Mu Sochua: Protesting with poise

There was a slight moment of hesitation as a senior police officer stood in the path of the Toyota Land Cruiser and armed men in combat uniforms fanned out around the vehicle.

Minutes before, Mu Sochua was surrounded by boisterous supporters on Naga Bridge. Now she was encircled by burly riot police ordering her out of the car.

Sochua was caught, and by surprise.

Hesitant to comply with the police orders for the briefest of moments, Sochua consulted with two Cambodian National Rescue Party colleagues inside the car. Might they resist? The odds were not in their favour.

More police deployed, creating a perimeter of riot shields, well-worn batons and recently fired tear-gas guns.

“Open the door. Get her out,” officers were saying to no one in particular.

They didn’t have to say it again.

Her poise returned, Sochua stepped out of the vehicle flashing a huge smile and raised both arms above her head and, like her smile, kept them fixed in place above the thicket of police shields and helmets as she was escorted behind the razor wire near Freedom Park.

Though not in the manner she expected, Sochua had finally achieved her objective: she was inside the barricades that blocked access to Freedom Park.

Whether authorities were going to let the former Minister of Women’s Affairs and one of the best-known figures in the Cambodian National Rescue Party  go was now the question.

 

Peacefully resistant

Off limits to the public since January, Sochua had played human dodge-ball with the violent young men of Daun Penh district’s civilian security for months asserting her right as a citizen to enter Freedom Park.

Given free range to use violence against anyone trying to use the park as a rallying point, the guards were sparred with energetically and peacefully by Sochua as she kept up her one-woman campaign to enter the largely unkempt public area.

Morning after morning, with a small gaggle of supporters, human-rights monitors and media in tow, Sochua would approach Freedom Park on foot. Then, sprinting in sandals and touch-rugby dodges, she would run the gauntlet to reach the centre of the public space.

The run-ins mostly ended the same way: Sochua bundled up by the navy uniformed guards; or pressed aggressively up against a wall by a youth in black-visor crash helmet and camouflage flak jacket; her supporters brutally beaten on occasion.

Despite the violence, Sochua wouldn’t stop. On July 15, authorities had now stopped her with arrest.

Ask what motivates her to put herself on the frontline of street protests and Sochua fires back without hesitation: “Justice.” She thinks for a split second and qualifies: “Freedom and justice.”

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photo Ben Woods

Twenty years on

Two days after her release from a week in Phnom Penh’s Prey Sar prison and Sochua is back in action: attending party meetings, talking to supporters and well-wishers on her simple mobile phone, giving interviews to journalists as she simultaneously tries to eat breakfast.

“This is, like, 20 years of this,” she says. “I am a grassroots politician. I’m an activist. How many protests have I gone through? Even when I was minister I went to (investigate) brothels; I went everywhere to listen to stories. And these stories challenged me. It’s not motivation. It’s a challenge and that sense of accountability and responsibility to deliver; to not lie to myself. Otherwise, if I hear stories and I don’t do anything about it, then I lie to myself and I can’t live with myself. I challenge myself all the time by going to the problem point.”

The morning of her arrest, Sochua had organised a peaceful demonstration to “free” Freedom Park. CNRP supporters in the hundreds approached the nearby Naga Bridge on Norodom Boulevard from several directions. When marchers unfurled a banner on the police razor-wire around the park, district security moved in swinging batons. This time, though, opposition party supporters fought back – for the first time – and quickly routed the guards.

In circumstances still open to question and conspiracy theory, several guards were brutally beaten with fists, feet, rocks, sticks, and in one case, an aluminium crutch. The guards spent days in hospital with their wounds. Police did not intervene in the street fight beyond firing several tear-gas canisters, while Sochua and the other opposition officials in attendance called for an end to the violence amid singing songs and making speeches.

When the gas cleared and the bulk of the opposition supporters had called it a day, the police moved in to arrest the departing Sochua and two colleagues. Five more opposition figures would be arrested in the following hours and days.

Sochua spent that night in police custody and six more at Phnom Penh’s Prey Sar prison before a political deal between CNRP President Sam Rainsy and CPP Prime Minister Hun Sen led to the release of Sochua and seven other CNRP prisoners.

Two days after being freed she spoke of her relief when leaving prison, and how she had prepared for the possibility of a far longer stay behind bars. “Did you see the convoy? Incredible! Along the way, all the way to Prey Sar,” she said referring to the considerable security cortege the military police put on for her delivery to jail. “At every district, district military police were there to receive us, to wait for us and follow the convoy. By the time the convoy got to Prey Sar, the convoy had gotten bigger and bigger. Either we were VIPs or the most wanted criminals. I think we were the latter.”

