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queeringperspectives
Sep 25, 20235 min read

#39 - Queer Survival during the Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia

In colaboration with SafeSpaceBTB

After last week's introduction to the current situation of queers in Cambodia, today we are inspired by our conversation with B. Pov to understand a bit better what queer Cambodians went through during the Khmer Rouge regime.

The Communist Party of Kampuchea, better known as the Khmer Rouge, ruled the country from 1975 to 1979 through a brutal dictatorship that claimed the lives of a quarter of the country's total population at the time, nearly 2 million people, making it one of the worst genocides in recent history.

The trauma of what Cambodians had to endure is particularly felt by the queer community to this day. The Khmer Rouge regime was the culmination of the process started during colonization of erasing queer life from public view. This naturally caused a setback in terms of recognition of queer rights and socioeconomic equity, from which the queer community in Cambodia is still trying to recover.

As was the case throughout the post-colonial world, colonies were left with a power vacuum after independence, leaving countries open to internal conflict over which direction to take politically. In Southeast Asia, this occurred in the midst of the Cold War, as the global powers clashed between communist and capitalist ideals.

This war was proxied to the Global South through intervention in local armed conflicts, and it erupted in the region in Vietnam in 1955, shortly after the defeat of the French Empire and the independence of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

For the next 20 years, Cambodia was caught in the crossfire of the Vietnam War. The United States, in its global war against communism, invaded Vietnam and ended up bombing Cambodia, where the Viet Cong had bases in the jungle. In 1970, the United States helped install in Cambodia a right-wing dictatorship.

It was in this context that the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, armed themselves to overthrow the dictatorship with a strong anti-Western, ethnonationalist sentiment fed up with foreign intervention and abuse.

The Khmer Rouge took control of the country in 1975 after 8 years of civil war. Pol Pot's primary goal was to cleanse Cambodia of all foreign influence and return the country to its agrarian roots.

Politically, the Khmer Rouge, despite being called a "communist" party, can be better characterized as a neo-fascist regime that simply took from communism the Stalinist and Maoist examples of absolute totalitarian control by the state of the entire population and all means of production. Adding to the contradictions, the country was renamed Democratic Kampuchea.

There wasn't even a workers' revolution, as Pol Pot persecuted and evacuated -by foot- all the people from the cities and forced them to become enslaved peasants to produce impossible quotas of rice, of which the people saw almost nothing, causing a famine that killed most of them from starvation and inhumane working conditions.

The erasure of difference to control the 'purity' of Khmer identity was the main driving force of the Khmer Rouge. Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cham ethnic groups were imprisoned or executed along with all foreigners.

Internally, individualized identities were also persecuted. Any sign of independent thought, whether through religion, education, or creativity, was considered treason, and soon there were no professionals left, including doctors and teachers. In sum, anyone who was not originally a peasant was treated with suspicion, interrogated, tortured, and potentially killed.

In ideology, the Khmer Rouge had a vision of the perfect Cambodian, one who was solely interested in working for the prosperity of the nation. In the public sphere, segregation by sex was the norm to prevent distractions from work, and traditional gender norms shifted toward a kind of robotic farmer without sexuality or gender expression. Sexual relations were allowed only in marriages for the sole purpose of procreation.

As a result, the political imperative to erase difference implied that any deviation from the regime's procreative needs endangered the individual's life. All those who could not "pass" as heterosexuals were sent to concentration camps or executed, making the mere existence of gender nonconformity and transness a death sentence.

Those who could pass but were suspected of queerness were forced into straight marriages and watched as the marriage was consummated to prove their participation in repopulating the country. Still, the constant surveillance and torturous interrogations meant that many people were outed by their peers, even under false and coerced confessions.

Additionally, in its attempt to 'cleanse' and strengthen Khmer identity, the Khmer Rouge destroyed many historical, educational and religious materials, resulting on the erasure of much of the history of queer involvement in Cambodia's past.

The strict segregation by sex in public spaces created a greater need for sexual services, especially among those in the army, who offered in exchange some protection for queers willing to provide these services to survive.

Another survival strategy was the use of a coded language, a register of the Khmer language called "pia saa Sor" (white language), which uses specific sounds interwoven with the Khmer language to render it unintelligible to those who do not know the rules of these modifications. The origins of this register are uncertain, but some trace it back to the queer community during the colonial period, who used it to secretly signal to each other their belonging to the community.

During the Khmer Rouge regime, the usage of pia saa sor extended outside of the queer community to anyone who wished to talk freely in the presence of authorities. This means that if the origins of this register are indeed queer, the community lent this tool to the broader public in an act of solidarity.

Today, the use of pia saa Sor has returned to the queer community, especially among trans* women, along with a sister register developed later called pia saa Khiev.

As we come to the last stop in our travels through South and Southeast Asia, it is striking to realize how in every country we have visited that was colonized by European empires, the scars left by the occupation have caused the complete destabilization of local relations, opening space for a reactionary anti-Western sentiment with extremist, fascist ideals.

Queers, who played a central role in the societies to which they belonged, were suddenly persecuted by the "civilizing" ideologies imported from Europe, only to be singled out and rejected as Western imports by the nationalist projects that came after independence.

We may always be a minority, but it was colonization that marked our difference and erased our history, which made us vulnerable to oppression.

Yet it is this hardship that has made the queer community so creative in developing tools of resistance, especially those under the trans* umbrella who cannot hide and are forced to find a way to survive. Much like what we saw in Sri Lanka and Thailand, queer resilience during the Khmer Rouge shows us how the tools of survival the queer community has been forced to create are vital for other oppressed communities in times of need, making our inclusion in civil resistance a benefit to all.

That being said, this is not cause for celebration, as it is time to stop only surviving, so we can start living.


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