Less Than Human
Torture in Cambodia
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A LICADHO
Project Against Torture
report
by
Jason Barber
June 2000 |
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Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (LICADHO)
Mailing Address: PO Box 499 ● Office Address: 103, Street 97, Phnom Penh,
Cambodia
Fax/Tel: 855-23-360-965 (main office) 855-23-211-391 (Project Against
Torture) ● email: Licadho@camnet.com.kh |
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Clarifications
In this report:
-
All costs quoted in dollars ($) refer to
United States’ dollars; $1 = 3,800 Cambodian riels at time of writing
-
Unless otherwise footnoted, all case examples
of torture (presented in italics or in boxes) are based on victim testimonies
or other information collected by Licadho
-
Names of victims of torture are excluded or
changed, except for cases in which the victim died or cases in which the
victim’s identity has been previously well-publicized
FOREWORD
by David Chandler
I have been asked to add a few
words to this probing and often terrifying study, which examines the
phenomenon of torture and places it in a Cambodian context. Nothing I can say
will increase its value, and I urge anyone reading these words to read on, up
to the end, where some appalling case studies are documented in an appendix.
Over the last few years, I have
thought a good deal about torture in Cambodia. This is because my book,
Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison, published
in 1999, deals with the systematic mistreatment of over 15,000 men, women and
children who were held in this Khmer Rouge anteroom to death. They were
accused of counter-revolutionary crimes and interrogated at length. Extremely
brutal torture formed a key component of those interrogations.
I devoted a chapter in my book to
torture. I placed the practice in a historical context both globally and in
the framework of Cambodian history. I also examined torture in other times and
places, and absorbed as much theoretical writing as I could find, including
the works of Jean Amery, Michael Foucault, Edward Peters and Elaine Scarry,
among others. I came away feeling depleted and depressed, but with a faint
understanding of what the prisoners at S-21, and the victims described in the
pages that follow, had gone through.
I write that torture in Cambodia
did not start with the Khmer Rouge. The current study, Less Than Human,
shows that the practice diminished, but did not end, after the Khmer Rouge
fell from power. It documents torture in the 1980s and 1990s and widens the
definition of torture for the 21st Century to include protracted
domestic violence and the appalling abuse of sex workers.
Nonetheless, as Less Than
Human also makes clear, the problem is deeper and wider than a single
country. There is no need to demonize Cambodia or its people for what is
documented here. Indeed, a positive aspect of this study is that it was
written openly and carefully inside Cambodia itself. In many countries of
Southeast Asia – to say nothing of the rest of the world – a study of this
kind would never be permitted. Admitting that a problem exists, and
publicizing examples, is better than denying that practices exist, or taking
refuge in “Asian values” which are synonymous with the values of those in
power, rather than those of the powerless victims of abuse.
When we look up from reading
Less Than Human we are left with some awful stories and with an enduring
problem, which is the tendency toward violence that is embedded in all of us.
Studies like this one show us that we are capable of torturing others on the
one hand and capable of seeking to stop the practice on the other. If the
study does anything to make us aware of these capabilities, and to reduce the
incidence of torture in Cambodia, it will have had an enormous, and merited,
success.
–
David Chandler
is Professor Emeritus of History at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
He is the author of A
History of Cambodia (1996), Facing the Cambodian Past: Selected Essays,
1971-1994 (1996), and Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol
Pot (1992).
PREFACE
Torture, as one of the gravest
crimes possible, is protected by a wall of silence and denial. Perpetrators do
not admit it, and may take measures to avoid leaving evidence such as scars,
or to dissuade victims from talking. Governments have reasons to downplay the
scope of torture. Victims are left traumatised, ashamed and frightened; they
are often reluctant to talk about their experience, or lay complaints against
their torturers. Breaking this silence, and giving victims a voice, is a
necessary first step towards reducing the use of torture. This report is an
attempt to begin to break this silence in Cambodia.
In a country and a world in which
so many people are torture survivors, it must be noted from the start that the
author of this report is not one of them. Any attempt to comprehend torture,
and the trauma it wreaks, by someone who has not experienced it will
inevitably be inadequate. The experiences, emotions and thoughts of torture
survivors can by no means be fully and properly described.
This report is an exploratory
study on torture in Cambodia: how, where and why it occurs and is perpetuated.
The research included a review of torture cases in Licadho investigation,
medical and prison research files. Additional information was gathered through
interviews with torture victims, and with others – government and law
enforcement officials, and the staff of non-government organizations (NGOs) –
with knowledge of torture.
This is not a statistical study.
It is impossible to accurately estimate
the amount of torture which occurs in Cambodia.
While this report includes some
statistics – particularly an analysis of information about torture contained
in Licadho’s prison research database (see below) – these figures should not
be considered comprehensive; they are indicative only.
The seeds of this report were
planted in 1992 with the creation of Licadho as an independent Cambodian human
rights organization, and the subsequent establishment of its provincial
network (it currently has offices in 15 provinces and municipalities). Part of
Licadho’s work is to receive complaints of alleged human rights violations,
investigate to try to establish their veracity, and, where appropriate, refer
cases to government, law enforcement or judicial bodies with a request for
prosecutions and other action to be taken according to the law. Torture is one
of the human rights violations that Licadho investigates.
In 1994, in response to chronic
health problems in prisons, Licadho established a small medical team to
provide treatment in several prisons. Torture victims were among those who
were treated. The medical project continues today, with its staff regularly
visiting 11 prisons around the country to treat inmates and guards. Meanwhile,
Licadho’s work in prisons expanded in 1997 with the creation of a prison
monitoring program. Researchers were employed in Phnom Penh and the provinces
to regularly visit prisons, monitor conditions, identify and work with the
authorities to try to resolve human rights problems, and interview pre-trial
and convicted prisoners. Currently, the program covers 20 of Cambodia’s 25
prisons. The medical and prison monitoring work is conducted with Ministry of
Interior approval. The extent of access to prisons, and the ability to
interview inmates in private (without prison staff in earshot), can vary from
prison to prison and time to time.
Inmate interviews by the prison
researchers cover a variety of questions, including the inmates’ personal
details, circumstances of their arrest and detention, whether they have legal
representation (for pre-trial prisoners), and food, health and other
conditions in prison. One of the questions asked is whether they were
mistreated while in the custody of the arresting authorities or while in
prison; if so, the inmates are asked to describe what happened to them.
Information from these interviews, including inmates’ statements about torture
or other mistreatment, is compiled in a central database.
This report – designed to bring
together the available information about torture held by Licadho, as well as
other organizations – was commissioned by Licadho as part of preparation for the
creation of the Licadho Project Against Torture. That project was established in
early 2000 to provide investigation, advocacy and rehabilitation services to
torture victims.
Torture is a disturbing and
depressing subject. One of the pitfalls of researching and writing about it,
into which the author of this report undoubtedly falls, is to neglect to see or
to show the many glimmers of light in what is otherwise a very bleak picture.
There are many Cambodians across all sectors of society who not only refuse to
close their eyes to torture, but who actively work against it: the dedicated and
talented staff of numerous NGOs who try to care for the victims and investigate
the perpetrators; the many so-called ordinary people in villages and towns
throughout Cambodia who, often at risk to their own safety, are willing to help
the victims and provide information to investigators; and those officials within
the government, police, military and courts who are prepared, each in his or her
own way, to assist the fight against torture. Finally, and most importantly,
there are the torture survivors who in picking up the pieces of their shattered
lives serve as inspiration to us all.
PART I: BACKGROUND
“Our children must learn never to treat human
beings like animals,
or lower than animals.”
– Vann Nath, survivor of the Khmer Rouge’s S-21
torture center.
Torture is one of the most grievous acts of
brutality practiced by mankind. While the word conjures up visions of the Dark
Ages or the Inquisition, torture is by no means relegated to the ancient past.
It is still commonly practiced in dozens of countries. Cambodia is one of them.
In police stations and prisons, on military bases, in brothels of sexual
slavery, and in private homes, torture is an everyday occurrence. People are
regularly and routinely beaten black and blue with punches and kicks. They are
hit with batons, iron bars, gun butts, pieces of wood or other objects,
subjected to electric shocks, whipped with wire, bamboo, rope or belts. Some are
nearly suffocated with pieces of plastic, or have their feet crushed under
wooden or iron bars. For many victims, torture includes rape or other sexual
abuse. Aside from physical torture, methods of psychological torture include
prolonged unlawful detention, verbal intimidation and death threats, mock
executions and physical assaults or threats against relatives of victims.
Torture has existed in Cambodia for centuries,
including during the famed Angkorian civilisation, but Cambodians need no
reminding that torture is not consigned to ancient history. The most notorious
practitioners of torture in modern Cambodia – the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge regime led
by Pol Pot – haunt the memories of many Cambodians today. Virtually the entire
population was tortured or subjected to other extreme traumas in one way or
another by the Khmer Rouge. Decades later, some of Pol Pot’s torture methods are
still in use. Indeed, throughout the ages of Cambodian history, the basic aims,
and many of the techniques, of torture have remained the same. Today’s
torturers, like those of the past, inflict physical and mental pain primarily
for the purposes of extracting confessions or other information, punishing
perceived wrongdoers (criminal or otherwise), or simply extorting money from
detainees or their families.
Torture is inflicted on men, women and children
in Cambodia, and many victims receive this treatment at the hands of those who
are supposed to protect society: police officers, soldiers, government
bodyguards and others in positions of authority. The single biggest reason why
torture is permitted to flourish in Cambodia into the 21st Century is
the lack of accountability before the law of criminals who hold power or
influence.
§
Police officers smash an iron bar over the
head of a 15-year-old boy, to get him to confess to stealing;
§
a woman is whipped with wire, beaten with
a stick and nearly suffocated with a plastic bag, at a police station;
§
prison guards beat a group of inmates with
the handle of a hoe until they are bloody and bruised, and then confine them in
a cell without adequate food, clothing, bedding or water for bathing for more
than two weeks;
§
a teenage girl, forced into prostitution,
is taken to a house owned by a military policeman or his family and beaten,
given electric shocks and injected with drugs to make her ‘agree’ to sleep with
customers;
§
a man is taken to a police station and
blindfolded, manacled and beaten by police who stomp on his face and try to
force him to eat a cigarette.
The above are just a handful of torture cases in
Cambodia in the past three years, and they are by no means the worst. The
victims have two things in common – they were tortured, and their torturers were
not brought to justice.
Torture is prohibited by international law,
through the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman
or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, to which Cambodia is a party. Cambodia’s
Constitution (1993) and criminal law (1992) also expressly forbid torture. Such
prohibitions mean little or nothing to a victim or a torturer. The government,
police and judiciary, by failing to meet their legal obligations to investigate
and prosecute torture cases, are accomplices to torture. In recent years, the
number of torture-related prosecutions of police or prison officers, for
example, can be counted on one hand. As for convictions and prison sentences,
there appears to have been only one: a military policeman who spent four months
in jail for beating a teenage boy who died in custody. When torture cases are
brought to their attention, government officials, judges, prosecutors, police
and military chiefs usually turn a blind eye, thereby explicitly permitting and
implicitly encouraging the use of torture.
As such, Cambodian torture victims are victimised
repeatedly – first by the torturers, and then by a government and judicial
system which at best ignores the victims and at worst condones the barbaric and
illegal treatment of them. They are often further victimized by the economic
consequences of torture, as their physical or psychological injuries make it
difficult for them to earn a living.
