ASIA, CAMBODIA: Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, & Wives

Theresa de Langis, a Cambodian-based independent consultant on women’s human rights in conflict settings, reports on her project, ‘Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, Wives’. This is an illustrated oral history project inspired by the Women’s Hearing, which aims to tell the life stories of Cambodian women’s experiences of sexualised and gender-based violence under the Khmer Rouge regime.

‘“We are like wheat floating on the pond.” These are the words of a survivor at the recent Asia-Pacific Women’s Hearing on Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in Conflict, hosted by the Cambodian Defenders Project and held in Phnom Penh, October 10-11, 2012. With testifiers from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Nepal and Timor Leste, ten women survivors shared their personal stories, many for the first time publically, before an audience of participants from around the world. They did so because the formal tribunals in their countries are unable or willing to take up sexualised crimes as part of their adjudications – and erasing, as a result, their stories from the discourses that dominate both justice and history. These women are, indeed, like “wheat floating on the pond.”

‘Like the women who testified at the Hearing, their violations have been excluded from the formal Tribunal (the Extraordinary Chambers to the Courts of Cambodia, or ECCC) currently adjudicating crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge regime between January 1975 and April 1979, resulting in one of the worst genocides of a government against its own people, leading to the demise of a full quarter of the population. Instances of sexual violence under the regime include mass rape and gang rape, sexual slavery and mutilation, involving Khmer Rouge cadre acting in their official capacities. To find justice, these victims must turn to alternative measures, like the Women’s Hearing and oral history.

‘With a goal of collecting testimonies of women’s full experiences during the conflict and genocide, the Cambodian women’s oral history project is led by a self-funded independent researcher, but its methodology is embedded within a community of human rights practitioners from organisations working at local levels on human rights, reconciliation and testimonial therapy. An informal advisory group comprised of these organisations has provided a forum for mutual learning from a global to local context, as well as ensuring ethical and research questions are considered with an appropriate cultural context relevant to victim-narrators. As the majority of narrators cannot read, illustrations by a Cambodian artist are an integral part of the final design. Interview collection will begin full time in January of 2013.

‘Collecting testimony of sexualized violence as part of atrocity takes a specific approach, one that prioritises victims and accounts for the unique long-term impacts of sexualized crimes. The Khmer Rouge fell more than 30 years ago, and yet women are coming forward only now, carrying this secret burden for decades. In telling their stories, survivors bravely make a huge corrective to the historical record, and help to reverse the perverse results of a culture of silence around sexualized crimes, where victims are shamed and blamed and perpetrators are guaranteed impunity.’

• For more information about the project please contact: Theresa de Langis, email theresa.delangis@gmail.com

Source:
ORAL HISTORY, Spring 2013, Page: 27