 

A lady in the big house

Arriving at the prison around 7pm, Sochua was brought to the women’s section and given her prison uniform: “saffron-coloured”, she says. Sochua draws a rough-penned map of the inside of the compound, including such details as the prison’s ‘Lucky Supermarket’ (as the inmates have labelled it, without sparing the irony) and ‘video rental’ store.

“When I entered through this gate, they had to register me. I was already in my new uniform, and the women here were saying: ‘Ming, ming, ming (auntie, auntie, auntie), we have been waiting a long time for you already.’ They had heard everything on the radio. They took me to a cell with 26 women and they were hugging me and they said ‘This is going to be your new bed,’” Sochua says, drawing the outline of a raised concrete platform where she had space for a sleeping mat. In the corner of the communal cell, a communal latrine and washing area was located behind a low wall that offered the smallest modicum of privacy while prisoners squatted in the most private of acts.

That first night was the hardest.

“The hard part was to go to the bathroom. I didn’t have a krama, no sarong or nothing. So they gave me some. They were telling me how I should cover myself… anyway,” she says, her sentence trailing off. “What was really difficult for me: I was trying to stay calm, stay calm, stay calm. For me, I never should have been there. But then I was so glad that I was there. If you are going to fight for justice, you have to be there.”

The open cell was noisy and the women, to defend their territory, were unsurprisingly loud, assertive and colourful in their use of language. Prison is not a place for the faint-hearted and it shouldn’t be for the innocent, or at least those denied a fair hearing, says Sochua, switching to an issue that she says will be her next campaign for the opposition party: a complete overhaul of the judicial system.

“The women have to defend themselves so they have to be tough… Then I started to ask: ‘Why are you here? When did you arrive?’ And this is the part that I want to pursue: none of the prisoners, I can tell you none of the prisoners, whether you have money or you don’t have money, went through a clean system… That is the only thing I have been talking about since I have been free.”

Drawing on her experience of being denied a lawyer in police custody and being roughly treated by one young police officer, stories other prisoners recounted of being ordered to sign statements they hadn’t made or couldn’t understand, or paying bribes to reduce the severity of charges or sentences, Sochua says she is taking on the entire justice system. “We will have to take not just the judiciary, but the justice system and put it under a microscope.

That is what I want to do next.”

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photo Ben Woods

Her father’s daughter

Ask Sochua where her sense of justice comes from and she fires back: “From my father.” Born in 1954, Sochua’s early years growing up in Phnom Penh were privileged. She was educated at the French Lycee, whose sports grounds and swimming pool were once located on the land where the US Embassy now stands. “I learned to swim there,” she says.

Her father was born in Kampuchea Krom, but moved to Phnom Penh as a young man where he was successful in business and married Sochua’s mother, who was from a family of Chinese-Khmer merchants from Takeo province. Her father’s life started in hardship and it would be that experience that influenced both his own world view and that of his children, probably none more than Sochua. An orphan after his mother died when he was an infant, Sochua’s father was raised by an aunt who breastfed him to ensure his survival. Later, a wealthy great uncle – a business ‘mandarin’ at the time – sent Sochua’s father to China. He would return to Cambodia with an education and several languages: Chinese, French, Khmer and Vietnamese from his Khmer Krom roots.

“Although he was privileged, he talked about being breastfed by his aunt when his mother died. He was poor,” Sochua says, recounting that her father impressed upon her the need to treat people fairly. “He would say to us: ‘Treat people right.’”

Though protected from that poverty by privileged family circumstance, Sochua’s first exposure to the reality for the majority of her fellow countrymen came from listening to stories of the servants who worked in her father’s house, and whom she spent much time with. “The youngest servants would talk about their lives in the fields, how poor they were, and why they were now serving us. So our father gave us this sense of justice for a long time.”

Sochua didn’t listen to all her father’s advice. “He said to me: ‘I will give you the best education, a French education, the best, but I don’t want you to ever be a politician; these politicians are all corrupt,’” she says, visibly amused at the ways things turned out.

If her father taught her about rich and poor, Sochua’s mother taught her a valuable life lesson about the differences between men and women. Only educated to third grade, Sochua’s mother learned to read and write Khmer with a tutor while she, as a young girl, did her French homework. “This is why I am a women’s activist. There is a difference between rich and poor, and there is a difference between men and women.

“My family was very funny. If you sit at a table like this, at meal time, my mother would be on one side, my father on the other. To my father, I spoke Khmer. To my mother, I spoke Chinese. I speak Teochew. And then whenever my father wanted to keep a secret from us, he would speak in Vietnamese with his sisters… Then at school we would speak French. We would be punished if we did not speak French.”

