Case 002 Witnesses, experts and Civil Parties

The Civil Party is from Svay Rieng province. He was a Lon Nol soldier and as such was taken away supposedly for a study session but in reality he was to be killed. He was given two tins of rice to feed ten people after a hard day of work digging canals. He said the Khmer Rouge evicted them from their homelands. He met Khieu Samphan and Svay Ampil Market, where the latter distributed rice and clothes for the trip to the southwest zone. The CP quoted Khieu Samphan as saying the revolution would not allow for different classes. Many of his family members were killed.

The Civil Party was born in 1952. She married her first husband, who worked in the cooperative, in 1973 and had two children with him.

In 1974 he was sent to the battlefield and afterwards worked in Central Market in Phnom Penh. He wasn’t a cadre but he was a group leader. She was sent to cook rice for evacuees, which Khieu Samphan distributed. Her husband disappeared in 1978 when he was 25 years old, and she never saw him again. She had to leave Phnom Penh while she was pregnant when her husband disappeared; she gave birth to her baby when she returned in 1979. The CP also had several uncles who disappeared too. She saw Khieu Samphan when he was handing out blue-white karmas to evacuees from the east.

Eventually she was allowed to cook rice at the place where her husband was being held, so her son was able to see him although she wasn’t.

The Civil Party  live in Pursat province prior to the revolution. After 1975 he was a messenger at Battambang University alongside Horn.

He helped to receive visitors around when they came for study sessions. In 1977 Nuon Chea said his father was a traitor and therefore the CP was brought into Phnom Penh. Both his father and uncle were arrested and sent to S-21. He worked with Khan who worked with Nuon Chea. Khan said Nuon Chea gave the order to demolish all pagodas, because it was unnecessary to practice any religious beliefs. All of his father’s relatives were killed. To the CP’s knowledge, they purged people in the Northwest Zone and replaced them with cadres from the Southwest Zone, around 500-600 according to him.

In his closing statement, he explained how difficult his situation is now – “lower than animals” – and how hard it was to be separated from his family, no education, no land or means of survival.

The Civil Party was a monk in Kampot who was forcibly decapitated by the revolutionary militia in 1971 when he was 15 years old.

He was part of the division that occupied Phnom Penh. He described women who greeted them with flowers as they entered the city, but said some soldiers beat them. That threw away the flowers. He and other soldiers were told that Lon Nol would be killed. He had friends and relatives who were Lon Nol soldiers. He found them and told them to take off their uniforms and lie if asked who they were.

He was in the Navy but was later arrested and put to hard work because they thought he was an enemy spy. He remembers seeing Nuon Chea and Ta Mok together while filming a video about the fighting between China and Japan.

Nget Chat was born in Pursat province, where she lives today. She narrowly avoided execution in 1978 but her husband did not. She was forced to marry three or four days after he disappeared. Her entire family was killed. Her husband and her family was Kampuchea Krom. She was told to remarry because she had children and to think of their destiny.

Soy Naroeun was born in 1955 in Kampong Cham. She was separated from her family on 17 April 1975.

She worked in a mobile unit with 20-30 other women. She was forced to be married in 1975. She was upset because her parents were not there, but she agreed to give herself to her husband because there were militiamen walking back and forth in front of the shelter they were sleeping in. She became pregnant soon after but was forced to work regardless. She got malaria at six months and the baby died because she had no  medicine to cure her malaria. She became pregnant again and this time the child survived. Her sister was also married but not until 1978 when conditions were much worse. 11 of her relatives died.

Kul Nem was born around 1956 in Takeo province. He was moved in the arm from Phnom Penh to Kratie and then Mondulkiri in 1975. He was forced to marry there, despite having a fiancé already in his village. He still feels guilty about that to this day. His wife became pregnant but she miscarried because she was exhausted
from being overworked. He was sent to K-11 which was a punishment. His wife was from the Pnong ethnicity.

