When the Khmer Rouge flexed its muscles in her small village in northwest Cambodia, all Chan knew was that the soldiers wanted her gold. 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.īut 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. 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. Thirty years later, most of what was done in that “utopia” would be tried as a crime. 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. What Chan couldn’t know was that the Khmer Rouge had already slaughtered thousands of Cambodians - doctors, teachers, lawyers, anyone with education. I wanted to fight them! But they had guns, and grenades, different kinds of grenades, the big ones, like a jackfruit." They took away our chickens and pigs and cows. We cannot cook in our homes, just go and cook out all together. "The next day, it's like this: We cannot earn money any more. They existed, modestly, happily.īut then things changed. They were young - Chan was 20 - and the couple didn’t have any children, or any special education. They ran a small business, selling pigs and chickens, that kept them housed and fed.
But Chan and her husband were far from the capital, unsullied by modernity. 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. By 1975, the Khmer Rouge had taken control of Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, and begusn driving out its residents.
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - In the early days of the new regime, Chan Phay lived a mostly normal life.
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