Cambodia's Fearless Heroine

Casey Kelbaugh The prime minister calls her a “hustler” and a “gangster,” but Mo Sochua is a savior of women sold into sex slavery—and willing to go to prison if that’s what it takes to help them.

The smile of Mo Sochua is gentle. It’s the sweet Cambodian smile, as deceptive as her birth country. The Cambodia of the headlines is a great success story: “Democracy Sprung from Bones of the Killing Fields,” or “Five Top Khmer Rouge Leaders on Trial.” But scratch the surface, says Sochua, the most outspoken human-rights activist in the parliament, and you will see Cambodia “fast regressing to a soft dictatorship.”

“I sat up and said, ‘I’m not going to take this anymore! I am not going to be defenseless. I am going to jail.’”

Beneath the surface of her serenity is a caldron of energy and passion to save Cambodian women from sex slavery in brothels, where she goes at night to comfort and educate them. She campaigns to restore free and fair elections. She stands with families who are being brutally driven off their lands with methods similar to those of the Khmer Rouge. Today, it’s the military that wields guns, tear gas, and beatings, and burns fields and homes to the ground to turn over the land to rich developers or corporations, all sanctioned by the government.

You would never imagine that this elegant woman with the high cheekbones of her Chinese mother, dressed in a hand-tailored suit, crossing the lobby of the Parker-Meridien Hotel in Manhattan to meet me for an interview, could be called a “hustler” or “gangster.” But that is how she has been shamed by the leader of her country, Prime Minister Hun Sen, the Vietnamese strongman who has been in power for over 30 years.

Hun Sen was very supportive of Mo Sochua when she was the first female to become minister of women’s affairs in his cabinet, in a country that considers women inferior to men. She made him look good when she negotiated international agreements against sex trafficking of women in Southeast Asia, which brought in donor money from democratic countries and later earned her a Nobel Prize nomination. He was even pleased when she fired up thousands of women to run for provincial political office and saw 900 of them elected.

But since 2004, when she renounced her government position in protest against corruption, she has become the leading voice of the opposition. During recent elections, she challenged a general who was campaigning for office in a government vehicle. She wanted to take a photo as evidence of election fraud. The beefy general wrestled with her to push her away from his car. In the tussle, the buttons on her shirt were ripped open, shocking the large crowd. The ruling party seized the opportunity to put out a story all over the government-controlled media that the female parliamentarian “grabs men” and is the equivalent of a prostitute.

This distortion of her life’s work in saving women from sexual violence “just invites other men to abuse women,” she says. “Hun Sen is targeting me because I walk from home to hut to educate people about their human rights. I tell them about the laws that protect them, but so many cannot read. Land-grabbing is the top issue, because when a farmer or a woman is evicted from their land, they lose the future of their children. Then the ruling party works on them psychologically, and threatens that if they let me come to talk to them again, they won’t be allowed to register a child for school or get health services or even cross the road, because the government owns it.”

Threatened with having her parliamentary immunity revoked, which would open the way for arrest, Sochua had the audacity to lodge a lawsuit for defamation against the prime minister. If arrested, she would be detained in the notorious Prey Sar prison for as long as the court wishes.