The testimony of Ms.PREAP Sokhoeurn is in relation to the regulation of marriage. 

Preap Sokhoeum was born in 1951 in Kampong Cham province. She had two daughters. She was working on a cotton plantation in 1975 when she was called to be married. After the marriage she found only sadness. She did not know her husband before. Both were weeping because they wanted their parents here. He tried to have sex with her but she told him because the marriage hadn’t been held with the proper customs she did
not acknowledge it and therefore did not allow him to touch her. She knew they were being watched. Eventually he raped her. She became pregnant after that. Her husband came to see her one day and she
didn’t even remember his face. He raped her again, telling her that it was Angkar’s instructions and it would kill them both if they didn’t have sex. He later disappeared, and she was told her baby would be killed because her husband was a traitor. She knew several couples who had refused to consummate their marriage or get married, and they were all disappeared. Her siblings were all killed because one of them had been a Lon Nol soldier. She asserted that the KR completely eliminated the feeling of family relationship.

Pen Sochan was born in Pursart Province. She was living with her parents before she was transferred to another village.

She got married around 15 or 16 years old with 12 other couples while she was in a mobile unit, where she made fertilizer. She refused her unit chief’s requests, who asked her if she was mature because she was already on the list of Comrade Oeun. None of her relatives were there. Comrade Oeun said that to get married and produce children were Angkar’s instructions. She said that they built a floor of bamboo trees which they partitioned into twelve rooms for the twelve couples. She was threatened to death if she didn’t consummate her wedding by the third night. They were monitored by militiamen who told her husband to rape and beat her, so he did. Militiamen always reminded them that they had to produce children for Angkar. She was young and afraid. She suffered a lot and her mother couldn’t help her.

She got married a second time to a soldier who had many others wives. She was beaten and raped by him also and had six children with him. She stated that her life was painful. She suffered a lot physically and psychologically because she lost many members of her family and was forced to get married.

HENG Lai Heang was born in 1950 in Kratie province, where she and her family lived in a communal farming community.

In 1971, she joined the revolutionary movement when men from the jungle urged them to join to liberate the country. She was on a local committee, so she was responsible for disseminating information about the revolution to the Base People in all the villages. During this period she witnessed many ceremonies and selection for marriage. In 1976, her supervisors in the committee of Sector 505 in the Northeast Zone arranged her marriage. She refused many times but when they used the word “stubborn” to describe her, she agreed to the arrangement for her safety. For her it was a resistance against this new power if she didn’t accept. She became pregnant a year after her wedding, but her husband was arrested in 1978 and she was accused of being linked to a traitor. He was sent to a study session and never returned. She was removed to a work site for wives of traitors in Kratie province.

Regarding the policy against Vietnamese, she stated that this policy was initiated at the local level at the beginning and was disseminated to the district after. This was established because of the conflict between Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese. All of them, even half-blood,
were smashed. This was the case of her uncle’s family.

Mom Vun was born in 1948 in Siem Reap province, where she lived before 1975. Her husband was Tan Him.

She was assigned to harvest rice when her child was young; when her child died she was assigned to build dykes. Her older siblings were accused of being traitors and killed. Her mother died from sickness. She was
forced to re-marry within a few months of her husband’s disappearance in 1975. Two days before her marriage she was held at gunpoint and raped by five men, one by one. She and her husband didn’t like each other but they felt they had no choice but to get married or be killed. She didn’t inform her family of the wedding because it wasn’t done in the traditional way. Although they tried to avoid consummating the marriage, militiamen held torches on them and forced her husband’s penis into her.

She separated from her husband in 1984. At a meeting in 1976 she saw Nuon Chea speak.

Ms. CHEA Dieb was born in April 1954 in Pramat Dei village, Kampong Cham province. She is a rice farmer  and has four children. She joined the army in 1974 and followed Comrades Han and Hean in the mobile unit incharge of transporting wounded soldiers from the battlefield.