 

Jailer’s turncoat

Decades later, during her week in prison, Sochua’s followers were once again keeping a close watch on what she was saying. Moved from the large communal cell of her first night behind bars to a smaller room with six inmates, Sochua was assigned a woman, another prisoner, to act as her ‘server’, although her real task was to spy on the opposition lawmaker-elect, particularly to discover what she said, and to whom, and if she had gained access to a telephone. But the spying didn’t quite work out the way the prison guards expected.

“She right away confessed,” Sochua says, amused once more at the very recent memory. “She said: ‘You know, auntie, my role is to report to them [the prison guards] two times a day whether or not you have a telephone. But I am not going to sell my integrity. I am seven. My family is seven.’” Seven was the position assigned to the CNRP on the ballot paper list of parties in the 2013 national election, and the digit now signifies support for the political opposition.

The number seven was a recurring theme (the police asked Sochua seven questions when they arrested her) in the seven days she spent incarcerated, Sochua says. During the daily exercise period on her second day, she began walking laps of the prison courtyard as the other 400 or so other inmates lounged around and chatted. As Sochua approached the seventh lap of the yard, her fellow prisoners took up a chant: ‘Number seven! Number seven!’

“The entire courtyard!” Sochua says. It was a pyrrhic victory. “The next day at 7:30, the guard didn’t open the cell.” It would be the last time Sochua did her politically charged fitness laps, or had access to the exercise yard. Shortly after, officials from the Interior Ministry’s prisons department came to ask Sochua about her treatment in prison. She asked them about the yard. One officer responded: “‘Auntie, wherever you go, you create chaos.’ I went on to tell him: ‘If you are going to treat people like this, by the next election CPP [Cambodian People’s Party] might not have any votes.’ It’s all recorded. I said: ‘Record it.’”

Then, with precision timing, as the questioning finished and Sochua and the police officers walked back into view of the other inmates, the entire wing erupted in a chant again: “Chaiyo ming (Bravo, auntie!), chaiyo ming!” ‘You see?’ the police officer said, turning to Sochua as the women prisoners continued their chant. “From that day on the gate was never opened… and they kept me inside,” she said.

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photo Ben Woods
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$500 and a suitcase

With the civil war creeping closer after the toppling of Prince Sihanouk in 1970, Sochua’s family sent her to France. It was 1972. After one year she decided to drop out of school in Paris and move to San Francisco, the Bay Area, to join her brother. Fluent in French and Chinese, Sochua had to master another language, English, to gain access to colleges in the US. The Beatles, she says, were the secret to her TOEFL English exam success.

“I learned English through The Beatles’ songs, like Imagine. I had French, so it was easy, but there were some expressions, such as ‘Let it be.’ What about ‘Let it be?’ I totally didn’t understand. And Hey Jude: ‘Hey Jude, don’t let me down.’ What the hell is this? It was learning English through The Beatles.”

Those classic pop lyrics eventually resulted in Sochua attending San Francisco State University, where she obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and then moved onto the University of California, Berkeley, where she received a Masters in Social Work in 1981. But her journey was only beginning.

The same week as her graduation from Berkeley, she became a US citizen. To celebrate, she packed all her belongings in one bag, gathered all the money she had ($500) and took a one-way flight to Thailand to work with Cambodian refugees fleeing Pol Pot’s recently toppled Democratic Kampuchea and Vietnam’s newly ‘liberated’ People’s Republic of Kampuchea. She had been promised a job with the International Rescue Committee and now, holding a US passport, she was able to travel freely to the Thai-Cambodia border camps.

“One suitcase and $500. That was my life,” she says. “I always wanted to come back to Cambodia… I always wanted to come back home because I did not say goodbye to my parents when they put me on the plane. And especially my mother; I saw how brokenhearted my mother was. And my father, of course.”

No one knows what happened to Sochua’s parents. Near the end of the doomed Khmer Republic, her father was operating an airline company that flew much-needed supplies into Phnom Penh and desperate people out. Sochua and her brothers had waited and waited for their parents to be on one of those flights. They never were. Relatives would leave Cambodia in those finals months and weeks and days and tell Sochua that her parents had given up their seat tickets for them. She would never see them again and still doesn’t know their fate.

Who are her heroes? Sochua replies with an example. “When I was in jail I asked for three books: Nelson Mandela, Gandhi and the third one… not Aung San Suu Kyi, it used to be…” she says, and suddenly realises what she has just said.

“Don’t say that,” she asks, but then decides it is better to clarify. “Aung San Suu Kyi is with me,” she says, pointing out that the pastel-coloured cotton top she is wearing is from Burma. She was also wearing a Burmese, Suu Kyi-style cotton top the day she was arrested. It wasn’t a wardrobe coincidence; it was a fashion statement of political proportions. “I chose it specifically because of Burma – not living in fear. That I owe to Aung San Suu Kyi.” Continuing, she explains her third book choice and hero: “Those who fought for non-violence” – Martin Luther King.

