Fear of black magic fuels witch-hunt in Cambodia

Banlung, Cambodia, Aug 17 (EFE). —  When Ket Thom village chief’s daughter was pregnant, she dreamt of the village sorcerer, an ill omen, which the villagers believe resulted in the deaths of the baby and the mother during childbirth, something that had happened to other pregnant women too.

“Some villagers saw the (sorcerer’s) spirit and sometimes only his headless body, and after his visits, the pregnant girl died,” Roctom Pean, father of the girl and 73yearold leader of the Jarai community, explained to EFE.

The village is located near Banlung, capital of the northeastern Ratanakiri province, where most belong to ethnic minorities and are known to practice Animism, which is widespread in the country along with Buddhism.

Convinced the man was a “Kru thmup” or a master of black magic, the villagers decided to expel him from the village, a benign measure given in many cases those suspected of witchcraft are murdered.

“People are very scared. We are afraid because we cannot touch him, and some of us cannot see him. He is not like a buffalo or a pig that we can see and kill when they attack. But with someone like him, when he attacks we don’t see him,” Roctom Pean says.

The man accused of witchcraft and his family now lives in a plantation, a few kilometers from the village, with the stigma that “someday his children will inherit their father’s legacy,” he adds.

Sorcerers who place pins in their enemies’ stomachs, wizards whose heads separate from their bodies and roam about at night, and spirits who protect or torment, are just some examples of the muchfeared supernatural world of Cambodia, a country, where this year, there have been many cases of cold blooded murders, related to witchcraft, especially in rural areas of provinces such as Moldukiri and Kompong Speu.

Last year, a mob stoned and tortured a man to death for eight hours in Takeo province, on suspicions of him being a sorcerer.

“Anthropologists have long recognized 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,” Jan Ovesen, an anthropologist who specializes in Cambodia, told Phnom Penh Post.

“Some (witch) doctors are capable of sending evil spirits inside someone, to make them go mad or things like that. They can make a lot of money that way, but it causes problems in the future, and it does not interest me,” says Khieng Ay of the Tampuan community, preparing his face.

Ay lives in a solitary hut amid cashew, mango and tobacco plantations, a few kilometers from Banlung, with his wife, dogs, cats and chicken and is known to use magic to cure diseases and protect people from evil spirits, and has several visitors seeking his services.

“If you learn this (practice), you have to respect the limits,” he says as he fastens a candle, which he puts inside his mouth and places an egg, signaling he can connect with spirits.

His son, Shiphay, has no intention of carrying on with the family tradition, a sign of esoteric traditions disappearing with the advent of development in the country, as Ryun Patterson explained in his book on black magic in Cambodia.

However, in Ratanakiri, which has up to nine different indigenous groups, remote hilltop settlements, nomadic nature of many groups and cultural differences have checked much the impact of external influences.

According to a report by Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact, 2005, the coexistence with spirits still plays a determining role in the lives of the people, and they can decide to move to another region if the spirits of nature do not want to live with them.