Before the fall of Phnom Penh, they were near the city around Wat Nom and she transported the munitions, bodies, the properties found, the spoils of war stocked in warehouse and she also participated in fights. After, she was transferred to a textile unit where they were required to produce hundred skirts and shirts per day. In 1978, she was sent to the O’Russey textile unit because she was suspected to be connected to leaders of the former regime. She stated that she saw Khieu Samphan twice. During the meeting at Wat Long, this one said women had to work and marry a man. Particularly he spoke to young people to “produce” children to protect the country. He said that 19-25 and 30-35 years old were the age ranges to get married. They organized marriages, but she refused because she wanted to serve the regime. However, the second time she couldn’t refuse and she followed the counsel of Angkar. There were twelve couples. The men were handicapped; for example hers had a problem at his leg. He was 26 and she was 19. They pronounced an engagement and after that they were divided into four groups. They were monitored and if they wanted to be separated or didn’t consume their marriages they were sent to reeducation. She gave the example of a man who didn’t like women but men and was transferred to be reeducated. After this, he consummated his wedding and his wife was pregnant. According to her, she was forced to get married. 

She spoke about her suffering, her lost and the difficulty to talk about it today. She was scared all the time, because just being accused of something was sufficient to send them in re-education or to be killed.

The Civil Party was born in 1956 in Trapeang Kak village, Takeo province. He began to learn art when he joined the Communist Party of Kampuchea in 1970 and after he joined the army.

He was assigned to be a group chief and a card-carrying member of the Party. He was promoted to chief of a company but was injured in the battlefield and sent to a handicapped soldier compound in Sector 13 in mid-1975, then  transferred in a guarded handicapped zone in the southwest. During his rest he saw handicapped men forced to get  married  with some single women from Kampot province for patriotic duty. They were old and handicapped so the Khmer Rouge felt they should arrange marriage for them according to Ta Mok's policy. He was in charge of the district office so he was responsible for biographies of men and women to arrange their marriages and choose  who should marry whom. He explained that there were always 20-30 couples to get married at the same time. He said people could refuse this arrangement but no one did because they were too afraid of getting killed. He tried to refuse to get married but the third time he accepted because the woman was a cousin of his chief Phoan and it was a culture of fear during the regime. There were three couples to get married at the same time. According to him, it was not forced marriage, rather a sector plan on the communist party of Democratic Kampuchea. He was informed of this plan by his chief and it was disseminated throughout the country. Women and men with a certain age had to get married, it became a rule, and women had to be younger than men of three to five years.

He chose to use the notion of arranged marriage. He asked the  Courts to note his suffering and that the lower ranks should be tried at the ECCC because they altered and ruined the party line according to him.

Before 1975, the Civil Party was a student​ and a police officer.

He explained that at the beginning Khmer Rouge soldiers were very nice and nobody suspected anything. He was finally authorized to go to Kampot but he lived in bad conditions and he finished in the commune hospital. After that, he was transferred to District 107 for working in a special unit to carry heavy baskets of earth. In the middle of 1978, the Civil Party was forced to get married because he was considered as a hard worker. He finally accepted after asking if he could get married with the woman he was engaged with but her brother was killed by the Khmer Rouge. The chief of the unit told they were sons and daughters of Angkar and for that reason they could not refuse the marriage. CP stated that some people were allowed to choose who they married, but only men and only if their biographies were compatible. One night, the chiefs called 50 men and 50 women. Each couple had to pronounce an official vow. He didn’t know his future wife. After the ceremony they continued to work but at night they had to consummate their wedding. However, they couldn’t because they were exhausted, skinny and without sexual feelings. 

He said they had to pretend that they loved each other like husband and wife, and were monitored to see if they had sex. He said those ceremonies were different than traditional ones because they didn’t ask their parents, who were not here during the wedding, they didn’t know each other and they were threatened with death. For him, it was a really difficult period, like living in hell.

