ASIA-PACIFIC REGIONAL WOMEN’S HEARING ON GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE IN CONFLICT
A film by Sopheak SAO
In recent years, non-judicial truth-telling forums have taken place around the world. Often, these are in response to the inability or unwillingness of formal judicial mechanisms to deliver justice to survivors of gender-based crimes during armed conflict or under oppressive regimes. One example of such a forum was held on 10 and 11 October 2012 in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh.
The hearing was attended by participants from four countries: Bangladesh, East-Timor, Nepal and Cambodia. All countries went through periods of conflict with gross human rights violations affecting an extensive portion of the population. In the aftermath, each of them set up transitional justice mechanisms to deal with the crimes committed.
Only a very few of those mechanisms adequately addressed the gender-based violence that occurred during those conflicts.
Director’s statement:
As a female filmmaker, I support woman issue through my film.
As a young generation, I would like to know about my own history by my own people and help them to find justice.
However, I believe that by this film these were not minor crimes or secondary bi-products of a conflict but in some cases, a central part of war strategy and organized crimes against humanity. Please help the survivors to be empower.
Once Khai Ly (61) was married with children in Vietnam. Nowadays she is a Buddhist nun. She lives in Stung Meanchey pagoda in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh since 12 years. Because of her Vietnamese origin she faces discrimination by other Cambodian nuns. Sao Sopheak’s THE QUIET MOVEMENT is the first Cambodian documentary, which approaches a sensitive issue by investigating the realities in a Cambodian pagoda today.
The Cambodian Buddhist Sangha was virtually annihilated by the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979). Of some 65,000 monks, nuns and novices in the country in 1969-70, no more than 3,000 are believed by all available accounts to have survived. Since the late 1980s, the number of monks and novices has risen to more than 60,000 again. However, low numbers of teachers and quality of education for monks and, as a consequence, the generally poor discipline of the monks in Cambodia today remain one of the great socio-cultural problems of the country and its recovery as a moral community.
Khai Ly uses advanced meditation skills to overcome her disappointment. She wishes that the Cambodian Ministry of Cult and Religion intervenes and stops the unacceptable behavior of some monks.
A true story about two girls struggling hard for their love. This documentary won the first price at Meta House Phnom Penh for the Gay Pride Festival in May, 2012. This film was premier in South-East Asia festivals. Also screened in Berlin at the “Berlinale Panorama Film Festival” in February, 2013 which one of the biggest festival in the world. And now still going on in Europe & USA.
Those are words that for Cambodian people more than anything else symbolize the horror of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime. Tuol Sleng was the prison where suspected traitors were brought for torturing before being shot at the Killing Fields.
No less than 16.000 people were imprisoned at Tuol Sleng from 1975 until 1979. Only seven of them survived. The rest were brutally killed.
The short documentary Survivor was made in cooperation with the Norwegian editor and former Asia correspondent John Einar Sandvand. Survivor tells the story about Chum Mey, a previous mechanic who was one of only seven survivors of the Tuol Sleng prison.
In the twelve minute long video Chum Mey shows us the Tuol Sleng prison and tells in his own words how he was tortured and beaten.
The communist movement Khmer Rouge, under the leadership of Pol Pot, ruled Cambodia from April 1975 until January 1979. It was one of the most brutal regimes the world has known in modern history and it is estimated that up to two million people – one fourth of the population – died during the Pol Pot years.
Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh was the biggest of many socalled security centers where suspected traitors of the Khmer Rouge were sent after being arrested. For days they were tortured until they agreed to write a detailed report of how they supposedly had worked against the regime. Almost all of them were then sent to Choeung Ek – better known as the Killing Fields – to be killed.
Chum Mey in front of portrait photos of prisoners at Tuol Sleng
Why did Chum Mey survive?
Because of luck. The prison needed a mechanic. Chum Mey had the necessary experience. It was decided to let him stay alive to perform necessary reparations at the prison.
But Chum Mey also witnessed the killing of his wife and newborn child at the end of the Khmer Rouge period. And he had to live with the gruesome memories of the torture and pain in Tuol Sleng.
Today he is dedicated to share his pain and experiences with anyone who wants to listen. Almost every day he travels to Tuol Sleng where he talks to visitors about what went on in the buildings. He was also a key witness when Tuol Sleng boss Duch went on trial in the international tribunal set up to try the senior Khmer Rouge leaders.
It is a story of meaningless torture and the darkest sides of human nature. I cried when I first heard him tell about how his nails were pulled out from his fingers and how he was given electric shocks through his ears.
Skulls from a Khmer Rouge mass grave at a temple in Takeo province, Cambodia
This film was screened at Meta House in Phnom Penh in January 2011 with more than 200 people, including Chum Mey himself, present.
