Intended for Evil by Les Sillars

Author:Les Sillars
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO018000;REL012110
ISBN: 9781493405428
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2016-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

15

The Plan

[If the only] possible passion was revolutionary passion, matchmaking was the province of Angkar.

—Rithy Panh, The Elimination

In the spring of 1977 in the cuisine at Tuol Mateh, Radha ran into an acquaintance, a young woman named Phy. “Angka just married me to that old man,” she said, pointing. “There he is.” Radha looked. The guy was old, a peasant, and likely a loyal soldier of the revolution. He was very dark (an undesirable trait in Cambodian culture) and missing his front teeth. One leg was shorter than the other. Phy told him that the cooperative chiefs just went into the rice fields, picked him out, and matched them up. She had just come from the ceremony. Radha was appalled.

Similar pairings were going on all over the country. In the aftermath of the Four Year Plan, the Central Committee had realized that the Super Great Leap Forward required even more labor than the inferior New People, who were unable to work with true revolutionary enthusiasm, would be able to generate. Besides, they seemed to be dying like flies out in the cooperatives. So infallible Angka set up a series of mass weddings across the country, the fruit of which would be the next generation of the new socialist man.

In some cooperatives, males who were Old People could request permission to marry a particular woman or perhaps set up a match for a child, but Angka usually took care of marriages in Radha’s villages. The Khmer Rouge themselves, of course, picked their own spouses.

Not long after Radha learned of Phy’s marriage, the youth brigade leaders pulled him in from the rice fields for a chat. “Comrade,” Noeun said, “we want you to get married.”

Radha did not want to get married. Comrade Noeun had mentioned this to him some months earlier, and now the cadres were back with an order. He recalled from his days at church in Phnom Penh the words of 2 Corinthians 6:14, “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers.” He objected mildly to the cadres, despite the risk. “He who protests is an enemy,” went one of Angka’s sayings, “and he who opposes is a corpse.”1

“Comrades,” Radha said, “I can barely walk. I am too weak. I cannot look after a wife.”

The officials were unimpressed. They told Radha he was getting married whether he liked it or not.

Radha went back to the rice fields and complained bitterly to the Lord. He began to pray while plowing. Lord, I don’t want to get married. You let my father and my siblings die, and my mother is in desperate shape. I don’t know whether Ravy is even alive. I have lost everything that mattered, and here I am stuck in a rice field waiting for Angka to marry me off to some girl from the Old People.

He felt that God owed him a break. The more he thought about it, plodding along behind the buffalo through the rice paddy, the angrier he became. Finally he said, “Lord, if you make me do this, I’m not going to be a Christian anymore.

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