The Civil Party was born in 1940 in Koh Tang village, Tralach Commune, Takeo province. She is a rice worker field and a transgender. 

Her parents were killed during the Pol Pot regime. Although she was born as a man, before 1975 she had lived as a woman. During the Khmer Rouge era she became he, because she had to get married when she was evacuated from Son Nol Mountain, a re-education prison. When she was transferred a village in Bantay District, she tried to refuse to marry because her mother was in bad health and her family couldn’t be there for the ceremony. 107 couples were called to the same room without knowing what was happening. They had to choose each other in the dark. The Civil Party had talked with her wife-to-be to ask her to be able to recognize each other with the scarf. She said no one refused to get married because it was a psychologically tense situation. Some of her transgender friends decided to kill themselves or others were shot. The ceremony was not organized according to the Khmer tradition. She spoke also about soldiers who monitored them to know if they consumed their marriage. She and her wife had to drink a lot of alcohol to be able to do it, because the Civil Party wasn't attracted to women. They had to make a vow to Angkar, commit to marriage and produce children as Angkar required it to increase population and protect the country. After that they sent her to work and she never saw her wife and daughter again. The Civil Party also spoke about rooms of interviews, tools of torture and screams she heard. She lived in a lot of different places, most of the time in prison.

She said she had nothing to tell to the accused just how much he suffered because he lost everything: her family, how she was forced to get married, she was sexually abused, had physical injuries, eyesight is poor, right leg is handicapped because of the chains, etc.

The Civil Party lived with her family in the unit 7 at Ta Ong village, Ta Ong Commune in 1975.

After the fall of Phnom Penh she was transferred at district Chamkar Leu District of Kampong Cham province. She was married during the Lon Nol regime and had a child, but her husband was killed after he joined the Revolutionary army. In early 1978, she was married a second time when she arrived in Unit 7. The Civil Party said she was threatened because she already had a child and they told her that if she didn’t get married they would take him away from her. Moreover, the witness explained that she had a cousin who refused to get married and who was killed because of that. Therefore she did not protest There were 13 couples to get married at the same time as her. She described the ceremony: her parents weren’t there because she didn’t have the time to tell them about it, there was no traditional music or dancing or anything else. Her new husband was more than 20 years her senior. She didn’t like him and during their first night together she threw him away. This action led her in front of the chief of the section, Comrade Penh. The Civil Party explained
that during this meeting with Comrade Phan, he raped her because of her disobedience despite the policy of morality.

The witness told the Trial Chamber that after this, she consummated her marriage with her husband
because they were monitored by militiamen. Finally she had a child at the end of 1978. She said the living conditions were difficult, even she was pregnant she had to work hard and she couldn’t rest.

Civil Party, My Savoeun, described the chaotic situation for East Zone soldiers from 1976 to 1978. Before Civil Party Mey Savoeun was sent to Pursat in 1978, the Civil Party was arrested and detained in Me Sang district (Prey Veng province) where he was forced to dig soil. The Civil Party was then arrested, while in military uniform at Kranhung pagoda and detained nearby. He was dragged behind a bicycle, beaten, and interrogated before being released. 

The Civil Party testified that others who confessed during their detention were killed. The Civil Party was again arrested with his mother in Svay Rieng province, but escaped detention in a prison because fighting with Vietnamese broke out. 

The Civil Party was a soldier in Koh Keo Commune, Lvea Em District in Kandal Province. 

He was attached to Unit 148 which was still at Koh Keo when the area was liberated. He was later transferred to Prey Veng  Province where he built canals, dyke systems and roads and worked in the rice fields. He said that Sao Phim, the Zone Secretary at the time, encouraged a rebellion in the East Zone and told forces to fight against theSouthwest soldiers. Airplanes dropped leaflets which “encouraged all people and forces as well as civil servants in the East Zone to surrender with the West and Southwest forces”. The leaflet said that they did not “betray thenation,” only the leaders, such as Sao Phim and his wife, had betrayed the country. He fled the battlefield and was arrested, narrowly escaping execution, before being sent to Prey Veng Province where he was assigned to a mobile unit. It was here that he was told that Angkar required them to marry.

