Villagers accused of sorcery sit at a house in Saleav village in Ratanakkiri province. Photograph: David Boyle/Phnom Penh Post |
Tuesday, 19 June 2012
May Titthara and David Boyle
The Phnom Penh Post
The women of Saleav village burst into
hysterical, indignant laughter at the suggestion that they eat human
flesh or uncooked meat, as they nurture their young – children condemned
to grow up as exiles.
Tucked away in a remote area of
Rattanakkiri’s Bakeo district, for more than two and a half decades,
accused sorcerers have been banished to this barren outpost by various
indigenous minority groups whose belief in the occult still thrives.
“I
am so angry when they said that my village is a sorcerer village. I am
not eating human, blood or uncooked meat; I am eating food just like
other people do,” 17-year-old Ramas Voeun says, holding her baby in a krama.
Alternating between amusement
and anger, the young ethnic Jarai mother says preposterous accusations
were levelled against her family by the former neighbours who expelled
them from Nhang village in Andong Meas distict, such as the assertion
that they ate their own children.
“I would like to ask to everyone
to stop saying that my village is a sorcerer village, because some
people who are sorcerers have already been killed,” she says.
Brutal killings, including a
case in which an alleged sorcerer was hacked to death by axe-wielding
villagers, are not uncommon in Cambodia and have led authorities to take
unusual actions in Ratanakkiri.
Some 20 families have been
forced to relocate to Saleav village, and though many of them believe in
black magic, they say they have been falsely accused and do not want
their children to grow up with the stigma of coming from the sorcerer
village.
About five years ago,
44-year-old Ra Chorm Veuch fled nearby Khoun village, fearing for her
life after some villagers got sick then claimed she had subsequently
appeared in their dreams. Her fate was sealed with the accusation that
she had “red eyes”.
Now when she leaves Saleav
village to go somewhere such as the market in the provincial capital of
Banlung, her interactions with others are inevitably abrubt.
“When I ask something from
people who live near the market, they always give it to me, because
they’re afraid that if they did not give to me and I am angry, I will
perform magic on them,” she says.
Nearby residents confirm there
is a strong suspicion of those living in Saleav – and it’s not a
prejudice confined to the older population.
Fourteen-year-old Sok Tim says
he did not believe in sorcery until he went to visit his exiled
neighbours and contracted diarrhoea.
“Other people said that maybe a
sorcerer did it to me, and I had to buy a chicken to pray for the
sorcerer, and when I did it in the evening, the next day when I woke up,
I was better,” he said.
Others warn if you aggravate the sorcerers in Saleav village, you will find yourself vomiting until you die.
Jan Ovesen, an associate
professor at Uppsala University in Sweden, has been completing a
research project on poverty, sorcery and social capital in Cambodia with
cultural anthropologist Ing-Britt Trankell since 2008.
He says sorcery needs to be understood not as a natural fact of life but a symbolic practice triggered by social contexts.
“Anthropologists have long
recognised that sorcery accusations, worldwide, are basically a
mechanism for social exclusion, triggered by envy, jealousy, fear,
revenge or political power aspirations, or some combination of these,”
he says.
The fact that beliefs that
centre on practices such as casting spells, invoking spirits, chanting
mantras, fashioning amulets and writing magic signs are found around the
world makes them no more credible but attests to their deep-seated
nature in human psychology, he says.
Ma Vichet, police chief of
Ratanakkiri’s O’Yadav district, says his department’s research has
revealed that most common source of accusation – sickness – comes from
poor sanitation, drinking water that had not boiled and people not
washing their hands.
But he still challenged villages
to deploy their own traditional test – a “damned if you do, damned if
you don’t” ritual reminiscent of medieval European witch hunts in which
the accuser and accused must dip their finger in molten lead and sustain
no burns to prove innocence.
“But they could not do, so
recently, there have not been as many cases as there were in the past,”
he said, adding that no one particularly wants to get their fingers
burned.
Another test they employ gives
the accused a fighting chance – it tasks the alleged sorcerer to pinch
the tips of an egg as hard as they can, and if it breaks, a feat of
strength generally accepted to be beyond the limits of human strength,
they will be found guilty.
Ramas Khvan, who was forced to
move to Saleav village in 1996, said he passed both these test and
another one in which the first person to run out of breath with their
head under water was deemed guilty.
But he said it did not matter, because villages decided he had simply invoked magic to cheat.
“They still didn’t believe, so I had to ask the commune chief to live in that place that they opened for sorcerers,” he said.
He had good reason to move.
In 2001, three family members in
Ratanakkiri, including a 7-year-old girl, were shackled and then
drowned after being accused of sorcery, Pen Bonnar, provincial
co-ordinator of the rights group Adhoc, says.
“What they did that time was
very cruel, and the two people who were arrested by the court were only
sentenced to six months,” he says.
His organisation has received 10
complaints since 2003 from villagers who received death threats after
being accused of sorcery in Ratanakkiri, he adds.
The threats and violence are not just confined to the far northeast.
Other grizzly cases have
included the fatal triple-stabbing of a man known only as Len in Kampong
Thom province in 2001; the 2011 murder of Sieng Soeun, whose throat was
slit in Kampong Speu province; and the hacking death of Mul Sophal, who
was descended upon by axe-wielding villagers in the same province.
There are many more cases, and
while belief in black magic is strongest among the heavily animistic
indigenous ethnic minorities in Cambodia, the fear of ghosts and
sorcerers has also strongly permeated into mainstream Buddhist culture.
Yet while Theravada Buddhism has
developed as a hybridized, polytheistic religion incorporating Hindu
gods and animistic beliefs, notions of black magic and sorcery have not
gone unchallenged.
Ancient Cambodian fables from a
collection known as the Gatiloke that were spread for centuries only by
word of mouth, employ narratives in which magic is used to trick people
out of their possessions or discriminate against them.
In The Story of Bhikkhu Sok, an
ethnic Phnong villager travels down from the mountains to Sen Monorom in
Mondulkiri province during a great famine to try and find food amongst
the lowland strangers. When he returns, new cooking skills he has
learned raise the suspicions of villagers, who later hack him and all
but one of his family members to death with razors after a neighbour
falls ill and they believe it is because the returnee was practising
black magic.
The child who escapes eventually
makes it to Kratie province, where he is adopted and successfully
becomes a monk – a narrative that undermines both the Phnong belief in
sorcery and the prejudices of lowland Khmers to indigenous minorities.
In Ratanakkiri, the occult
beliefs are also under attack from another religious source, Christian
proselytising, which has come to the rescue of 51-year-old Rocham Char,
an accused sorcerer in O’Yadav district Somkul village who was
threatened with murder and exile last year.
The now mostly Christian
villagers say they have abandoned their suspicions of him and are happy
for him to stay, although his accuser, Kloeun Nhieu, still maintains he
is a black magic practitioner.
Back in Saleav village,
24-year-old Lam Ba Kamphoeun maintains a strong belief in the power of
black magic but says the craft is inherited through lines of lineage
that do not extend beyond a few old people in the community.
He says it is unfair that young
people there are discriminated against, despite the fact that they could
not become sorcerers even if they wanted to.
“For us, as the young generation, we do not follow the sorcerer’s anymore. We don’t want to be sorcerers,” he says.
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