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| Pah Eang, 22 (left), and Nith Pov, 29 (right), sit underneath their new house, which has become a gathering place for the remaining family members of two accused “sorcerers” who were killed in this remote village six months ago. (Terry McCoy/GlobalPost) |
An average of three Khmer are accused of sorcery and killed every year.
March 29, 2011
Terry McCoy
Global Post
BOMNOK, Cambodia — In the midday swelter of early hot season, Pah Eang shivered and walked into a mountainous forest she’d once visited every day. She said she was scared. She hadn’t been to this place, open and silent, in five months. Not since the killings and whispers of magic.
Pulling at her red sweatshirt, Pah dissolved into the Cardamom Mountains that ripple through western Cambodia, and began her search for a place that keeps this 22-year-old awake at night and plagues what’s left of her family. Her path wound deeper until everything was quiet and the only mark of humanity was a bamboo-thatched hut in a clearing so idyllic the savagery of what had occurred there was difficult to imagine.
Last September, Pah’s father and younger brother were killed around 1 a.m. in this hut. The father, Pheng Pah, 46, was stabbed to death while his son, Pah Broh, 15, had his throat slit. When the bodies were discovered the next morning, some villagers in this deeply rural community 25 miles from a paved road rejoiced. They said the father and son were “sorcerers” and had deserved to die.
The killings reflect a disturbing trend in rural Cambodia, where magic is a very real thing and the only way to silence it is through violence, and sometimes, death. An average of three Khmer are accused of sorcery and killed every year, and such witch hunts illustrate the growing chasm between increasingly urban cities and countryside mired in poverty, while showing how deep belief in the occult runs in this culture.
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