Here is a very disturbing story from today's NYT, on the practice of acid-throwing into the faces of women -- by other women.
July 22, 2001
Vengeance Destroys Faces, and Souls, in
Cambodia
By SETH MYDANS
HNOM PENH, Cambodia — It is a form of
revenge that is intended to be worse than
murder. Every time the victim looks into the mirror
she will know: I am ugly now.
The fleeting smile of Som Rasmey is still
disconcertingly beautiful. But her face is ribbed and
ruined by acid, her left eye red and staring, her
burned scalp barren.
After the screaming, thrashing attack 20 months ago
the scorned wife who drenched her with acid, Minh
Rinath, returned to make the message explicit. "He
is mine now," she said. "He will never want you
again."
Miss Som Rasmey, who is now 24, had a particular
kind of beauty — lustrous, proud, the kind that
could be as intimidating as it was alluring.
The attack, in which three other women held her
down by her arms and legs and hair, has not only
robbed her of her looks; it has crushed her soul.
"I have the soul of a dead woman now," she said as
tears streamed down her face. "My body is alive
but my soul is dead."
In the past two years, there has been a horrific
surge in acid attacks in Cambodia, most of them
carried out — in contrast to places like Bangladesh
— by wives against the lovers of their husbands.
One local human rights group, Licadho, recorded
20 such attacks last year in a sort of imitative mass
hysteria.
"The wife does not want you to die," said Maniline
Ek, an American volunteer at a women's shelter here. "They want you to live and
suffer. It's torture. People look at your face and they say, `Oh, she took someone
else's husband.' "
These are battles among the oppressed, the harsh intersection of mutual tragedies —
woman against woman. In Cambodia, power belongs almost exclusively to men.
The philandering husbands are almost never the targets of attack.
A local women's aid group, the Cambodian Women's Crisis Center, recorded only
one instance last year in which a husband was the target. And it was the only
instance in which the attacker was tried and punished.
It is common in Cambodia for men — particularly men of power — to take an
unofficial second wife. The betrayal of the official wife is so familiar that popular
songs have been written about it.
"Our society does not condemn the men," said the director of the crisis center,
Chanthol Oung. "It feels their behavior is acceptable."
The most highly publicized attack was carried out in late 1999 by a woman named
Khourn Sophal, the wife of Svay Sittha, under secretary of state at the Council of
Ministers.
The victim, an 18-year-old actress and singer named Tat Marina, was horribly
disfigured when the woman and several bodyguards poured about five quarts of
acid over her.
A government spokesman, Khieu Thavika, described the attack as a personal
matter "for the first and second wife to resolve." Although charges have been
brought against Mrs. Khourn Sophal, no move has been made to arrest her.
Relatives of her victim say Mrs. Khourn Sophal telephones periodically to insult the
young woman.
Three years ago, the wife of an even higher official was implicated in the shooting
death of Cambodia's most popular singer, Piseth Pilika. That official is the prime
minister himself, Hun Sen. No one has been arrested or charged in that attack.
Typically, the girlfriends or second wives of powerful men are poor young women
who have little but beauty to offer them hope or prospects for the future. And when
that leads to conflict, they are powerless.
At the age of 15, Miss Som Rasmey dropped out of school to earn money for her
family by selling coconuts, cigarettes and gasoline at the roadside. Three years ago
she graduated to serving drinks at a restaurant.
Like many other young women who serve drinks, she soon attracted a patron, a
powerful military colonel named Lim Sok Heng. Her life was transformed: beautiful
clothes, holidays at the beach, even a trip to Hong Kong. And then a baby.
With time, Miss Som Rasmey said, she grew frightened by the colonel's brutality
and by increasing threats from his wife. She tried to leave him but he imprisoned her
in a small house under constant guard.
His obsession with her must have driven his wife mad. When at last she attacked,
she was raging.
"I'll throw the acid now!" she shouted as her friends pinned her victim to the floor.
Miss Som Rasmey had been nursing her 7-month- old daughter and had just time
enough to toss her out of the way.
Her lips tighten as she describes what followed and her speech is clipped and angry.
"She emptied a bottle over my head," she said. "Then another half bottle. I was
burning all over. I struggled and I tried to break free. I ran into the yard and she ran
after me. She had one more bottle and she wanted to throw it. She was shouting,
and I was shouting, `I'm burning; please help me.' "
The attack ended when a group of neighbors surrounded Mrs. Minh Rinath with
hatchets in their hands.
As they heaved Miss Som Rasmey onto a pallet to rush her to a hospital, she could
hear her little girl screaming, the last time she would hear the baby's voice. After the
attack, Colonel Lim Sok Heng and his wife took the baby home and Miss Som
Rasmey cannot be sure whether she is now alive or dead.
Following the attack, the colonel seized Miss Som Rasmey from the hospital and
imprisoned her again, this time in Vietnam, for fear she would make trouble. Six
months later, she escaped and returned to her home, so disfigured that at first her
family did not recognize her.
Her anger has not subsided. Miss Som Rasmey is the first victim to pursue her
attacker in court, demanding compensation and the return of her child.
And it is here that the fundamental law of Cambodia asserted itself: impunity.
Cambodian courts consistently bow to the power of position and the persuasion of
cash.
As Miss Som Rasmey put it: "The rich and the poor are completely different. Prison
is only for poor people. But people like Lim Sok Heng and his wife can do
whatever they want and get away with it."
At the trial last fall, the judge, Tith Sothy, displayed impatience with Miss Som
Rasmey, cutting her off and ordering her not to waste his time "talking about
romance."
But he was not an unsympathetic man. He could see who had been wronged here.
The scorned wife, he said, had acted out of understandable feelings of jealousy.
The judge dismissed Miss Som Rasmey's demand for the return of her child. He
sentenced her attacker, Mrs. Minh Rinath, to two years in prison for misdemeanor
assault, suspended. |
