That old black magic (elections in Cambodia)

[Jagat 1]

<h2>That old black magic</h2>

 

Violence is never far from the surface in Cambodia. With the recent election only days away, a triple homicide is assumed to be political carnage, the last thing this troubled nation needs. But, as Canadian writer CHRIS TENOVE learns when he finally reaches the scene of the crime, the real motive for the killings may be something ancient and much more sinister

 

By CHRIS TENOVE

Saturday, August 9, 2003 - Globe&Mail

 

POUL COMMUNE, CAMBODIA -- This is something you can't do in Canada. You can't drop by the jail and say, "I'd like to talk to the famous brothers, the ones you recently arrested for killing their neighbours," and expect that the prison warden will round them up for you. But things work differently in Cambodia.

 

The warden finds an abandoned room, and we sit behind a wooden table with scraps of plastic tablecloth stapled to it. Through a tiny window, I can hear the shouts of inmates as they chase an old soccer ball through the puddle-strewn courtyard inside.

 

Meas Nhoeun, Meas Sreing and Meas Nhong -- the brothers -- are accused of murdering three neighbours in Poul commune, a tiny farming community several hours north of Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. The killings were splashed across the news because they happened five days before the country's national election and were said to be politically motivated. But a visit to their hardscrabble village has revealed a much stranger possible motive, and I want to hear what the men themselves have to say.

 

The warden comes in for a last look at the room and notices something on a dusty staircase in the corner. He smiles sheepishly. Someone has left a machete and an axe -- just what the brothers allegedly used to butcher their neighbours. The warden chuckles a little uncomfortably. He takes the weapons out, then returns with the three men.

 

They are extremely short. The tallest is maybe 5-foot-2. There are no shackles, no maniac glint in the eyes, just three quiet, almost impish men with a familial likeness in their flat noses and wavy hair.

 

I try to think of something innocuous to break the tension, but instead blurt out: "I read in the newspaper that you had an argument about the elections."

 

Cambodia and its people are full of surprises. I know this. And yet I am caught off guard when the brothers reply by talking about the deadly threat posed by magical cows.

 

"Be honest with me," I insist through a translator. "Why did you really do it?"

 

A day earlier, on Friday, July 25, the capital city was gripped by the last, feverish political campaigning before Sunday's national election. At Phnom pagoda -- the city's birthplace -- thousands of supporters of the ruling Cambodian People's Party gathered in their white shirts and ball caps. Even the tourist elephant twitched its ears along with the dance music on stage, while the women happily trilled out "rrrrrrrr-eeeahhh" in impending triumph.

 

Prime Minister Hun Sen decided not to campaign for this election -- the wily, one-eyed politician knows that he is a lodestone for both adulation and resentment. Instead, the final rally was headlined by party chairman Chea Sim. When he arrived, a corridor of hundreds of seething white shirts snaked all the way from his SUV to the stage. The crowd, intoxicated by their solidarity, chanted, "Chnas! Chnas! Chnas!" (Win! Win! Win!)

 

This campaign was less bloody than those in the past. But a gruesome homicide had made the front pages of Phnom Penh's newspapers. According to The Cambodia Daily, three CPP supporters in the countryside had hacked up three members of the royalist opposition FUNCINPEC party (formally known as the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Co-operative Cambodia).

 

This was the kind of story everyone had been expecting. Five years ago, the previous National Assembly election left dozens of corpses in its wake, when the Prime Minister fought the opposition at the polls and in the streets to maintain control of the country. This time, observers from around the world arrived to monitor the campaign.

 

When U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was in town for a summit meeting of Southeast Asian nations in June, he made a point of warning the government to "do everything possible to ensure that the upcoming elections" are free and fair. The triple killing was exactly the kind of violence people worried about.

 

Cambodians are wondrously gentle and loath to argue. In three visits here, including lengthy research for a master's thesis, the most violent tendency I have come across is a swift, hard slap on the back the men tend to deliver after making, in their opinion, a particularly good joke.