Torture is just one part of the pervasive
violence in current-day Cambodia, whose impacts stretch far beyond individual
victims. Countries that permit torture invariably permit other grave crimes and
human rights abuses. Police and other officials who commit torture invariably
commit other crimes. The practice of torture is directly counter to the rule of
law, and perpetuates Cambodia’s climate of impunity
for those who hold power and climate of fear for those who do not. Both
contribute to the cycle of violence and repression that has marred Cambodia for
decades, hindering the country’s social, economic and legal development.
While torture for political reasons has been
publicized in recent years (in the aftermath of the July 1997 violent
disintegration of the coalition government, for instance), the majority of
torture committed in Cambodia is for non-political reasons. The most
institutionalised use of torture occurs in police stations. To be arrested in
Cambodia is a dangerous affair; violence, or the threat of it, is routinely used
to secure confessions from criminal suspects. Approximately one in four prison
inmates in Cambodia was allegedly threatened, mistreated or tortured while in
police custody, according to Licadho research. Torture is a common criminal
investigation technique in Cambodia, tolerated by all levels of the police and
judiciary.
As well as in police stations, torture also
occurs in prisons, mainly as punishment for attempted escape or other discipline
breaches, and in military camps and other detention sites.
As for civilian places of torture, the pain and
suffering inflicted in brothels or private homes on victims of sexual
trafficking and domestic violence can be as horrific, if not more so, as the
torture committed in State custody. In both sexual trafficking and domestic
violence, the physical, sexual and psychological torture unleashed on women and
children is often extreme; the victims are kept in a virtually continual state
of misery and terror.
For the victims, the torture continues long after
the torturers cease their work. Torture takes an incalculable toll on victims,
extending far beyond black eyes, broken bones, bruises and scars. A myriad of
psychological problems – such as fear, anxiety, depression, nightmares – can
plague the lives and souls of survivors for years, if not forever. The
psychological distress of victims, and their loss of dignity and their loss of
faith in fellow humans, also defies adequate description or comprehension. But
it is widely accepted that the psychological consequences of torture are
immense, and often far more debilitating than the physical injuries. In
Cambodia, for example, no one doubts the ongoing psychological suffering caused
by the Khmer Rouge and years of war. Yet scant regard is paid to the
psychological pain inflicted on today’s torture victims, most of whom are left
to suffer alone and in silence.
Concerted action to combat torture is long
overdue. There is an urgent need for greater education of police, other
officials and the general populace, as well as prosecutions of offenders and
assistance to victims, and most importantly the establishment of practical
safeguards for people at most risk of being tortured. Such action is vital to
begin to heal the scars of the past, reduce the infliction of new wounds, and
break the cycle of violence and trauma in Cambodia.
CHAPTER 2. WHAT IS TORTURE?
“1.
to cause extreme physical pain to, esp. to
extract information, etc.; to torture prisoners. 2. to give mental
anguish to. 3. to twist into a grotesque form. 4. physical or
mental anguish. 5. the practice of torturing a person. 6. a cause
of mental agony.”
– ‘Torture’, as defined by the Collins Concise
Dictionary, third edition, 1992.
“For the purposes of this Convention, the term
‘torture’ means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or
mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining
from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act
he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or
intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on
discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at
the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or
other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or
suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.”
– The UN
Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or
Punishment.
“For the purpose of this
Declaration, torture is defined as the deliberate, systematic or wanton
infliction of physical or mental suffering by one or more persons acting alone
or on the orders of any authority, to force another person to yield information,
to make a confession, or for any other reason.”
– The World Medical Association’s Declaration of
Tokyo, 1975.
The Cambodian word for torture is tearunikam,
which is derived from the Sanskrit daruna, meaning “fierce” or “savage”
and the Pali kamm, meaning “action”. The expression twer bab,
which means to abuse, mistreat or inflict suffering, is also commonly used.
Torture is not defined in Cambodian domestic law
because, as in many countries, torture is not legislated as a ‘crime’ per se.
Perpetrators should be charged under the applicable criminal provisions for each
element of the torture – i.e. battery, illegal confinement, rape, manslaughter,
and so on.
The applicable legal definition of torture as a
concept, rather than the individual actions that may comprise an instance of
torture, comes from the UN Convention against Torture, which Cambodia ratified
in 1992. A broader definition, designed for medical doctors, is that of the
World Medical Association.
The key difference between the two definitions is
whether the participation or complicity of a State official is necessary for
physical or mental pain to be categorized as torture. The UN convention requires
the consent or acquiescence of a public official “or other person acting in an
official capacity”, while the World Medical Association refers only to “one or
more persons acting alone or on the orders of any authority”.
This report applies a broad definition of
torture. While it focuses primarily on torture by people in positions of State
power, it does not exclude torture committed by those who wield other forms of
authority or influence. In particular, this report asserts that sexual
trafficking and domestic violence, even if the perpetrators are civilians, can
in some cases be characterized as torture. This is in the belief that the key
element in torture is the infliction of serious physical and/or mental pain by
someone – whether it be a policeman, soldier, civil servant, brothel owner,
husband or other civilian – who holds (or believes they do) a position of
authority over the victim.
A broad definition of torture is particularly
relevant in Cambodia, where the lines are often blurred between crimes committed
by officials and those committed by civilians. In the sex trade, for example,
human traffickers and pimps often operate under the protection of members of the
State security forces. Children and women are abducted or sold, and detained,
raped and beaten into working as prostitutes. Whether or not State security
personnel actively participate in these crimes, the patronage they provide to
the perpetrators permits such violence to occur. Furthermore, the authorities’
general failure to enforce the law in certain areas – particularly human
trafficking and domestic violence – allows offenders to feel free to commit
crimes without fear of punishment. As such, the State bears some responsibility,
if not for the crimes of the perpetrators, then for the lack of justice they
face (and the lack of deterrence to others who would commit the same crimes).
Given the lack of an accepted overriding
definition of torture, and in the context of countries where State complicity in
violence takes many forms, it has been argued that “degrading, cruel and inhuman
treatment” becomes impossible to separate from torture. As one commentator has
asked, “Is it not torture to have children witness the murder of their parents?
Is it not torture of women to have their sons and husbands taken away never to
be seen again? Is it not torture to engage village members including women and
children to forced labour and to threaten men with rape and sexual abuse of
their women?”
Such questions are applicable to Cambodians,
particularly in regard to the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge regime, but also in more
recent years. Today, for the survivors of past torture and for current-day
victims, there are many more questions: Is it torture to have lost relatives
during the Khmer Rouge regime and have to live for decades without ever knowing
what happened to them? Is it torture to have your son murdered by a policeman,
soldier or someone else and feel compelled, or threatened, to accept a few
hundred dollars in compensation, rather than take the case to court? Is it
torture to be beaten day in and day out by your husband, and be unable to depend
on the authorities for help because they don’t consider it a crime? Is it
torture to seek the help of the police to rescue your abducted wife or daughter,
who is being tortured in a brothel, only to be told that they will not do
anything? The victims may well think so.
“Once again, I was human.”
–
Teeda Butt Mam, a survivor, on the downfall of the Pol Pot regime in 1979.
The elaborate stone reliefs carved on the walls
of Cambodia’s most celebrated religious monument, the 12th Century
Angkor Wat, include graphic scenes of people being skinned alive, strung up on
trees, chained or beaten. They provide a glimpse into the history of torture in
Cambodia, indicating that, as in Europe and elsewhere, its roots stretch back
centuries.
The torture depicted on Angkor Wat’s walls
represent the hells to which wrongdoers were supposedly banished. On the huge
monument’s southern gallery, there are, according to one account, a total of 32
hells. As Vittorio Roveda’s book Khmer Mythology describes, each hell is
depicted with scenes of brutal punishments and inscriptions indicating how they
are meted out depending on the type of sin committed. For those who are
guilty of injustice, there is the “hell of weeping”, where sinners are chained,
beaten and slashed by great swords. Those who have harmed, or taken the property
of, others are thrown into basins of molten metal. Seducers and adulterers are
torn to pieces by birds of prey or thrown into lakes. State servants who abuse
their positions to steal from others are thrown, head first, into cauldrons. For
other sinners, the punishments include being sent into forests of cactuses,
bound upside down in ropes, or strung up on trees with nails hammered into their
heads.
Interestingly – in a country where today,
centuries later, suspected thieves and robbers are beaten by street mobs or
tortured to confess by police officers – a total of 12 of the 32 hells are
reserved for thieves. The punishments here include having their tongues pulled
out with tongs, being thrown into freezing cold water, or, for “great
criminals”, being devoured by dogs or birds of prey. As Vittorio Roveda puts it,
“All these descriptions provide a colorful picture of life at the time of
Suryavarman II”, the King who built Angkor Wat.
The actual use of torture in ancient Cambodia, if
perhaps not of all the methods so vividly displayed on Angkor Wat, is
corroborated by the most comprehensive eyewitness account. Chinese emissary Chou
Ta-Kuan spent nearly a year in Cambodia in 1296-97, more than a century after
Angkor Wat was built, and documented his observations. According to his account,
execution, torture and amputation were features of Cambodian justice. Serious
criminals would be buried alive, while lesser ones would have their feet, hands
or noses cut off. A man who adulterously slept with a married woman would have
his feet squeezed between two splints of wood (a version of which is still
practiced in Cambodia today) until he surrendered all his property as
compensation to the woman’s husband. A thief caught red-handed would be
imprisoned and tortured, while a suspected thief would be given the chance to
confess or be put to a test of his innocence or guilt. If he denied the charge,
his hand would be plunged into a vat of boiling oil. “If he is truly guilty, the
hand is cooked to shreds; if not, skin and bones are unharmed,” wrote Chou Ta-Kuan.
Such a use of torture for ‘judicial’ reasons, to
determine or punish criminal guilt, continued in Cambodia for centuries.
Historian David Chandler has noted that 17th Century Cambodian legal
codes list 21 time-consuming, extremely painful punishments for people accused
of betraying the King; the Khmer narrative poem Tum Taev, set in the 17th
Century, closes with the execution of an entire family for lese-majeste,
buried up to the neck and decapitated by a buffalo-drawn iron harrow. During the
subsequent French colonial period (1863-1954), torture was not lawfully
sanctioned, although Chandler suggests that torture (such as “very rough”
interrogations of prisoners) continued to be practiced to some extent through
the colonial era.
In modern Cambodia, the most systematic use of
torture as a government policy occurred during the 1975-79 Democratic Kampuchea
regime led by Pol Pot. Seizing power in April 1975, Democratic Kampuchea, the
communists also known as the Khmer Rouge, unleashed a ferocious revolution which
swept through Cambodia “like a forest fire or a typhoon”. In a warped bid to
return the country to “Year Zero”, the regime’s leaders sought to wipe out “over
2,000 years of Cambodian history” and rebuild an entirely new society. In search
of a rural workers’ utopia, they forcibly evacuated the country’s cities,
dispatching millions of people to the countryside to work like slaves in
regimented labor camps. Money and private property were abolished, along with
religion, schools and all but the most basic of medical services. There were no
political, social, economic or cultural freedoms.
Ordinary Cambodians did not know who was ruling
their country, but were told only that Angkar (the Organization) was in
charge. The invisible Angkar was everywhere, watching and knowing
everything, they were told. Angkar decided everything: how people would
work, live, eat, and, for many, how they would die. Infractions of Angkar’s
rules were dealt with severely, and security forces hunted down real and
imaginary counter-revolutionaries. By January 1979, and the fall of Pol Pot’s
regime to the invading army of neighbouring Vietnam, as many as one in four or
five Cambodians was dead from execution, disease or starvation. It was one of
the worst genocides of the 20th Century, a living nightmare rivalled
by the hells depicted on the walls of Angkor Wat some 800 years earlier.
