful standing committee, but served on its council as Minister of Social Affairs. Leng Thirith was personally and directly involved in denying Cambodians basic healthcare during the regime's years in power. Thirith allegedly ordered the purge of alleged traitors from her ministry who were sent to re-education camps and was aware of the killings of alleged enemies. She also allegedly participated in the regime's regulation of marriage, orchestrated mass forced marriages, and remained a staunch supporter of the Khmer Rouge long after its demise in the 1990s.
Notes DC-Cam & VOA Khmer
Comments