 

But there is another side to Cambodia, of course. Tourists who arrive at Phnom Penh are immediately presented with three options: They can visit a high school where tens of thousands of Cambodians were tortured by the Khmer Rouge, a killing field with a giant glass tower full of human bones, or a firing range where a small fee allows you to blast away with guns and rocket launchers.

 

Flip to the "Police Blotter" section of the local newspapers, and you can read about horrific crimes seemingly motivated by the pettiest of causes. In bookstores and street-side stalls, you can buy biographies of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge regime, which caused the deaths of 1.7 million people in the late 1970s.

 

Violence and death haunt the country. Every time I come here, I can't help but wonder why these seemingly gentle people have a tendency, perhaps more than any others in Asia, to kill each other.

 

The shocking triple homicide in Poul commune seemed like a good place to look for answers.

 

On the day before the vote, all political campaigning is prohibited, a wise cooling-off period, so I seize the opportunity to head north to Poul. Before leaving, I run a bizarre detail buried in one of the news reports past an Australian-Cambodian acquaintance: that the brothers were retaliating against black magic. My friend is skeptical. "Everyone knows what that means. It means the police don't want to talk about politics. . . . A lot of things get blamed on black magic near election time."

 

Licadho, a Cambodian human-rights organization, has investigated several cases in which a crime with apparent political motivations was attributed to magic. "It's true that Cambodians are superstitious," Licadho director Naly Pilorge says, "but courts and politicians tend to emphasize personal disputes, and they often mention magic. Officials use this as an excuse to avoid all political implications."

 

And sure enough, what is one of the first things police commissioner Touch Naroth tells me when I arrive in the capital of Kompong Chhnang province? "No politics!" He is emphatic that, when arrested, the suspects said the killings were revenge against black magic.

 

Colonel Naroth wears a thick gold chain and a huge glittering ring, and I can't help but think that the CPP has set him up nicely. Just then, he stops to take a call and shares a chuckle with fellow officers. A FUNCINPEC supporter has dressed a dog in a CPP shirt, a calculated insult. An officer is dispatched to deal with it. Another drives us to the jetty in a plush Mitsubishi SUV, with soft leather seats and syrupy love songs on the high-end stereo. Throughout the drive, the officer's pistol bounces against the headrest behind me.

 

To reach Poul, we must hire a boat and navigate through several braids of the immense Tonle Sap River. The boat soon slips through a curtain of reeds, and the modest urbanization of the Kompong Chhnang capital is left behind. It is quiet, the river shimmers with heat. We drift past an old fisherman with skin like dried leather; he hunches over the wooden prow of his boat, staring into the milky brown water and slowly lowering his line.

 

The fens around us are flat, but in the distance to the northeast there are a few limestone mountains. One is shaped like a sleeping woman -- according to myth, this is the daughter of a giantess. She fell in love with a normal man, but her mother was furious and threatened to devour him. (Apparently, fear of mothers-in-law is cross-cultural.) The man escaped across the Tonle Sap and the daughter, distraught, committed suicide. My boat takes me from the human side of the river to the land of the giantess.

 

After half an hour, the boat docks at a scabrous little fishing village whose buildings of corroded metal have turned a weather-beaten brown, except for a bright blue CPP sign.

 

Nintendo hasn't reached here yet, so kids have to invent their own fun. Several have gathered in the hot morning sun to play a game that involves thumping and shrieking through a pile of trash. Several minutes later, a boy holds the limp body of a mouse by its tail, a proud look on his face.

 

From here, it is a half-hour trip inland on the back of a motorcycle to get to Poul commune and the victims' house. Along the road, the rice fields are studded with solitary sugar palms and the occasional bony white cow, chewing thoughtfully, or grey water buffalo waiting for its next burden. The moto winds past tiny wood huts with stilts and thatched roofs. Every field is submerged in brownish water, the farmers shin-deep and bent over to harvest and replant by hand.

 

From time to time, we pass freshly painted and incongruously large signs for political parties. They seem foreign, token references to democracy in a landscape apparently untouched by the 20th century, let alone the 21st.