By virtually any definition of
torture, most Cambodians who lived through Pol Pot’s rule can be said to have
suffered torture. The regime’s policies – such as mass evacuation of cities,
separation of families, forced labour, forced marriage and the abolishment of
social services – undoubtedly inflicted severe physical and mental pain and
suffering on the populace. Many younger people (born after the Pol Pot regime)
are likely to be secondary victims of the torture inflicted on their older
relatives. Arguably, the majority of Cambodians alive today have suffered from
torture in one form or another.
As well as the general populace
which suffered from Democratic Kampuchea’s blunt attempts at social
reengineering, there are those who were directly tortured by the regime’s
security personnel. A national network of detention, interrogation, torture and
execution centres (more than 180 in total, according to one historian) comprised
the heart of Pol Pot’s security apparatus. The purpose of this gulag system was
not to mete out swift death to detainees, but to obtain ‘confessions’ to alleged
crimes against Angkar.
Frequently, this involved physical and mental torture.
Survivor Vann Nath describes his interrogation by the forces of
Angkar
after his arrest in Battambang province in 1977:
The
interrogator told me to me confess, or else he’d hurt me. I didn’t have any
answer. He tied the electric wire firmly around my handcuffs and connected the
other end to my trousers with a safety pin. He sat down again.
“You’ve
been reported to have been going around instigating people to oppose Angkar,” he
said. “Who is your network?”
“I don’t know what
you’re talking about, Brother,” I said. I didn’t know what they thought I had
done. At the cooperative I never had time to go around and see my friends, not a
single one. It must have been a pretext to kill me. The man holding the gun laid
it on the table and walked towards me. He connected the wire to the electric
power and connected the other end to my bottom of my shorts.
“Now do you
remember? Who collaborated with you to betray Angkar?” he asked.
I couldn’t think
of the words to answer them when he gave me an electric shock. My whole body
went into a spasm and I passed out. When I came to I could hear a distant voice
asking “How many people in your network? Who are you communicating with?”
“No…brothers,” I could only get those two words out before I fell unconscious
again.
Tens if not hundreds of
thousands of men, women and children were detained in the Khmer Rouge’s prisons.
Many died from starvation, disease, torture or eventual execution. The number of
survivors is unknown, but one scholar has estimated the survival rate of
detainees in smaller detention centres at 20-30%, compared to almost zero at the
Phnom Penh interrogation centre, called S-21.
S-21, now better known as Tuol
Sleng, occupied the site of a former high school. It was, as David Chandler has
written, “a total institution whose mission was to locate, question and destroy”
enemies of the Party Center (the regime’s central leadership). Its prisoners
included former regime officials, accused of betraying the revolution, and their
relatives. As the regime’s leadership increasingly descended into violent
paranoia, the hunt for ‘traitors’, many of them imaginary, grew wider and wider,
and many of its own revolutionary cadre and soldiers were arrested, tortured and
executed.
At Tuol Sleng, prisoners were
forced to give detailed ‘biographies’ of their lives and ‘confessions’ of
alleged crimes against Angkar.
Frequently, they were made to admit that they were spies of Vietnam, the CIA or
the KGB (or all three). These biographical confessions were usually extracted
through days of torture; often the preliminary confessions were vetted and then
returned to the victims with suggested revisions. The bureaucracy was
meticulous: every prisoner was photographed; their ‘confessions’, and
correspondence between the interrogators and their masters, were recorded in
thousands of pages of official documents. At one stage, a senior government
official urged the prison chief to conserve paper, noting of the detainees:
“Some of them are afraid and just talk and talk.”
After confessions were drafted
and redrafted to the satisfaction of their jailers, the prisoners were executed,
often along with the families, usually by being clubbed to the back of the head
with hoe or axe handles. On July 1, 1977, 114 women were executed, 90 of them
listed on records as “wives” of prisoners. The next day, 31 sons and 43
daughters of prisoners were killed. On October 15 alone, a record 418 prisoners
were executed.
Of more than 14,000 prisoners
sent to S-21, seven are known to have survived. One of them was Vann Nath,
transferred to S-21 after his initial arrest in Battambang. After less than a
month in the prison, kept shackled and virtually starved, “my ribs were poking
out and my body was like an old man of 70. My hair was overgrown like bamboo
roots, and had become a nest for lice. I had scabies all over my body. My mind
and spirit had flown away. I only knew one thing clearly: hunger.”
Vann Nath, in his 1998 book on
his S-21 experiences, continues: “Each day they would take some prisoners out of
my room to be interrogated. They would handcuff and blindfold the prisoners
before they left the room. Sometimes some of the prisoners came back with wounds
or blood on their bodies, while others disappeared.”
The
following torture techniques are documented in S-21 archives:
-
Beating: by hand, heavy stick, branches, bunches
of electric wire
-
Burning with cigarette
-
Electric shock
-
Feeding "2 or 3 spoonfuls of shit"
|
-
Being jammed with a needle
-
Having fingernails pulled out
-
Shoving
-
Scratching
-
Suffocation with plastic bag
|
|
|
-
Water torture: by immersion, or by drops on the
forehead
-
Paying homage to the image(s) of dogs
-
Paying homage to walls, tables or chairs
|
Box 3.1
THE S-21 TORTURE MACHINE
Interrogation and torture at S-21 (Tuol Sleng)
was an industry and, as such, the staff had their own manual on how to do it.
The manual was recovered after the fall of the Pol Pot regime. The following
is from Part III, “Views and Stances Concerning Methodology of Interrogation”,
Section 4, “The Question of Torturing”:
a.
The purpose of torturing is to get their responses. It’s not something
we do for fun. We must hurt them so that they respond quickly. Another purpose
is to break them and make them lose their will. It’s not something that’s done
out of individual anger, or for self-satisfaction. So we beat them to make
them afraid, but absolutely not to kill them. When torturing it is necessary
to examine their state of health first, and then the whip. Don’t be so
bloodthirsty that you cause their death quickly. You won’t get the needed
information.
b.
It is necessary to be fully aware that doing politics is most
important. Torture is only secondary, subsidiary and supplementary to some
political expediency in certain areas. So politics takes the lead at all
times. Even when torturing, it is always necessary to do constant propaganda.
c.
At the same time, it is necessary to avoid any
question of hesitancy or half-heartedness, of not daring to torture, which
makes it impossible to get answers to our questions from our enemies. This
will slow down and delay our work. In sum, whether doing propaganda work or
torturing or bringing up questions to ask them or accusing them of something,
it is necessary to hold steadfastly to a stance of not being half-hearted or
hesitant. We must be absolute…
The interrogation manual emphasized the mixing of psychological (or
‘propaganda’) techniques with physical ones. Recommended psychological tactics
included:
a.
Reassure them by giving them something, some food for instance…
b.
Terrify them, confuse them in clever ways. Arrange little ploys to make
them give up any hope that they will ever live again or ever be able to
survive.
c.
Draw them into some ordinary conversation, but formulated so that it is
of some use.
d.
Bring them over to thinking about their families, their wives, their
children and their life. Make it clear to them that their guilt is a minor
one. When they confess, or have not yet done so, we must guide them and
reassure them that they are not the big leaders. Don’t step up the pressure
all the time. Say something like ‘Don’t make us torture you or torture you
severely. It’s bad for your health, and makes it harder for us to deal with
each other in the future’…
Other S-21 documents, such
as personal notebooks written by several senior interrogators, reveal a
similarly chilling desire to develop and refine the perfect torture machine.
In these notebooks, the prison’s first, second and third-ranked interrogators
– named Pon, Tuy and Chan – fretted over how best to practice interrogation
and torture, and critiqued the abilities of their staff. Interrogators were
faulted for deficiencies ranging from sloppy handwriting on documents to
displaying fear when “lots of enemies [prisoners] die”. The problem of
interrogators falling asleep on the job was noted. “The enemies look down on
us when they see us asleep,” one notebook entry reads. “Upon waking up,
there’s a desire to salvage one’s reputation”, so the interrogators beat the
prisoners.
A recurring problem cited
in the notebooks was interrogators beating inmates too heavily, injuring or
killing them. Such interrogators were accused of “individualism”; whether out
of anger or fun, they failed to adhere to S-21 interrogation policies. “If you
beat, don’t get carried with beating: beat a hit at a time. Then curse them
out, curse them out to get them to think it over,” one notebook entry advised
interrogators on how to torture prisoners.
The S-21 staff was divided
into various groups, including the “hot” (torture) and “cold” (non-torture
interrogation) teams, and the documentation group (who prepared confessions,
reports, etc). Excessive torture created problems for the smooth functioning
of the system, such as when the hot team beat people into a “totally
debilitated state” and then handed them over to the document team, who could
do nothing with them.
Interrogators who relied
too heavily on physical torture, failing to use psychological tactics at the
same time, were accused of “walking on one leg” instead of both legs. Other
interrogators were guilty of beating prisoners who were in the “meat of the
story”, or the middle of their confessions, instead of waiting until “after
the meat of the story”. Sometimes, torture was used at the wrong times;
interrogators were counselled: “Don’t beat enemies when they’re in a rage.
Whenever they’re in a rage, the beatings don’t hurt…” Similarly, the
interrogators were supposed to carefully consider the responses of the
victims, rather than just accept whatever they said. “Don't just get names:
you've got to think,” reads one notebook entry.
The notebooks reveal the
calm and (at least in their own minds) rational manner with which the top
interrogators saw their tasks. Even the screaming of victims was noted as a
problem to be addressed, because they were “so loud that they can be heard
outside” the prison walls, compromising secrecy.
Chan, the number
three-ranked interrogator, writing in his notebook on May 21, 1978, offered
the following analysis of some of the problems in deciding when and how to use
torture during interrogations:
With regard to those places where
they [the prisoners] are making things up, we must think and try to understand
what the reality of the picture might be. Once this picture is in mind, we
must interrogate in such a manner as to not draw their attention to the fact
that we are on to them somehow or other. Must we interrogate immediately or
must we beat them? If we have to beat them, what story do we make up about why
it’s necessary to beat them? Once they’ve been beaten up, how do we
interrogate them so that we can say whether they’re responding acquiescently
to us or not yet, so as not to have adverse effects on the fact that we’re
beating them? And if there’s not acquiescence, what story do we make up about
why we have to beat them some more? If we are going to beat them, we must beat
them from a position in which we have the advantage over these enemies
politically, have a pretext to make accusations against them and apply full
pressure to them. Once there’s a bit of acquiescence, we should start
interrogating them according to the flow of the narrative in accordance with
trap questions that we have already set up in advance. We must then further
assess what the enemies have responded in this round: is it in accordance with
the concrete reality or not? If it’s not, then we must sort things out again…
Interestingly, the
notebooks indicate a subsequent change in policy toward torture at S-21, as
their authors grew increasingly concerned with “the problem of beating
enemies” and the “overly heavy reliance on torture”.
On October 8, 1978 – three
months before the regime’s collapse – first-ranked interrogator Pon wrote in
his notebook of the need for S-21 (or at least part of it) to be turned into a
‘reform school’. “There is a totally absolute requirement for a reform school,
which is to save to the maximum those people who have lost their way,” he
wrote. Admitting that, in the past, “there have indeed been some enemies who
it was not necessary to beat during interrogation”, Pon advocated a new
“maximum stance of compassion.” He wrote of a plan “to interrogate all
Cambodian nationals without resort to beatings, while getting 80% to confess,
and getting 70% to confess every last little bit without resorting to
beatings”. (Foreigners, however, such as Vietnamese and imperialist CIA agents
could still be “absolutely, totally and permanently” dealt with in the
customary manner).