 

Death changes things

Echoing her father’s wish, Sochua says she didn’t want to be involved in politics. She started with refugees and peace work. Politics, however, found her when then-First Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh invited her in 1995 to be his advisor on women’s affairs. She ran for a parliamentary seat with Funcinpec in 1998, which she won, but gave up immediately to become Minister of Women’s Affairs under the coalition between Prince Ranariddh and Hun Sen. Six years later, after earning a strong reputation for integrity as a minister, she would leave Funcinpec and join the opposition Sam Rainsy Party. The year was 2004 and she decided to leave Funcinpec the day the country’s most famous union leader, Chea Vichea, was murdered.

“Chea Vichea would come challenge me because I was Minister of Women’s Affairs, so I would start going into these protests during these strikes,” she said, recounting the killing of a striker who was shot dead by police during a protest in the early 2000s. That killing was a turning point, she said. Garment workers and their cause would become Sochua’s, too.

“Why I left Funcinpec? Funcinpec never came,” she says. “The day Chea Vichea was killed, Funcinpec would say: ‘Oh, you lead the delegation for Funcinpec. You bring some flowers.’ I said: ‘No, I’m not going to do that.’ Then Prince Sirivudh came [as an official representative of Funcinpec]… I went home after the ceremony for Chea Vichea. I took a shower. Cried in the shower. Got dressed. Came to see Rainsy and said I want to join the Sam Rainsy Party. He said: ‘You are already SRP.’ The SRP accepted me with arms open. When I went into the SRP compound, they hugged me and said: ‘You have always been part of the SRP.’”

 

Borders and boundaries

Sochua married Scott Leiper in 1984. She was by then working with the UN Border Relief Operation and he was working with the World Food Programme. After a posting in Rome, Sochua returned with Scott to Phnom Penh in 1989. They have three daughters in their twenties. Even long-time supporters of Sochua are sometimes surprised to find she was a minister and mother of three at the same time. That is not an accident. Sochua has always kept a measured distance between her political and family life.

“My life and Scott’s life is totally different,” she says. “We’ve been married over 30 years and even when I was a minister – and I was not opposition, I was the minister, I was in the cabinet – we were never seen together officially, even social gatherings that we had with Funcinpec, he never showed up. It was a deal that we made.”

That two-decade-long separation of family and political career was trespassed for the first time with Sochua’s arrest: Scott and two of her daughters went to Prey Sar prison – along with hundreds of other supporters – for her release on July 22. “When he went to prison, it was the first time that he entered my political life. And I have been in politics since 1995. It was the first time that my family was there with me. And people didn’t realise who they were – my family, my children. Although they give me a lot of support, they wanted to give me moral support from afar. And I was also worried for their safety.”

Sochua is sure her opposition party will win the next national election but refuses to say when she thinks that vote will take place. “I don’t want to say 2018. I say next election.”

Managing the transition of power from Hun Sen will require cooperation and tact, one of the tasks of the CNRP’s 55 lawmakers-elect who will take their seats in parliament as part of the deal struck that resulted in her release from prison.

And what will happen to Cambodia’s ethnic Vietnamese population if the opposition, members of which have actively stoked xenophobia toward the Vietnamese, takes power? Sochua takes umbrage at the criticism that her party is fundamentally racist. “I think it is very unfair. I reject. We are nationalist and people don’t want to see that difference. There is a fine line. We never said go after the Vietnamese. We say we are against the border demarcation. The issue is the border. The issue is not the Vietnamese as the race. Never! It is not because you are Vietnamese as a race, which is how you define a racist,” she continues, saying the issue is one of unchecked illegal immigration, which applies to everyone.

“You have to implement the law on migration. And it is not just the Vietnamese. The Chinese are coming in freely too – with Cambodian passports. When we are in power, we will have the law of the land, the immigration law, and we will have the international convention and standards. But we have to be strict with the border in terms of who comes in and who goes out. Not as racial discrimination, but as control. Like any country that has borders and border disputes. It’s a huge issue in America. And what about Thailand? Why are they not called racists?”

 

Moving forward

Just before the interview ends and Sochua leaves to meet her husband and daughters for lunch in Phnom Penh, she lays out her map for the future, both hers and Cambodia’s. “I see the road forward is not just about the political deal and all that. That is not it. It is when people feel that sense of justice. And that sense of justice is not just in the court system, but in every single breath you take in and out. You are poor? Why? You are under arrest? Why? You are deprived? Why?”

As she stands to leave the restaurant in the Sunway Hotel, the waiting staff are all admiring eyes and smiles. Everyone knows Sochua now: former minister, street activist, Member of Parliament, working mother and recently released political prisoner. Staff members stop what they are doing and press their hands together in sampeah as she walks past and, without hesitation, Sochua sampeahs back to them.