 

This is what Cambodia looks like after 10 years of nation building. When the United Nations touched down like a hurricane in 1993, its goal was to transform a country with a raging civil war and an inefficient Communist government into a functioning democracy. The job was made more difficult by the fact that the Khmer Rouge killing machine struck with particular ferocity at civil servants, business people, lawyers, journalists, doctors and all the intellectual capital most needed to build a working state.

 

The UN and the international aid community have brought billions of dollars and thousands of experts to Cambodia, and they have learned to congratulate themselves for small improvements.

 

But there is also stagnation and backsliding. In the past 10 years, the mortality rate for children under 5 has actually climbed from 115 per 1,000 births to 135, and the average annual income is about $270 (U.S.), less than 75 cents a day. Poverty, corruption, disease and ignorance still have a stranglehold on the country.

 

Hun Sen wins elections because of places like Poul. Here they know him as the son of impoverished farmers who began his career with the Khmer Rouge, lost an eye fighting for Phnom Penh and then escaped down the Mekong River to Vietnam. He returned several years later when the Vietnamese army crushed the Khmer Rouge and installed a sympathetic Communist government. In 1985, at just 33, he became the country's leader.

 

Before this year's campaign, the Prime Minister had weathered two elections. In 1993, he lost a UN-supervised vote, but then orchestrated countrywide unrest until he was named co-prime minister. In 1997, he seized sole power in a coup, consolidated his control, and then allowed another election in 1998, which the CPP won.

 

Human-rights groups have accused all Cambodian parties of misdeeds, but when it comes to vote-buying, loans that are contingent on particular votes, and threats of violence and reprisal, the CPP is in a league of its own.

 

Poul is not so much a village as a few homes scattered along a stretch of road. We stop at one little cluster of houses. The homicide victims lived in a two-room hut whose interior walls have been stripped of wood to build the three coffins. And right beside it, separated by a dusty cow path and a barbed wire fence, is the house of the accused brothers.

 

The region's police chief, Meas Sok Tim, was the first officer on the scene three days earlier, and he sits us down to explain what he found. Upstairs in the two-room hut were the bodies of Ray Kuch, 84, and his daughter-in-law, Krim Yan, 51. They had been dead since 9:30 the night before. Neighbours on either side apparently didn't hear a thing.

 

The killers then waited below, between the stilts of the house, for Ray Kuch's son to return home. Ray Mong Ly was at a FUNCINPEC meeting, and returned around 10 o'clock. It was his screams that alerted distant villagers; strangely, the immediate neighbours still heard nothing.

 

"It was a very dark night," the police chief explains, rather elliptically. As he speaks, we all flinch periodically -- not from disgust, but from the yellow, apple-sized fruits falling from above. The slight afternoon breeze is coaxing them loose. There is a rattle of leaves, we shield our heads, and the fruit hits the ground with a wet thud. It's incredibly hot, but the only other shade is inside the home of the recently deceased, which we have tacitly agreed to avoid. So we cower as the fruit gathers around us, bruised and smelling sweetly.

 

Ray Mong Ly screamed because he was set upon with machete and axe. He tried to escape, but got no farther than the roadside ditch. Borith, my translator, is interested in the exact details of each killing. He and the chief move to the ditch, where the policeman plays the role of the killer. They are joined by Ray Mong Ly's daughter, who has wandered up the road from her home. She watches as Borith, playing her father, holds up an arm and pretends to fend off the blows of a machete. The chief hacks at the arm, and then mimes a vicious slash across the throat. He continues to swing as Borith falls to one knee. The young woman stands still, watching the whole re-enactment, her expression rigidly impassive except for a slight movement at her throat as she swallows, again and again.

 

Upon arriving, Chief Sok Tim sealed off the area and looked for clues in the morning light. He found blood on the barbed-wire fence between the two houses, and then more blood on leaves in a grove of bamboo behind the neighbours' home. When he dug down among the roots of the bamboo, he found an axe and two long knives, suitably blood-smeared. The three brothers were arrested immediately.