Six weeks later, Pon was
writing of the role of S-21 staff, like all communist party cadre, to lead
“the masses”. He noted that “by beating prisoners to death, beating prisoners
and breaking their arms, cutting open their arms, their backs, their penises,
you can’t perform your duty. You can’t lead and gather in the masses”.
On December 16, just before Vietnam invaded to
overthrow the Pol Pot regime, Pon clarified in his notebook that there was
still some room for torture. “Interrogation without beating means beating
maximally little” (as little as possible), he wrote.
Within weeks, Vietnam invaded and Pon and his
colleagues fled S-21 and Phnom Penh. The reasons for Pon’s apparent misgivings
about torture in the latter months of the regime – and whether they reflected
a serious change in attitude or policy – remain uncertain. Did the chief
interrogator, after three years of overseeing the torture of thousands of
people at S-21, finally realize that not all of these prisoners could have
been real “enemies”? Did he, or his superiors, come to see that torture was
not an effective way of winning the hearts of “the masses”? Maybe, just maybe,
even the Khmer Rouge of S21 – the most expert torturers in Cambodia’s modern
history – came to doubt the work which they had been trained to do, and began
to realize that beating people senseless was of no usefulness to a society.
At the head of S-21, above
the top interrogators Pon, Tuy and Chan, was Kang Khek Iev (better known by the
alias Deuch, or Duch), who closely monitored the interrogations of detainees.
In September 1976, Ney Sarann,
the former secretary of the regime’s Northeast Zone, was arrested and sent to
S-21. He was given “about 20 whippings with fine rattan” in the morning, and
“20-30 whippings with electrical wire” in the afternoon, according to an
interrogation report. Deuch told the interrogators to “remind” Ney Sarann of
“the welfare of his wife and children”, who had also been detained. The
interrogators reported to Deuch that “the threat was made: there’s no avoiding
torture if you don’t confess”. Deuch authorised the use of “both hot and cold
techniques” on Sarann. The interrogators reported back: “We went to intimidate
him, telling him to prepare himself for the torture to be continued”. That
night, when they approached Sarann, he “started to confess by asking us to
clarify what he was to report”.
·
·
·
Democratic Kampuchea information
minister Hu Nim was arrested in early 1977. Four days after his arrest, he
submitted the first of seven confessions to his interrogator, who appended a
note to Deuch saying: “We whipped him four or five times to break his stand,
before taking him to be stuffed with water.” Later, the interrogator reported:
“I have tortured him to write it again.” Five weeks later, Hu Nim was abject: “I
am not a human being, I am an animal”, he wrote in his forced confession. He was
“smashed” (executed) on July 6, 1977, along with 126 others.
Twenty years after the fall of
the Pol Pot regime, Deuch was exposed as being alive and living under another
name in northwest Cambodia. (Arrested in mid-1999, he is currently imprisoned
awaiting trial.) When first located by journalists, he described his past work
as “a technician for the communist party”. In an eerie echo of the S-21
interrogation manual, Deuch spoke of the superiority of his torture methods,
versus those of another Khmer Rouge leader, Ta Mok: "I knew from experience that
if they were only tortured they wouldn't say anything. So torture had to be
accompanied by psychological tactics; so I told them they would be released if
they talked. This was a lie, but it worked. Ta Mok didn't care about the mental
state of the victims. He just tortured them and killed them."
After three years, eight months and 20 days of
Khmer Rouge madness, the regime finally collapsed on January 7, 1979 under a
Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, relieving Cambodians of the worst of the
horrors that had been inflicted upon them. It did not, however, bring an end to
torture or other serious human rights abuses. During Vietnam’s subsequent
10-year occupation of Cambodia, the remnants of the Khmer Rouge army – joined by
royalist and other anti-Vietnamese guerrillas – waged a war of resistance from
jungle enclaves along the Cambodia-Thailand border. Torture, executions and
other crimes were committed by all sides in the fractious conflict throughout
the 1980s.
The extent of torture used by the
Vietnamese-backed People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) communist-socialist
regime, which controlled Phnom Penh and most of Cambodia’s provinces through the
1980s, is unclear; there was no independent access to prisons or other
institutions at the time. However, the PRK’s use of torture against political
prisoners was documented by several human rights groups in the mid-1980s, based
largely on interviews with refugees including former prisoners, their relatives
or acquaintances, who had fled PRK-controlled areas to refugees camps in
Thailand.
A 1987 Amnesty International report estimated
that several thousand political prisoners had been held in PRK prisons in recent
years, and that more than 400 were detained without charge or trial at the time
of writing. Of those 400, Amnesty collected detailed information on 100 of them
– the majority of whom had allegedly suffered torture. Most of the 100 prisoners
were former PRK personnel – government or local officials, police, soldiers, and
so on – accused of being agents of the anti-Vietnamese guerrilla resistance.
Torture was usually inflicted in order to extract confessions or other
information about alleged anti-PRK activities. Prison authorities also
reportedly used torture, or the threat of it, to solicit ‘ransoms’ from
prisoners’ families to secure their release.
There were 46 reported deaths in PRK prisons
between 1979-85, according to Amnesty, 12 of them reportedly occurring during or
soon after interrogations in which torture was used. The most common method of
torture cited by Amnesty was prolonged beatings, with or without a weapon.
Whippings, near-suffocation with plastic bags and near-drowning in vats of
water, were also common. Other reported methods were: electric shocks; burning
with irons; forced ingestion of soapy water, salty fish sauce or other liquids;
suspension from the ceiling; mock executions.
A PRK ministry worker in his 30s was arrested by
Phnom Penh police in 1980. “They said I had the intention of bringing about
disunity within the revolution. They then tried to terrorize me by pistol
whipping me once and whipping me on the back seven or eight times with a length
of rubber hose.” Subsequently, “they took out a plastic bag and put it over my
head. I passed out and fell down.” About a week later, interrogators again sent
for him, and “my legs were tied up and suspended from the ceiling so that my
head was over a board through which nails had been hammered. They would raise me
up and drop me from a height so that my head would almost hit the nails, in
order to break me psychologically.”
·
·
·
In Battambang province in 1984, a farmer was
arrested by police, taken to a prison and accused of “engaging in politics” for
the guerrilla resistance. Tortured for six days, he described being “tied up
specially for the beatings, with my thumbs held together behind my back with
nylon fishing cord, with one arm over my back and the other tied behind my
back.” He was punched, kicked in the shins till they became swollen and oozed
infected pus – once, his interrogators arrived wearing sandals and changed into
combat boots before they began kicking him – and hit with rattan and a chain.
Knocked unconscious on at least four of the six days he was beaten, he was
usually revived with water. “I had no hope of survival. I was sure that I was
going to die.” On the sixth day, the prisoner was made to sign a new “biography”
– a resume of his activities, to go into government files – and released.
Such methods bore a striking resemblance to the
torture used during the Pol Pot regime and, ironically, were supposedly
prohibited by the PRK for precisely that reason. A former PRK civil police
instructor who left Cambodia in 1984 reportedly told Amnesty International that
police training documents stated that torture to get confessions, “like what was
done at Pol Pot’s Tuol Sleng”, was prohibited. Police officers were instructed
that torture was unreliable (prisoners could feel compelled to make false
confessions), and that its use would adversely affect the PRK’s image among
ordinary Cambodians, who would “evaluate the new regime as being the same as the
Pol Pot regime”. Despite the prohibition, torture was still common, according to
the instructor, because many police trainees did not understand their
instructions and also lacked humanitarian values. “Most of them have Pol Pot-ist
characteristics and just stick to their old ways.”
The extent to which the forces of Vietnam may
have encouraged or trained Cambodian security personnel to use torture is
unclear. However, the Amnesty International report implicated Vietnamese
military or civilian ‘experts’, attached to PRK security units, in the practice
of torture. It cited 12 documented cases of torture during interrogation by
Vietnamese experts assigned to PRK detention centres, and a further seven cases
of Vietnamese advisors being present during torture by Cambodian security
officials. Vietnamese units were reportedly directly involved in political
arrests throughout Cambodia, and in torture at Vietnamese-administered prisons
and detention centres.
The PRK and its Vietnamese backers were by no
means the only ones to use torture during the 1980s civil conflict. Members of
the guerrilla resistance coalition – which included senior leaders of the former
of Pol Pot regime – also committed numerous political killings and torture.
More than 300,000 Cambodian refugees fled to
Thailand during the conflict, most of them ending up in refugee camps
administered by the various resistance factions: the Party of Democratic
Kampuchea (the Khmer Rouge); the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (KPNLF);
and the royalist National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and
Cooperative Cambodia (FUNCINPEC). Executions, arbitrary arrest and detention,
torture, shackling and forced labour were among the rights abuses reported in
refugee camps and other areas controlled by resistance factions through the
1980s and into the 1990s.
The Khmer Rouge and the KPNLF, at least, ran
their own prisons along the border, where torture, rape and execution were
reported. Ta Mok, a former Pol Pot regime official, administered one prison.
Former prisoners of the Khmer Rouge told Amnesty International of detainees
being kept shackled to stakes, while others were forced to perform hard labour
in life-threatening conditions such as in mined border areas. People detained,
tortured or killed by resistance factions included prisoners of war, suspected
spies, civilians and non-combatants. The murder and rape of refugees occurred.
All the resistance groups attempted to maintain strict political control of
their subjects, tolerating no dissent. The Khmer Rouge continued many of its
former Pol Pot regime policies, arresting people for refusing to join its army,
failing to obtain permission to marry, trade or travel, or for questioning or
opposing party policies (for suspected “liberalism” or “bad politics”, for
instance).
Cambodians were finally offered a chance at peace
when the State of Cambodia regime (the new name adopted by the PRK) and the
resistance factions in the civil war signed peace accords in Paris in 1991. When
a United Nations mission was dispatched to hold the peace and organize national
elections, it found a deeply-scarred nation fraught with violence committed by
all sides. Hopes of a definitive peace were dashed when the Khmer Rouge reneged
on the peace agreements, withdrew from the planned elections, and continued its
guerrilla war. The May 1993 elections were marred by violence, including Khmer
Rouge massacres of ethnic Vietnamese, and the murders, torture or intimidation
of political opponents allegedly committed by forces of the State of Cambodia
(SOC). Special SOC military or police teams, whose recruits included robbers and
other criminals, allegedly carried out some murders of political opponents; at
least one such unit was allegedly the successor to a special Vietnamese unit
which had operated in Cambodia in the 1980s.
“Cambodia’s tragic recent history requires
special measures to assure protection of human rights, and the non-return to the
policies and practices of the past,” noted the preamble of the 1991 Paris peace
settlement, in reference to the Khmer Rouge’s bloody rule. The 1991 peace
accords and the UN-sponsored elections two years later brought the promise of
peace, democracy and recognition of fundamental human rights for Cambodians. The
country ratified the UN Convention against Torture, and other international
human rights documents.
The 1993 elections produced a coalition
government of onetime battlefield enemies; the major coalition partners were the
former ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) and the former resistance faction
FUNCINPEC. A new Constitution promulgated in September 1993 enshrined the
principles of democracy, rule of law and human rights, and unequivocally
prohibited torture. Independent non-government organizations, including human
rights groups, were established. A new era was born, one in which Cambodians
could begin the long, arduous task of rebuilding their lives and country.
Seven years later, the Constitutional prohibition
against torture is regularly violated with impunity.
The
number of people who endure torture in Cambodia is unknown. This report is not a
quantitative study. No statistical studies on the current (or past) use of
torture have been conducted. Currently, the available information about torture
is limited to victim testimonies provided to human rights, legal, medical and
other organizations, and on statistics kept by those groups. Based on the
insufficient available data, at best it can be asserted that hundreds, if not
thousands, of Cambodians are tortured each year.