He was married to a woman he did not know alongside sixty other couples. They were monitored by militiamen to ensure the marriage was consummated.

Mr. YUN Bin was born in 1955. He was sent to live in Kos Au Tanseng Island when the Khmer Rouge took power. Here he was assigned to build canals and dykes, clear the forests and transplant rice seedlings.

On 25 May 1978, he was called to go for a study session with nine other youths from several districts. He was tied with rope and taken by vehicle to an execution site. There were 40 people in total including four women. He was beaten with an axe until he lost consciousness and thrown into a well. When he regained consciousness he was covered with four or five dead bodies. Those who had not died cried out. The soldiers threw grenades into the well until there was silence. Mr. Yun asked the souls of those who died to help him survive and escape the well. He promised them he would find justice for them. He managed to release himself from the rope tied around his wrists and escaped. He returned to his parents’ village in Kampong Thom where he concealed himself inside their house.

He later fled with his father to the forest when people were evicted from the village in 1978. His father became ill and passed away.

Mrs. KAUN Sunthara was born in 1952. She said that on 17 April 1975 she and her family were told to leave  Phnom Penh.

They left the next morning travelling by foot toward Kandal Province. At the time, she was  almost nine months pregnant. She delivered her baby with the assistance of her sister and midwives who were around twelve-years-old. She did not receive any medicine and in order to have enough sustenance to  roduce breastmilk she cooked leaves with salt. In June 1977, her son died aged two-years-old because he was so 
emaciated. Her daughter, who was five years old at the time, contracted dysentery and died in December of the same year. In 1976, men and women were separated and placed in a mobile unit. Every ten days they
were allowed to return home. Her husband was not able to return home to see their children before they died. She went to her husbands worksite where she was told that her husband had been taken away.

In 1979 she received news that her brother was killed at S-21. She saw her brother and sister-in-law’s photos at S-21, however, could not find those of their two adopted children.

Che Heap was born 1 February 1961. Before the fall of Phnom Penh he was living in the Kampong Tom district with his family.

His brother, a KR soldier, took him and several siblings to live in Phnom Penh. His brother was part of a logistics unit. Once when he went to visit his brother, he was not there and someone pointed to Che and said that he was the brother of a traitor. After this Che tried to hide his biography because his brother was accused of being a traitor. When he asked permission to go home, it was not granted. After the war he learned that his brother had been taken to Tuol Sleng. His brother’s wife was never told of this, and soon after he disappeared she and her children were taken to a pagoda. She is still again. The Civil Party said that five of his siblings went missing, never to be seen again. 

He testified in court because his brother sacrificed a lot to the struggle and regime. His brothers supported the KR, joined the regime and left their parents behind only for them all to be arrested and never returned; according to Mr. Che, only three of the siblings survived. The family couldn’t afford to make a ritual for his siblings. They cry every time they think of them.

PHOUNG Yat was born on 15 April 1960. She is a farmer in the rice fields.

In 1975 two of her siblings were drafted into the army. She heard that one of her sisters went to PP and got married and worked in a factory, but she never heard what happened to her. In Tuol Sleng prison, the Civil Party found her siblings’ photos displayed there. Upon seeing this she wept until she fainted. She told the court that her sister fled their home village because she didn’t want to marry the man she’d been assigned to marry.

She stayed in hiding until the end of the regime, which, according to Ms. Phoung, was the only reason she survived.

ROS Chuor Siy was born on 20 September 1938. She lives in Paris with three children.