 

The first reporters on the scene arrived before the bodies were removed. They described fingers hacked off hands, throats and mouths cut wide open, and abdomens split with insides spilling out. It was hard to believe this was motivated by mere politics, one reporter told me. The attack seemed too frenzied, too vicious.

 

I ask Ray Mong Ly's daughter if there was a grudge between the two families. "We never had any problems with them," she replies. "Sometimes my grandfather would use his traditional medicine to help cure sick children in the neighbour's family."

 

As we walk over to the brothers' house, Chief Sok Tim shows me the blood stains on the wire fence. The look on his face says: "These boys are no criminal geniuses." Then he coaxes an old man, the father of the three brothers, out of the house. He is unclothed, except for a red-checked loincloth and a single sandal. I ask him to sit beside me on a plastic chair to chat, but he refuses. "I can't use it," he says. "After my wife died 10 days ago, I feel like I am going crazy." Instead, he squats in the dirt.

 

The father claims to have no ill will for the family next door. He also denies that he or his sons were involved in politics. In fact, on a wall in his house, Borith spots a mounted photograph of Prince Ranariddh, leader of FUNCINPEC; it was the victims who were supposed to be supporters of this party. If not politics, I ask the old man, what was the reason?

 

He says that several months ago his wife's belly became swollen, and she grew very sick. A year earlier, his brother had the same symptoms and died. A medical doctor said the wife would do the same. A traditional Khmer doctor was called, gave her some medicine and next morning checked her feces. "There was buffalo skin there," the father says. "There was hair in it. That meant she was being killed by magic."

 

The old man's sentences gush out, stop and start again, proceeding almost randomly. Somehow, he says, the sons became convinced that the next-door neighbours were responsible. The day their mother died, they began to plot revenge. On the evening of the killing, they asked another neighbour to collect extra palm juice for them, saying they needed extra energy because they had some killing to do.

 

The father's comments are somewhat disjointed, and I'm not sure whether they should be fully believed. But while he talks, I am struck by the fact that I can hear the police deputy and a local man speaking under the victims' home next door. For decades, these two families would have heard each other's conversations. How can you spend your life next door to people, and then kill them so horrifically over a lousy election?

 

The old man doesn't seem to be angry, and he neither endorses nor denounces his sons. He is more concerned with finding a way to feed himself, now that his family is dead or behind bars. "God will decide their punishment," he says. "But it is a sin for Cambodia that this has happened."

 

Then he repeats this last remark. It's as if his sons aren't individually responsible, as if Cambodia is a single entity, and the killings somehow part of the burden of sin the whole country must bear.

 

Maybe this is how you come to think of violence when an entire generation -- those who lived through "Pol Pot time" -- were either victim or aggressor, and often both. Perhaps that is how Ray Mong Ly's daughter, having watching the re-enactment of her father's death, was able to walk away without crying.

 

Or maybe the old man was just making excuses for his kids.

 

The three impish brothers sit across the table from me, patiently answering questions. Their chins are just a few inches above the table, so it is like I am speaking with three disembodied heads.

 

By now I don't really believe the killings were political, but I ask about the newspaper allegations anyway. They don't so much deny the accusation as completely misunderstand it.

 

Meas Nhoeun, the head in the middle, with the missing bottom teeth, does the talking. At 39, he's oldest. "We don't know anything about politics," he says, and soon he is repeating the story of the buffalo skin in the feces.

 

When the brothers paid for another visit by the traditional doctor, he says, they were told that their mother would die, but also that he would find the source of the sickness.

 

Doctor and family began to pray -- the brothers imitate this, all three clenching their fists in front of them and shutting their eyes -- until finally an image appeared in the doctor's mind. "It is one of your neighbours," he said, "but I don't know which one."

 

Once the mother had died, Meas Nhoeun became very frightened. He started to get a sore stomach at night and was sure that the neighbour was now cursing him. Not only that, he claimed the old man next door, Ray Mong Kuch, had poured his magical powers into a cow shaped out of wet earth. If you touched it, your arm would swell and start to burn.

 

"Did you say a 'magic cow?' " I ask my translator.

