Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company
The Boston Globe
September 9, 2001, Sunday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A10
LENGTH: 978 words
HEADLINE: IN CAMBODIA, SLAYINGS BEG FOR A MOTIVE
BYLINE: By Richard Sine, Globe Correspondent
BODY:
BASET COMMUNE, Cambodia - Taking shelter under the stilts of a thatch-roofed shack, as a monsoon rain pelted the village and the rice paddies, Prom Nat explained why the sorcerer a few doors away had deserved to die.
"Where he touched, the person would become sick, and then he'd die," she said. "If he touched the back, the back would ache. If he touched the stomach, the stomach would bloat. He'd make it look like he was just being playful. Maybe he had the magic because he was raising ghosts."
Asked whether the "sorcerer" might in fact have been killed because he had begun campaigning for a party opposing the government, Prom Nat and the villagers who had gathered around her shook their heads in vehement disagreement. And they demanded the release of two men who have confessed to the killing.
"They need to get back to farming," said a villager, Oun Sakhorn. "Right now, we have to work the farm for them."
Uch Horn, 52, was killed on June 30 in Kompong Speu province. He was the first of three opposition candidates to have been shot within a month. A fourth was killed on Aug. 23, also by people who said he was a sorcerer, police said. A fifth opposition candidate was reported killed 10 days ago in a remote province.
No candidate from the ruling Cambodian People's Party has been attacked.
The shootings of opposition candidates are dramatic examples, election monitors say, of a pattern of campaign-related intimidation in communes throughout Cambodia. Local elections are scheduled for February.
Such violence is nothing new in Cambodia. By the end of the 1998 national elections, the United Nations was investigating 32 alleged political killings. Then, as now, local authorities - who are usually controlled by the ruling party - routinely attribute the slayings to vendettas or accusations of sorcery, rather than politics. Human rights groups and opposition leaders, just as routinely, label them political hits.
The Uch Horn case suggests that the truth may sometimes lie in between. Few here are arguing that Prime Minister Hun Sen or his deputies are orchestrating the killings from the capital, Phnom Penh. But in a familiar pattern for Cambodia, leaders seem loath to intercede when ignorance, violence, and vigilantism play into their hands.
Uch Horn had been haunted by rumors that he dabbled in sorcery for months before he joined the Sam Rainsy Party, led by a prominent opposition activist. Even some of his supporters concede that he may have helped to start the rumors. Upset last year that neighbors were pilfering his chickens and letting their cows feed on his mango trees, he sought to spook intruders by sprinkling grave dirt around the farm, hoisting a ghost flag over his fields, and poisoning the trees, said a cousin and fellow opposition activist, Mao Horm. Then he rented a microphone to tell people to stay away, saying he had an evil farm, Mao Horm said.
But the violence began only after Uch Horn joined the Sam Rainsy Party in April and began traveling through the commune to recruit members. A hut on his farm was burned, and a man wielding a bamboo stick chased him. He was killed 10 days after posting a prominent political sign outside his home, allegedly by a man who had lost two relatives to Uch Horn's witchcraft.
Within days of their arrest, the suspect and his alleged accomplice had confessed on television. But dozens, perhaps hundreds, of villagers signed petitions and held protests outside the provincial police headquarters demanding their release.
Human rights investigators in Phnom Penh say the suspects had been encouraged, maybe even hired, by commune or village authorities.
Some say this could be the most violent election season yet because the nation's 1,621 commune chiefs - many of whom have held their Cambodian People's Party positions since the fall of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in 1979 - have long viewed their communities as fiefdoms.
"They are the kings in these areas," said Kek Galabru, who heads a human rights group and an election education organization in the capital. "They have the highest political, financial, and social standing. They have the power to put someone in jail.
"People must be very courageous to join other parties," she added. "They have to live with the chiefs and face them every day. The chiefs can threaten to confiscate their land."
Galabru and others say the violence will not end until top government officials prosecute local leaders and publicly acknowledge the role of political motives. Instead, the officials tend to blame the violence on the climate of lawlessness, which they themselves are often accused of perpetuating.
"You know very well you have violence every day," a government spokesman, Khieu Kanharith, said after a recent report of election violence. "But because the election is near, some political parties try to politicize the situation."
Newspapers are well-stocked with lurid tales of vengeance killings, honor killings, and the occasional sorcerer killing. Often the killers' motives are rooted in traditional Cambodian beliefs. But human rights groups here say people would not resort to vigilantism so frequently if they could trust the judicial system.
Whatever the motive, the killings of political candidates have sent a powerful message to opposition activists.
In the adjacent province, police have blamed anger over a love affair for the killing of Meas Soy, a Funcinpec party candidate shot to death July 17 as he walked to dinner with five other activists. He had been organizing a party meeting for the next day.
A fellow Funcinpec activist, Un Soeun, who heard the gunfire from his house nearby, said the slaying had put an end to campaign activity in the commune. "I'm still worried about my security, and I want to give up," he said. "My friend was killed so easily."
LOAD-DATE: September 10, 2001