In 1975 she and her husband left Paris, where he had completed a PhD in aviation and was working for Air France and Air Cambodge, to return to Cambodia thanks to an outreach campaign organized by Ieng Sary encouraging expats to return to help rebuild Cambodia. Upon arriving at the airport in Phnom Penh with their young daughters she and her husband were surprised that none of their families were there to greet them. According to Ms. Ros, as they were driving down the roads it was suspiciously quiet, and she and her  husband became worried. At the central office, she met two elder men who she’d known a few months before they returned to Cambodia. They were emaciated and in rough condition. She saw her sister who  had also returned six or seven months before her. Her sister had also not seen their parents. Ms. Ros said her family’s physical condition worsened as they were relocated multiple times by Angkar. In December 1976 her husband came to tell her that he had been assigned a special duty. He told her not to worry, to work hard and to look after herself and their daughters, that they would meet again. She and her daughters were moved repeatedly, which worried her a lot because she was moving farther away from her husband. She did not give up hope that they would be reunited soon. She was repeatedly told by Angkar that this would be the case. By 1979 she had given up hope. After the liberation of Phnom Penh she went to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and there she found a photograph of her husband among the prisoners; she knew he had been killed and could not imagine the pain and torture inflicted on him before he died. 

She wanted to cry out, she almost fainted, but a voice told her she had to stay strong. After that point she realized she could not raise her children in such a country. She sold everything she owned and moved back to France. She never discovered the fate of her parents.

Mr Chhun Samorn was born in 1957 in Thmei village, Ksetr commune, Kampong Rou district, Svay Rieng province, where he still lives with his family and works as a rice farmer.

He testified as a Civil Party in Case 002/02. Mr Chhun became a Khmer Rouge soldier in May 1975, and worked as a messenger in unit 75. He delivered information about enemy positions to other units. He also attended meetings on the subject. In 1976, he was sent to sector 23 and worked in the Special Unit, in charge of gathering intelligence and sometimes of planting mines. Meetings about internal matters were organized. His unit was sent to areas close to the Vietnamese border, in Svay Rieng province, where he said the fighting was fierce in 1976 and 1977, in order to collect information. Sometimes, his unit had to fight the Vietnamese Special Unit. Mr Chhun stated that the work of the Special Unit was harder than other units’. According to Mr Chhun, the fighting intensified in 1977 and soldiers from the Central and the Southwest zones were sent in as reinforcements. At the end of 1977, East zone commanders were sent to training sessions and disappeared. The units were split by Central zone soldiers between the soldiers who had joined the revolution before and after 1975. Weapons were confiscated. Soldiers who had joined before 1975, about 300, were boarded on trucks and were sent to Veal Taprunh. The few others, including Mr Chhun, were integrated into Division 703 and asked to show landmines locations. They were then sent to the same place instead of to the Center. They were all instructed to work in rice fields and to dig holes. In 1978, Mr Chhun heard that East zone soldiers attempted a coup in the Center. Mr Chhun and his coworkers were instructed to go back to their families and villages. In Mr Chhun’s village, soldiers from the Center replaced the cooperative chiefs and told his unit that they would be reenlisted after the purge. However, the witness explained that a few days after their arrival, they tied them up, called them traitors and walked them to be executed. Mr Chhun heard from someone that they were not the first group of soldiers to be sent away. At the execution site, the soldiers who were tied up were shot, but some managed to untie themselves and to flee. Mr Chhun managed to flee with two other soldiers and jumped into a river, then crossed the Vietnamese border. They were rescued by Vietnamese soldiers. The Vietnamese asked them questions and let them join their army in order to liberate Cambodia. The witness recognized a few names of cadres from his unit who were sent for study sessions and are on the S-21 OCIJ prisoners list.

After his testimony, Mr Chhun asked for justice for his family and asked the accused two questions: why they divided the soldiers between those who joined the revolution before and after 1975, and why they arrested many East zone soldiers without justice. The accused used their 10 Hearings in Case 002/02 right to remain silent.