 

The brothers saw the cow in the neighbour's house, Meas Nhoeun says, but it must have been moved before the police could find it.

 

"But why would you touch a magic cow?" I ask.

 

This question is unanswered, so I try another. "Why, if you thought your neighbour was cursing you, didn't you just move? Why did you kill all of them?"

 

The older brother explains that they were too poor to move anywhere else, and I still can't grasp the poverty of imagination this answer implies. No denial, no cat-and-mouse game between accuser and accused, just a simple confession: We did it because we were scared of getting sick.

 

It's the same answer they later give to the investigating judge, who decides to charge all three with premeditated murder.

 

To confirm a suspicion, I ask if any of them can read. No, they say, although the youngest brother, now 28, did finish the first grade.

 

It starts to rain outside. The warden, bored, wanders off and leaves Borith and me alone with the brothers. They sit and stare at us. It would be too much to say that their eyes were filled with unspoken pain, that regret had begun to tear them up inside, but I think I see a hint of it.

 

"Do you feel bad for what you did?" I ask, feeling like an American TV journalist.

 

"I am worried about my wife," Meas Nhoeun responds. "Now she is pregnant, and we have two small children."

 

"Be honest with me," I respond. "Why did you really do it?"

 

They talk to each other, and Borith summarizes. "They thought the old man next door was magic."

 

The warden comes and takes the brothers away. Once we are alone, Borith informs me that "there are many people like this in Cambodia who have no know-

 

ledge. They don't know what is right and wrong. If they get angry, they take action. That is it. This is not politics, it is only a problem of over-belief."

 

Now, two weeks after the election, there is still uncertainty about who will run the country. The CPP took about 50 per cent of the total vote, but to rule, the constitution requires a two-thirds majority, so the party needs a coalition partner. But the opposition parties are stonewalling, saying they won't co-operate unless Hun Sen quits.

 

Thus far, the Prime Minister's responses have been bellicose. He has outfoxed and outmuscled rivals before, and feels he can do it again. He's probably right.

 

In Kompong Chhnang, the brothers are awaiting their day in court. A guilty verdict could put them in prison for 15 years. Opposition parties still have their doubts, so Licadho continues to investigate the case for political overtones, but has yet to find any.

 

If not politics, what is to blame? I once drove past two tourists fighting on the shore of the Mekong River. They threw a few slow roundhouses at each other and then fell into a beery clinch. "I don't understand how foreigners fight like this, and the next morning they are friends," my moto driver said. "The Khmer people, when we fight, it's serious. If two people fight, the next morning one is dead."

 

This anecdote doesn't explain what happened in Poul, but Cambodians do seem to play without a net. When it begins, violence runs its bloody course.

 

Then again, a totally different argument could be made: that Cambodians are too trusting, not too violent. The brothers and their father never doubted the traditional doctor and his buffalo-skin explanation (no one has questioned the man whose diagnosis was so fatal. "We don't have time for that," the police say). And documents taken from the Khmer Rouge suggest that their murderous cadres were motivated by a desire to please their leaders as much as by ideology.

 

It's probably a mistake for a visitor to try to decipher a nation's character, but there is something provocative and baffling about what takes place in Cambodia. Asking "why did this happen?" rarely yields much of an answer.

 

But as if to balance the acts of unimaginable violence, there are moments of complete enchantment. That day in Kompong Chhnang, as we drove away from the jail, I felt as though I had slipped into another realm, where pungent fruit falls from the sky, and buffalo skin and magic cows are reason enough to slice up the neighbours.

 

I watched a white duck hop up the rungs of a ladder and into a house as though he owned it. My moto driver, a young man from the shabby fishing village, swerved through potholes and then suddenly reached into the wind and grabbed a dragonfly. He trapped it within his fingers for a few seconds and held it to my face, close enough to see the translucent wings and green eyes, then threw it into the air. We passed a motorcycle carrying an enormous megaphone blaring its reminder to participate in the great democratic act, the next day's elections.

 

Any of these could have been good or bad omens. Either way, there is magic in this country.

 

Chris Tenove is a Vancouver writer who often visits Southeast Asia.