Torture is today
regularly practised in the following circumstances:
·
In police custody:
Torture is a routine criminal investigation
technique, tolerated by all levels of the police and judiciary. The police
primarily use torture to extract confessions from criminal suspects, which the
courts in turn accept as evidence of guilt. Licadho interviews with prison
inmates reveal that a quarter of them allege that they were mistreated in police
custody after arrest. (For details, see Chapter 6.)
·
In prisons:
While it may have decreased in recent years,
torture continues to be reported in Cambodia’s prisons. Torture is primarily
used as a form of punishment for attempted escapes or breaches of prison rules.
Nearly 7% of inmates interviewed by Licadho alleged they had been physically
abused in prison custody. (See Chapter 9)
·
In other forms of State custody:
Torture by State agents is not limited to
police or prison officers. Soldiers, militiamen, official bodyguards, and even
social welfare staff and teachers have committed torture. (See chapter 8.)
·
In human trafficking & the sex trade:
Perhaps the most horrific torture in
Cambodia occurs in brothels, in which young women and children are subjected to
extreme physical, sexual and psychological abuse and deprivations. Sexual
traffickers and brothel pimps use violence as a matter of course, to keep their
victims submissive and sleeping with customers. The sexual slavery trade may be
the fastest-growing forum for torture in Cambodia in recent years, given the
rapid growth of the industry. It is impossible to estimate the number of
victims. A bare minimum indication is that at least 100 children or women died
or were injured by violence in the sex trade in 1998, according to cases
reported to the Cambodian Women’s Crisis Center. (See Chapter 11.)
Beatings and other exploitative, abusive working conditions are also a feature
of the trafficking of humans for non-sexual purposes, such as to work as manual
labor. (See Chapter 12.)
·
In domestic violence:
Although violence in the home is rarely described
as torture, there are clear parallels between domestic violence and other
accepted forms of ‘torture’. What a man does to his wife in their home can be as
physically and psychologically violent and damaging, if not more so, than what a
policeman may do to a criminal suspect. The often-ferocious nature of domestic
violence in Cambodia, and the size of the problem, is well documented. Roughly
one in six Cambodian women are physically abused by their husbands, according to
a 1995 survey by the Project Against Domestic Violence and the Ministry of
Women’s Affairs. Half of them have sustained injuries, and a third have been
struck with objects such as farm tools, metal pipes or sticks. (See Chapter
13.)
Cambodian torturers, whether they be State agents
or civilians, politically motivated or not, use similar methods. (One exception
is electric shock torture inflicted with electric batons, which is used
primarily by police and military police officers.) The following are some common
torture techniques in Cambodia:
·
Beating:
Beating (and kicking) is the most common form of torture, in Cambodia and around
the world. Palms, fists, elbows, knees and feet can be used, and/or solid
objects, most often guns, truncheons, pieces of wood or iron, etc.
·
Whipping:
Whipping, a form of beating, appears particularly prevalent in Cambodia. It is
often inflicted with an electrical wire or cable, like those used for
household appliances or industrial uses, or with several wires wound together.
The thickness of the wire varies, and it is often coated with plastic.
(References to whipping with electric wire in this report do not refer to
electrical shock, unless explicitly stated.) Ropes, belts and chains are also
common whipping instruments.
·
Electrical torture:
Shocks are delivered either by electric baton or
by an electric wire directly from a power source. Electric batons are mainly
possessed by police and military police.
·
Handcuffing/shackling/tying:
Many torture victims’ hands and/or feet are
cuffed or shackled (with leg irons) or otherwise restrained during beatings or
other torture. Other victims, particularly in prisons, may not be physically
assaulted but simply left cuffed, shackled or otherwise tied up for long periods
of time. Such restraints – particularly shackles – often cut into the flesh,
restrict blood circulation and prevent movement, causing severe pain; they can
cause permanent disability.
·
Limb-crushing:
This appears to be mainly used by police and
military police. Usually, a wooden or iron bar is placed across the victim’s
feet or lower legs, and the police stand or jump on top of the bar to create
downward pressure. In a different version, the police, often wearing boots,
stomp on the arms or legs of a victim who is lying down.
·
Rape/sexual abuse:
Repeated rape is a common element in the torture of victims of sexual
trafficking and domestic violence. Rape/sexual abuse has also been reported of
girls and women in police stations, prisons or other official custody. The
occasional case of sexual assault against males, usually in the form of
deliberate injury to the genitals, has been reported.
·
Verbal threats/psychological abuse:
The ubiquitous death threat – often at gunpoint – is the most common form of
psychological torture; virtually all torture victims are threatened with death.
Mock executions and threats to injure or kill the relatives of victims are also
used. Most torture victims, in State or civilian custody, are subjected to
prolonged unlawful detention and denial of access to outside world; some are
kept in solitary confinement.
This list is not comprehensive. Examples of
these, and other, types of torture are featured throughout this report.
Many, if not all, of these forms of torture have
long existed in Cambodia. A version of limb-crushing was practiced in the late
13th Century, when adulterers had their feet squeezed between two
splints of wood. Several of the commonest forms of torture today, such as
whipping and electric shock, were widely used during the Pol Pot era and the
subsequent PRK and SOC regimes.
For the purposes of this
Convention, the term ‘torture’ means any act by which severe pain or suffering,
whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such
purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession,
punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of
having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any
reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is
inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a
public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not
include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful
sanctions.
The meaning of official “acquiescence” is not
defined.. Similarly, there is no definition of “Other Cruel, Inhuman or
Degrading Treatment or Punishment”, although countries party to the convention
are required to take action against such acts.
The torture convention (Art. 2) states that:
·
Each State Party shall take effective
legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of
torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.
·
No exceptional circumstances
whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political
instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of
torture.
·
An order from a superior officer or a
public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.
Other obligations on Cambodia, as a party to the
convention, include:
·
Each State Party shall ensure that all
acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an
attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes
complicity or participation in torture.
Each State Party shall make these offences
punishable by appropriate penalties which take into account their grave nature.
(Art. 4.)
·
Each State Party shall ensure that its
competent authorities proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, wherever
there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed
in any territory under its jurisdiction.
(Art. 12.)
·
Each State Party shall ensure that any
individual who alleges he has been subjected to torture in any territory under
its jurisdiction has the right to complain to, and to have his case promptly and
impartially examined by, its competent authorities. Steps shall be taken to
ensure that the complainant and witnesses are protected against all
ill-treatment or intimidation as a consequence of his complaint or any evidence
given. (Art. 13.)
·
Each State Party shall ensure in its
legal system that the victim of an act of torture obtains redress and has an
enforceable right to fair and adequate compensation, including the means for as
full rehabilitation as possible. In the event of the death of the victim as a
result of an act of torture, his dependants shall be entitled to compensation.
(Art. 14.)
Source: Transitional Criminal Law, 1992 (Arts. 31,
32, 40, 41, 35.)
Source: Law on Suppression of Kidnapping,
Trafficking and Exploitation of Humans, 1996 (Arts. 3-5);
Transitional Criminal Law, 1992 (Art. 33).
Source: Transitional Criminal Law, 1992 (Art. 57 &
related Arts. 10-22).
To be arrested in Cambodia is one of the surest
ways to face the prospect of torture. When a suspect arrives at a police
station, or even while being taken there, he or she is frequently beaten or
otherwise tortured. The police’s motives include:
·
To extract confessions to alleged crimes,
and/or information about alleged accomplices or the location of money or other
proceeds of crime, etc.
·
To extort money or property from them,
under threat of further torture, and/or prosecution and imprisonment for alleged
crimes, if they do not pay.
·
To impose arbitrary punishment on alleged
criminals, or punish people for alleged disrespect or threats toward local
officials or other powerful people.
Licadho prison research statistics
Nearly one in every four inmates in Cambodian
prisons alleges that the arresting authorities mistreated them, according to
Licadho interviews with prisoners around the country. Of a total of 2,333
inmates who answered a question about whether they were mistreated by the
police, 567 of them (24.4%) said yes.
Of the 567 inmates who cited police mistreatment,
90 were arrested and allegedly abused prior to 1996; a further 64 prisoners were
arrested during 1996. The remainder (410 inmates) were arrested in 1997-1999.
Among inmates arrested in 1997 and 1998 (the most recent years for which full
data is available), the proportion who alleged that they were abused in police
custody was consistent at just under 25% (see chart below).
At time of writing, Licadho statistics for 1999
were incomplete. Only 40 inmates arrested and allegedly mistreated in 1999 (in
the period January to May) are included in the total sample of 567 prisoners
cited above. However, in the full year of 1999, Licadho researchers interviewed
a further 410 prison inmates who alleged police mistreatment. Most of them are
believed to have been arrested and mistreated in late 1998 or in 1999, but
information from these interviews has not yet been fully collated and analysed;
these 410 inmates have therefore been excluded from the sample of 567 mistreated
detainees.
The statistics cover mistreatment by arresting
authorities; they do not include torture committed in prisons after detainees
were sent there. In most cases, the arrests and alleged abuse was committed by
police or military police, but in some cases other State agents – soldiers,
militiamen, village chiefs, etc – were involved.
Police ‘mistreatment’, of course, can range from
one slap or punch to prolonged beating; not all of it constitutes torture.
However, the vast majority of the 567 inmates reported serious physical
violence, rather than minor abuse, against them. (See ‘Methods of Torture’
section, below.)
Other estimates of police
violence
Legal Aid of Cambodia (LAC), a non-government
organization which provides free legal services to criminal suspects, puts the
number of people abused in police custody far higher. According to LAC, about
80% of its clients say they were beaten (ranging from one or two slaps to
serious physical torture) while in police custody. That equals about 1,252
clients beaten a year, based on the LAC’s 1998 total workload of 1,566 clients
in criminal cases.
Limitations of the
statistics
The available statistics on police violence are
not comprehensive. The Licadho information covers only those arrested people who
ended up in prison (and not those who were mistreated in police custody but then
released for whatever reason), and who were interviewed and responded to
questions.
The amount of police violence cited in the
Licadho interviews is likely to be underreported; some inmates are reluctant to
talk (particularly if prison guards or other officials are present or nearby
during the interviews, as they often are).
The lawyers of LAC, meanwhile, are permitted
private interviews in prison with their clients, which may explain the far
higher reporting of police violence. LAC’s estimate of police mistreatment is,
however, also limited, based only on those criminal suspects to whom the
organization provided legal representation.
Possible extrapolations
Aside from those criminal suspects who are
arrested, abused and sent to court and prison, there are those who are released
from police custody, because of the payment of bribes or other reasons. The
number of such people, and the rate of police violence against them, is unknown.
If, however, the rate of violence is similar to that of those who end up in
prison, then significant numbers of people are abused in police custody each
year. Based on an estimate of 3,000 to 3,500 arrests made nationwide each year
by police authorities, around 750-875 detainees a year may be mistreated by the
police (according to Licadho’s finding of a 25% abuse rate). If as much as 80%
of police detainees are physically abused (LAC’s figure), then well over 2,000
arrested people are beaten each year in police custody.
Such extrapolations should be treated with
caution – they are based on the unproven assumption that there is a similar rate
of mistreatment of detainees who are arrested and released, and of those who are
imprisoned. However, they provide an indication of the possible scope of police
violence against detainees.
Confession rate
The use or threat of violence –
as well as the police’s emphasis on securing confessions from criminal suspects
– may well be reflected in the high rate of confessions given in police custody.
Nearly 90% of police detainees (who were subsequently sent to prison) confessed
to alleged crimes, according to Licadho interviews with prison inmates.
The 567 inmates who told Licadho interviewers
that they had been mistreated by the arresting authorities were asked to
describe the abuse. The majority of them, 429 inmates (75.7%) described acts of
serious physical violence. Of the remaining 138 inmates:
·
95
inmates did not provide a, or provided an inadequate, description of the
alleged mistreatment.
·
23
provided a description of intimidation or threats that did not include
actual physical violence. The intimidation cited included: threats to beat,
whip, shoot, give electric shocks to, or otherwise harm or kill them; firing of
gunshots in order to frighten them; demanding of money for their release;
threats to charge them with a more serious crime (such as murder) if they did
not confess to a lesser one. While many of these threats constitute
psychological torture, they were apparently not accompanied by physical
violence.
·
10
reported being shackled or handcuffed for prolonged periods – for longer
than a day or a night, and up to 16 days (one case) and 25 days (one case).
Prolonged shackling is a form of torture, but in these cases it was not
accompanied by physical violence.
·
7
were briefly subjected to relatively minor violence – one or two slaps,
pulling of hair, etc – which would clearly not constitute torture.
·
3
were shot or beaten at time of arrest in circumstances that, from the
interviews, were unclear (for instance, whether they were resisting arrest).
The other 429 inmates gave descriptions of
mistreatment which included serious physical violence. Beating and kicking,
without weapons, were the most common forms of torture cited. Other, more severe
forms of torture reported by the inmates are shown in the chart below. The chart
shows the percentages of the 429 inmates whose reported abuse included one or
more or six categories of severe torture, as well as the proportion of them who
stated that they fell unconscious during the torture. The categories, and number
of victims, are:
- Beaten with
solid object:
156 of the 429 inmates (36.4%) reported being beaten with solid objects
other than a firearm, including (in rough order of commonness): a wooden,
rattan or bamboo stick or baton; firewood; iron bar, chair; plastic pipe;
belt; broom; hammer; boot or shoe (held in torturer’s hand); chain;
stone/brick; used mortar ammunition shell.
|
|
Chart 6.2:
Reported serious police violence on detainees |
|
 |
|
Source: Licadho interviews with 429 prison inmates, 1996-99
● Multiple responses given ● Percentages rounded
|
|
- Beaten with
gun: 63
inmates (14.7%) were hit with a pistol or rifle, usually with the butt.
|
- Limbs
crushed:
31 cases (7.2%), of which the majority (24) involved the placing of
shackles, handcuffs, chains, wooden or iron bars, or chairs on a
detainee’s legs, feet, arms or hands, with one or more police officers
standing or jumping on the object. The remaining (7) cases involved police
(usually wearing boots) jumping or stomping on (rather than kicking) a
victim’s arms, legs or head in a deliberate manner.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Of the 429 inmates subjected to these or other
forms of torture, 44 (10.5%) stated that they fell unconscious at least once.
The chart includes multiple responses: some
inmates suffered more than one form of torture. Many inmates were tortured on
more than one occasion or day, but each inmate is counted only once in each
applicable category. Similarly, inmates who were beaten or whipped with more
than one object are listed only once in the relevant category. (Inmates beaten
with a gun and also another solid object are listed, once each, in both
categories.)
The chart represents some of the most severe
forms of torture; it does not cover all reported methods. Detainees who were
struck with fists or feet but not weapons, or those who did not explicitly state
that weapons were used, are excluded (except for those who reportedly fell
unconscious, who are included in the ‘Knocked Unconscious’ category).
None of the 429 inmates cited rape or other
sexual assault, except for one alleged case of forced vaginal search by police
officers looking for (non-existent) concealed gold. (For this case, see Box
6.2 ‘Upholding the law in Sre Ambil’, below.) Several inmates said they were
threatened with electric shock or other harm to their genitals. One woman
alleged she was pressured to have sex with a policeman and hit when she refused.
Virtually all of the 429 inmates were handcuffed,
shackled or tied up during the physical abuse, to prevent escape or attempts to
defend themselves. In some cases, inmates said that they were blindfolded, or
beaten in dark rooms, so they could not see their torturers’ faces. Food and
water deprivation was common. Physical violence or deprivations were often
accompanied by psychological abuse, the most common form of which was death
threats. Attempts to extort money from detainees, on the promise of being
released, were also frequently cited.
In July 1997, a 23-year-old old man was arrested
and taken to Phnom Penh’s municipal penal police station. “In the interrogation
room, they forced me to confess that I had stolen a motorcycle. I didn’t know of
any motorcycle. They beat me on my left ear. They handcuffed my legs and stood
on them. It was very painful, so I confessed to what they wanted.”
·
·
·
A 50-year-old soldier suspected of drug
trafficking was interrogated at the Ministry of Interior’s anti-drug department
In January 1998. “There were three policemen. When I wouldn’t answer their
questions, they forced me to sign a confession. Two of the policemen punched me
in the face four or five times. They also hit me in the chest several times with
their knees. They kicked me in the leg and hit my back two or three times with a
pistol.” The man signed the confession.
·
·
·
In May 1998, a 34-year-old man in a rural village
in Kandal province was called to the commune office and then sent to the
district police station. “When they interrogated me, they used a wooden stick to
beat me on the back and the head. My head was bleeding. I was also kicked on the
chest. They beat me in order to make me admit to taking part in the stealing of
a cow. I didn’t know about it. Because I felt very painful and scared, I
confessed.”
·
·
·
In December 1998, a youth, aged 17, suspected of
complicity in robbery, was taken to Phnom Penh’s Daun Penh district police
station. “About 6.30pm, two policemen came to start interrogating me, and forced
me to sign a confession. I was handcuffed and beaten with a wooden stick on my
back many times. They kicked and punched me in my chest and face. It was very
bad torture, so I signed the confession. I thought that if I did not, the police
would continue to beat me.”
·
·
·
In March 1999, a 29-year-old man, accused of
kidnapping, was arrested by military policemen in Battambang province. “There
were two military policemen. I don’t know their names or faces because I was
blindfolded. They blindfolded me and punched me in the stomach about 40 times.
They beat me to force me to answer according to their questions. They said I
joined in a kidnapping, and asked me for [the names of] my colleagues and the
money.”
The 567 prison inmates who alleged police
mistreatment to Licadho were arrested in a total of 16 provinces or
municipalities: Phnom Penh, Koh Kong, Battambang, Prey Veng, Siem Reap, Kompong
Thom, Banteay Meanchey, Kampot, Takeo, Kompong
Cham, Kompong Som, Kandal, Pursat, Kompong Speu, Svay Rieng, and Kompong Chhnang.
More than half the reported abuse occurred in Phnom Penh, Koh Kong or Battambang.
This is not surprising, at least in Phnom Penh and Battambang: as Cambodia’s
most populated cities, they presumably have higher numbers of arrests (and
torture) than other provinces.
Battambang and Koh Kong, respectively in the
northwest and southwest of Cambodia, are to some extent geographically remote
from Phnom Penh; Koh Kong is particularly isolated, as there is no road access
to the province. Until recent years, there were few independent non-government
organizations based in Koh Kong. Both provinces have historically been heavily
militarized, and the scene of much fighting with Khmer Rouge guerrillas until
recent years. Both provinces also have certain reputations for lawlessness and
impunity, particularly Koh Kong, which is one of Cambodia’s sexual trafficking
hubs.
However, any assumption that torture mostly
occurs in remote, unstable or poorly controlled regions is wrong. Cambodia’s
capital of Phnom Penh is also the capital of police torture. While that may be
due simply to its larger population, senior government and law enforcement
officials cannot fail to be aware of the practice. Torture has been reported at
virtually every police station in the capital and even under the noses of senior
police chiefs at the Ministry of Interior.
In May 1998, five Ministry of Interior policemen
arrested a 38-year-old man accused of breach of trust (a financial or property
crime) in Phnom Penh. Taken to the ministry headquarters, he said he was taken
to a room and kicked for about 30 minutes. From there, he was transferred to the
Phnom Penh municipal penal police, and allegedly blindfolded, handcuffed,
shackled and beaten, including by two people who kicked and stomped on his face.
Later, he was again transferred, this time to the inspection police in Tuol Kork
district, and further kicked and beaten. At one point, the police attempted to
get him to eat a cigarette. “As I was in pain, I answered according to what they
wanted me to say,” the man, who bore scars on his elbow and foot, later
recounted.
·
·
·
Also in May 1998, three men were arrested in
Kompong Speu province by two policemen, one from the provincial police and one
from the Ministry of Interior. Taken to the Ministry of Interior compound in
Phnom Penh, they were interrogated and beaten separately. At least one was
allegedly whipped with wire and hit on the head with a gun. The three men were
accused of stealing a motorbike, but were not sent to court. They were released
the day after their arrest; they stated that they paid more than $600 to the
police for their freedom. Complaints over the alleged torture were filed with
the Kompong Speu police and court; at time of writing, more than a year later,
no action had been taken against the alleged perpetrators.
In particular provinces and police stations, such
as in Koh Kong, there is no doubt that brutal torture has been endemic for
years.
In December 1995, a man accused of robbery and
murder was allegedly detained for 27 nights (more than 13 times the maximum
lawful police detention period of 48 hours) at Sre Ambil district police
station, Koh Kong. According to his subsequent account, he was beaten
unconscious with a plastic pipe on his head and back. He was revived with shocks
from an electric baton. About a week after the first bout of torture, he was
kicked and beaten again. The police administered one form of torture in a
modified manner to avoid leaving permanent scars. For at least two days of his
incarceration, the man was shackled; for seven days, he was not fed. Once, he
tried to commit suicide, and was stopped by a policeman who placed a gun to his
head and then fired twice in the air. The man confessed to murder and robbery
during torture; he was convicted and imprisoned, where he remains.
Such interrogation tactics remain common at Sre
Ambil (see box below) and at other Koh Kong police stations.
In March 1999, a man
suspected of robbery and theft was arrested and detained at Koh Kong’s
provincial criminal police station. Policemen allegedly kicked and beat him
unconscious. A day later, two identified policemen allegedly tortured him, in a
particular manner designed to leave no scars. He fell unconscious again. The
policemen revived him by pouring water over his body, before resuming their
torture and kicking and stomping on him. The man confessed. At time of writing,
he was in pre-trial prison detention.
Box 6.2
UPHOLDING THE
LAW IN SRE AMBIL
The following is
information from people formerly detained at Sre Ambil district penal police
station, Koh Kong province, September-December, 1998. Detainees’ names are not
stated, to protect them. The initials “Y.Y.”, “S.B.” and “K.R” represent the
names of identified Sre Ambil police officers.
Sept 10, 1998:
A man is arrested and detained one night.
Policeman S.B. and an unidentified colleague beat the suspect with a 1.5m long
plastic pipe and kick him.
Sept 10:
A woman is arrested on suspicion of robbery and organized crime. “At the
beginning of the interrogation, the policemen suspected that I hid gold inside
my vagina. So the policemen ordered three women to try to find gold inside my
vagina. Two women held me while one woman pushed her hand inside my vagina; the
second time, I bled a lot.” Licadho medical staff later treat the woman in
prison for a urinary tract infection and vaginitis.
Sept 10:
A man is arrested by militiamen and taken to the
Sre Ambil station. There, an unidentified policeman threatens to torture him
unless he confesses to illegal confinement (kidnapping). The man confesses
against his will.
Sept 21-26:
A man is arrested and accused of illegal
confinement. Sre Ambil police try to extort 5,000 Thai baht from him for his
release. He doesn’t pay. He is detained a total of five days (three days longer
than is lawfully permitted) at several different police stations, and kept
shackled for three of those days.
Oct 1-6:
A man, arrested for breach of trust, is detained
for six days at Sre Ambil. Policeman Y.Y. kicks him in the stomach and smashes
his head against a wall until he bleeds. Two other police demand 3,000 baht to
release him, but the man says he doesn’t have the money.
Oct 1-7:
An arrested man is shackled and beaten during
interrogation. He confesses to fraud because, he says, he could not stand the
pain. He is kept for three days at Sre Ambil and a further three days at another
police station.
Oct 7-21:
A man is detained for 15 days (before being taken
to another police station, in Smach Meanchey district, for another seven days).
At Sre Ambil, he is subjected to near-suffocation with a plastic bag over his
head. Police also place a half-meter long piece of wood on his feet, and stand
on it, crushing his feet.
Oct 7-27:
A man accused of illegal confinement is detained
for 20 days (10 times the lawful detention period) at Sre Ambil. Policemen Y.Y.
and S.B kick and beat him. They also attempt to extort money from him. The man
is then moved to Smach Meanchey police station for another five days.
Oct 20-23:
A man is detained for three days (before being
transferred to two other police stations, including Smach Meanchey, for a
further 10 days). At Sre Ambil, policeman S.B. and other police use a plastic
pipe to beat his back. They also force him to lie down and stomp on his arms,
causing severe swelling.
Nov 19-21:
Policeman Y.Y. kicks and beats a youth aged 16,
accused of robbery, until he is unconscious. The youth is then locked in a room
and kept shackled for three days. He is transferred to Smach Meanchey, where he
is also shackled for two days and nights.
Nov 25-30:
Y.Y. and K.R. kick and beat a 19-year-old man,
and place a plastic bag over his head, in a bid to get him to confess to
firearms and kidnapping charges. He is detained for six days.
Dec 13-22:
A man is detained for nine days. Police whip him over the head with a piece of
plastic cable, and kick him in the stomach and chest. One policeman threatens to
kill him if he does not confess to robbery.
The above are only those cases reported to
Licadho within the four-month period. All of the 12 victims were sent to prison.
Subsequently, one of them was found not guilty at his trial. Four more were
granted temporary release by court order and were not subsequently
re-imprisoned. No known disciplinary or legal action has been taken against any
member of the Sre Ambil penal police for unlawful arrest or detention or the use
of torture.
|
Prison inmates reporting police
mistreatment
|
|
|
|
|
|
The alleged crimes committed by the 567 people in
the Licadho sample ranged from murder to illegal fishing. A majority of the
cases involved offences relating to money or possessions – robbery, theft,
fraud, etc – but this may be due to the fact that these crimes are more common
than others.
Conclusions about which types of criminal
suspects are more likely to be abused in police custody are impossible to draw.
Anecdotally, however, it appears there are several common reasons why a detainee
may be singled out for particularly brutal treatment, including: if a police
officer knows (and dislikes) a criminal suspect; if the police are paid by a
complainant to investigate an alleged crime; and/or if a relative or friend of
the police are victims of the suspect’s alleged crimes. Particularly serious
torture is also common if the police are seeking information such as the
whereabouts of money or stolen goods from a suspect. Extortion of money for the
release of detainees is also common, and can lead to severe torture,
particularly if the police believe that the suspect or his family has money but
refuses to pay them.
|
Prison inmates reporting police
mistreatment
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
·
·
·
The people most seriously
abused by the police do not make it to prisons, or back to their families. The
numbers of people who die at the hands of the police are impossible to precisely
estimate. Documenting (or proving) such killings is difficult and potentially
dangerous; witnesses may be reluctant to talk, the police will often attempt to
cover up the crime, and the courts and other authorities rarely conduct thorough
investigations.
Generally, there are two loose
categories of people killed by the police: those who are deliberately executed,
and those who die during or after beatings or other torture. The lines between
the two are blurred: some people are tortured and then deliberately killed; in
other cases, it is difficult to establish whether the killing was deliberate or
accidental.
Most killings by the police
probably occur outside police stations, and do not involve torture before death;
the victims are usually shot, during or after arrest, or because of personal
disputes or some other reason not related to the perpetrators’ police duties. At
least 56 people were killed by civil or military police personnel, and another
seven killed by mixed groups of authorities that included police officers,
between January 1997 and October 1998. Some, but not most, of these killings may
have involved torture before death.
With regard to clear-cut cases
of deaths in police custody during or after torture, the following victims (with
date of death, and type of custody) have been documented in the past five years:
There is no reason to believe
that this list is comprehensive. It includes only well-documented cases in which
there is eyewitness, photographic or forensic evidence corroborating that the
victim was beaten or otherwise tortured before death. In two cases (Nheak Phat,
Bich Phoeun) the victim was deliberately executed after torture; in the others,
it is not known whether the death was accidental or deliberate.
The seven deceased were all
suspects in criminal investigations, the majority of them for robbery or theft,
and taken into police custody. The only political case is that of Um Hann,
arrested during a police hunt for Khmer Rouge suspects following bomb explosions
in Battambang town. The list excludes numerous other suspicious deaths in
custody in which investigations produced strong (but not conclusive) evidence of
torture, or in which solid evidence of the type of police or other forces
involved is lacking. It also excludes dozens of extrajudicial executions (as
noted above) by police or military, for political or non-political reasons.
Finally, deaths caused by torture in prisons are also excluded.
Suspicious deaths in police custody are usually
officially attributed to suicides, or to injuries inflicted on the victims by
civilians, such as mobs of angry bystanders, before or while being taken into
custody. Examples, from the above list, include:
Tong Sophara
(aka Sanh Thea), aged 23, was arrested
without warrant and detained at the Siem Reap provincial military police
headquarters. Accused of stealing a car from his employer and selling it, he
reportedly had more than $1,000 on him at time of arrest; the money was never
accounted for. Arrested in the evening of May 21, 1996, Sophara was dead by the
following morning. According to the military police, he hanged himself, with his
bootlaces, from a barred ventilation hole in a small detention room. He had been
stripped of his clothes after being detained, ostensibly to prevent a suicide
attempt, but the military police stated that they forgot to take his boots. Tong
Sophara was 5ft 7in (1.7m) tall; the room in which he allegedly hanged himself
was less than four-and-a-half feet (1.37m) tall. According to the official
account, he was facing (rather than with his back to) the wall vent from which
he allegedly hanged himself. Evidence that Sophara was beaten before death
included:
·
His corpse, seen by an independent
observer at Siem Reap hospital on May 22, had numerous wounds: an apparently
broken arm; a cut wrist; a bloody forehead; ribs that appeared to be broken; and
bruises on the torso.
·
Attempts by investigators and Tong
Sophara’s relatives to secure an independent physician to examine the corpse
were prevented by the body being hastily buried by official order.
·
The body was exhumed six days after
death (following repeated requests for official permission by Sophara’s
relatives) and revealed: one broken arm; at least one broken rib; a broken
tooth; puncture wounds; burn marks (possibly electrical); and multiple
contusions.
A complaint over Sophara’s
death was sent to the Siem Reap court by the dead man’s family, assisted by
legal and human rights workers. No legal action was taken. The prosecutor stated
that he was satisfied that the death was a suicide. The prosecutor, in line with
the military police’s explanation, stated that all of Sophara’s injuries were
suffered after death. The forehead injury was attributed to the body falling to
the ground when the bootlaces were cut by police after the body was found; the
circumstances in which the other injuries were supposedly sustained after death
were not explained.
·
·
·
Ok Phea,
a policeman and robber, died in hospital eight
days after being severely beaten by police in Takhmau, Kandal province, in March
1996. According to his wife’s subsequent account, she reluctantly agreed to
Phea’s plan to lure a motorcycle taxi driver to a quiet area and steal his bike.
On March 1, they carried out the plan, but both of them were captured by police
soon afterward, and taken to the Takhmau police station. According to the police
account, Phea was set upon by a group of angry civilians just outside the
station, and beaten unconscious. Witnesses say otherwise: he was conscious and
walking when he entered the police compound, where he was then repeatedly beaten
by both police officers and some civilians. One eyewitness said she saw a
policeman repeatedly strike Phea with a metal petanque ball. Another witness
said Phea fell unconscious inside the police compound after two policemen and
two other people beat him; after he fell unconscious, he was taken into a room
at the police station. Phea’s wife said that she and her husband were then
further beaten inside the station that afternoon and night. The next day, Phea,
who could neither walk nor talk, was sent to prison. He remained there three
days before being sent, unconscious, to hospital, where he died about five days
later.
·
·
·
In May 1996, four farmers
including Um Hann, aged 34, were arrested near their homes in
Battambang’s Moung Russei district, a then militarily unstable area. The arrests
came during a police search for suspects following the planting of bombs by
alleged Khmer Rouge agents in Battambang provincial town. A week before Um
Hann’s arrest, four other men were arrested in Mong Russei; they were taken to
Svay Por district police station in Battambang town and interrogated under
torture, according to human rights workers’ investigations. On the basis of
forced confessions extracted from them, Um Hann and the other three farmers were
then arrested on May 8. Taken to Svay Por station the following day, the four
new suspects were interrogated and tortured by municipal and anti-terrorism
police agents. Um Hann was punched, struck on the head with a spanner and
half-strangled with a krama scarf,
according to investigators’ informants. Taken back to his cell, Um Hann found
the strength to tell another detainee that he would not survive, and to ask that
his wife and child be looked after. He then fell to the ground unconscious and
later died. Police officers disguised his murder as suicide by hanging. The UN
special human rights envoy to Cambodia has publicly stated that “the description
of how the hanging had taken place was less than convincing”, and the official
investigation into the death was “less than impartial”. (Of the total of seven
others arrested and tortured in connection with the alleged Khmer Rouge
bombings, four were released by court order and three convicted and sentenced to
17 years’ imprisonment).
The above three cases, as well as that of Liv
Peng Harn in Kompong Cham, have been categorized by the UN as examples of
victims being “beaten up or otherwise tortured to death”. The best known case,
and the only one in which a (failed) murder prosecution was mounted, is that of
Liv Peng Harn, who was also tortured in custody before allegedly hanging himself
(see Chapter 23 for a detailed account).
It is often difficult to prove that alleged
suicides in police custody were in fact homicides. Professional autopsy and
forensic medical skills are virtually non-existent in Cambodia. Evidence of
torture does not conclusively prove cause of death. But in any case, and
particularly if there is evidence of torture, the police cannot be absolved of
responsibility if a criminal suspects enters a police station alive and leaves
it dead. Even if the police did not directly kill the detainee, beating someone
into a frame of mind where they may be prepared to kill themselves, and
permitting them the tools to do so (a rope, belt, razor, etc), is little better
than murder.
In other cases, however, there is no doubt of
police culpability. Examples include Ry Sarith, who died after being beaten by a
military policeman in Prey Veng (see Chapter 23 for description), Bich
Phoeun, released by the police so that they could then shoot him (see Box
7.3, ‘Mob ‘Justice’’, below), and Nheak Phat.
About 8am on May 28, 1999,
farmer Nheak Phat was plowing his rice field in Kork Tlork Krom commune in
Chikreng district of Siem Reap. A group of about 20 police arrived to arrest
him, accused him of robbery or theft (apparently of oxen). His hands tied, he
was taken some distance away to a rice field at Toul Kork Kmauch, near Toap Siem
village, where he was beaten. Later in the morning, the police visited the home
of his second wife, in search of a gun they believed he owned. His wife said she
knew nothing about a gun; a policeman said he would shoot her if he found the
gun. Her house was searched but no gun found. About 11am, the wife went to see
Nheak Phat at Tuol Kork Kmauch, where the police were holding him. Bleeding from
the mouth, several of his teeth were broken and his tongue was hanging out. His
hands were tied behind his back, and his shoulder appeared to be dislocated.
Nheak Phat, fearing that the police would kill both of them, told his wife to go
home. Later, she was told that her husband was dead. She went to see his body at
the same place she had seen him injured earlier. He was lying face down, hands
tied, wearing only a pair of shorts, with a bullet through his head. His body
bore bruises and other wounds.
This attitude is not limited to the lower ranks.
Detainees tortured at commune and district police stations frequently state that
the chief or deputy chief of the station participated in or was present during
their torture. At a higher level, even top provincial, municipal or national
police chiefs have personally ordered or participated in the unlawful detention
and physical or psychological abuse of detainees, according to victim
testimonies collected by Licadho. Such ‘leading by example’ sends a clear
message to their subordinates that torture is acceptable, and even to be
encouraged.
“The generation of people now aged in their 40s,
who are in charge of the police and military, they are from a background of
extreme violence in war. Violence is all they know,” says the former national
law enforcement official. “You can advocate public transparency, education,
accountability and so on, but at some stage you have to change the police
chiefs.”
Torture is a by-product of chronic problems
within Cambodia’s law enforcement and judicial systems, which are marked by
impunity and the lack of adherence to the rule of law. They include inadequate
police and judicial recruitment procedures, lack of training (or willingness to
use it), low salaries and rampant corruption, and the general failure of the
police and courts to do their jobs as laid down by law.
A person can be arrested by a court-ordered
arrest warrant, or without a warrant if s/he is caught in the act of committing
a crime (in flagrante delicto), according to Cambodian law. An arrested
person can be detained by the police for up to 48 hours before being brought
before a court or released. At the court, the case initially goes to a
prosecutor, who assesses the preliminary evidence; the prosecutor decides
whether to release the suspect without charge or to file an introductive
indictment and refer the case to an investigating judge.
There is nothing in any law which prevents the
police from collecting evidence before an arrest is made – indeed, that
is explicitly necessary for any lawful arrest based on a court warrant. Nor is
there anything which prohibits the police from continuing to collect evidence
after the suspect has been sent to court.
In reality, however, a police investigation into
an alleged crime – or more specifically the collection of evidence against a
suspect – tends to begin with the arrest of the suspect. The police consider
that they then have 48 hours to send a watertight case to the court – and a
confession is the easiest, quickest and most convincing evidence they can get in
that period.
As the then-Minister of Justice Chem Snguon told
the National Assembly’s Commission on Human Rights in 1997: “The problem [of
torture] is that those who arrest still think they have to beat the detainee
otherwise he won’t answer; unlike other countries, here they generally arrest
first and seek to find evidence second…”
Ang Eng Thong, president of the Cambodian Bar
Association, summarizes the police interrogation process: “The [suspect] goes in
front of the police. The police want to get a confession. If they cannot get a
confession, then they use torture. It is usually [by] beating.”
The 48-hour limit
Police and government officials frequently blame
the 48-hour detention proviso as an obstacle which requires that evidence be
found quickly or the suspect be released. As a government speaker at a Licadho
human rights seminar in Kompong Cham in 1996 summed it up: “Only eighty percent
of prisoners are beaten, but what is the option? Under the law, we can only
detain people for forty-eight hours and we lack the expertise to investigate for
evidence.”
Such arguments ignore the fact that the police
are supposed to have some evidence before they arrest and detain someone.
The 48-hour restriction only becomes a problem, logically, if there is no or
little evidence at the time of arrest.
“The police make an arrest and then collect
evidence,” notes Sok Sam Oeun, director of the Cambodian Defenders Project (CDP).
“If they did it [the other way round], then when they make the arrest, they will
have the evidence or at least enough evidence for probable cause. But because
they do not understand this concept [of investigation before arrest], the police
blame the 48-hour period.”
Complaints about the 48-hour stipulation are also
premised on the claim that the police abide by the limit, which is often not
true. Suspects are routinely detained unlawfully for longer periods,
particularly when detainees resist attempts to make them confess, or if the
police are attempting to extort money from them. Licadho has documented numerous
cases of detainees being kept for 5, 10, 20 or more days.
Incommunicado detention
Human rights abuses flourish in secrecy, in
circumstances in which the perpetrators feel free to do as they wish without
fear of being observed, interrupted or challenged. A major problem, which
invites abuses such as torture and unlawful prolonged detention, is that many
suspects are detained incommunicado at police stations, without the ability to
communicate with a friend, relative, lawyer or other outsider.
Even if human rights workers, medical staff,
lawyers or relatives of a detainee are aware of a detention, they may be refused
access to the detainee. If the suspect is being detained unlawfully (for more
than 48 hours), the police are likely to simply deny that they are holding the
person. If the detainee has been beaten, there is an added incentive for the
police not to let anyone see him. It is not uncommon for people detained lengthy
periods to be moved from police station to police station, presumably to avoid
the unlawful detention being discovered by outsiders.
Defence lawyers for criminal suspects are
customarily not appointed until weeks or months after their arrests, by which
time the suspects are usually in pre-trial detention in prison. In the
relatively rare cases where a lawyer is alerted soon after the arrest and seeks
access to the detainee in police custody, “we ask the police to allow us to
participate and listen to the [police] interview [with the suspect],” says Ang
Eng Thong of the Bar Association. “They always say no.”
Ang Eng Thong argues that there is nothing in any
law which prevents a lawyer from visiting a criminal suspect in police custody,
and being present during the police interrogation, but the reality is different.
Sok Sam Oeun of CDP agrees, noting that the main problem is the procedure for
lawyers to be appointed to represent a client: first the lawyer must get the
suspect, or a relative of the suspect, to thumbprint a written request for legal
representation; this request is taken to the court, which officially appoints
the lawyer to represent the suspect.
“If we want to go in [to a police station to
speak to a suspect], the police ask us do you have any appointment from the
court?” says Sok Sam Oeun. “When we go to the court, they say do you have a
thumbprint from your client? And the court says that this case has not yet been
sent to the court, so how can we appoint you?”
This procedure for the appointment of lawyers
appears to be an ad hoc one, and is not spelled out in Cambodian criminal law.
It is a clear barrier to stated government and police policy, which is that
criminal suspects in police custody have the right to have a lawyer present.
Right to communicate with a lawyer or other
representative
The law itself is somewhat ambiguous on exactly
when a criminal suspect’s right to legal counsel begins. The law states that
“the right to assistance of an attorney or counsel is assured for any person
accused of a misdemeanor or a crime”, and that no one can be detained for more
than 48 hours without access to a lawyer, family member or other representative.
There is no explicit provision which requires that a detainee must have access
to a lawyer before, or during, questioning by the police – the time when torture
and forced confession are most likely to occur.
Confusingly, there is one provision in the law
which requires that a criminal suspect’s legal counsel must receive a “copy of
the file of accusation” against the suspect within the initial 48-hour
post-arrest detention period. While this implies that the police have to
communicate with a lawyer nominated by a detainee, the provision falls short of
specifying whether this lawyer can enter the police station and speak to the
suspect.
Once a suspect is sent to court from a police
station, which should be within 48 hours of arrest according to the law, he or
she must be informed of their right to have a lawyer present during
interrogation by an investigating judge. There is, however, no similar proviso
for interrogations by prosecutors, who are usually the first to question
suspects sent to court.
Government policy, however, is that “anyone
placed under arrest is to be informed immediately of the charges against him and
his rights, in particular his right to have a lawyer present”.
Recently-introduced police operating procedures also state that police must
inform suspects of “the right to communicate with a friend or relative to inform
them of where they are detained” and “to communicate with a legal representative
and have that person present during the questioning” by police.
The reality, say former detainees and defence
lawyers, is that these rights are frequently ignored. If the police do inform a
suspect of the right to legal counsel, the explanation given is usually far from
adequate. A standard police practice, according to Sok Sam Oeun of CDP, is to
begin an interrogation by asking the suspect ‘Can you talk by yourself?’. The
suspect, thinking s/he is being asked whether he is physically capable of
speech, replies yes. The police proceed with the interrogation.
“’Can you talk by yourself?’. Of course I can!”
Sok Sam Oeun says with exasperation. “’By yourself’, that means without a
lawyer, but the suspect doesn’t know that. He wants to say ‘I can speak, of
course I can speak’.”
Given the general low level of education in
Cambodia and poor knowledge of the law, many arrested people are not aware of
their legal rights and, even if they are, may well not know how to contact a
lawyer. The right to receive legal advice in police custody is meaningless
unless it is clearly explained to suspects, and they are given the means to
exercise it. Logically, a policeman who intends to force a confession from a
suspect is unlikely to explain their legal rights to them, or to respond to a
request for a lawyer to be present. Without any outside scrutiny, the police
face little deterrent to using whatever methods they wish – including torture to
get a confession – to gather their ‘evidence’.
Box 7.1
TORTURE FOR FUN
While extracting confessions is the usual motive
for police torture, sometimes there is another element -- whether out of
boredom, sadism or drunkenness, some police seem to enjoy torturing detainees
for the amusement of it.
It is not uncommon for police officers to be
drunk when committing torture, usually at night, according to victims.
Sometimes, the torture begins earlier in the day but the police take a break for
their evening meal, and then return drunk to continue the torture.
Some victims report being subjected to degradations and humiliations by their
captors, who stand watching and laughing. Two of the most common are being
forced to strip naked, or being forced to crawl across the ground on hands and
knees. Taunting and ridiculing detainees is common.
An example is the provincial military police in
Battambang, who have a ruthless reputation for torture. In at least five
documented cases in 1998, detainees were forced to jump up and down or walk like
frogs, horses or ducks, or crawl along the ground like snakes. At least one of
the detainees was stripped naked while made to jump like a frog; another was
told to move his ears like a cow, and made to walk around shouting “I’m a female
lion”. Their tormentors stood by laughing, and beat them if they did not follow
the orders properly. All of the victims were also beaten severely at other
times, and forced to confess to various crimes.
Forced confessions & judicial complicity
The main reason why the police force people to
sign confessions is simple: judges and prosecutors accept these confessions.
This violates the Constitution and criminal law, which state that confessions
obtained by physical or mental duress are not admissible as evidence of guilt.
Furthermore, a confession – even if there is no evidence that it was forcibly
extracted – cannot be used to convict an accused unless it is corroborated by
other evidence.
Judges, however, frequently convict people on the
grounds of their confessions, with little or no other evidence, according to
defense lawyers.
“In many cases, the judge convicts on the basis
of a confession,” says Ouk Vandeth, a lawyer with Legal Aid of Cambodia (LAC).
“I ask the judge and prosecutor not to accept confessions without other
evidence, but they do not pay attention to this.”
As well as confessions, convictions are often
also based upon the written statements of witnesses, who are usually police
officers, according to Lean Chenda, first vice-director of LAC. These statements
are accepted into evidence even if the witnesses do not physically appear in
court to testify. This is contrary to the law, which requires that witnesses be
present in court, allowing the opportunity for cross-examination of them, if
their evidence is to be admissible.
Henrot Raken, the prosecutor-general of the Court
of Appeal, agrees that part of the problem is caused by “careless” police. In
some cases, particularly when a policeman catches someone in the act of a crime,
the suspect will confess. "Because the police have a confession, they do not
take care to gather other evidence,” explains Raken.
However, Raken denies that judges usually hand
down convictions on the basis of confessions alone, without other evidence. To
the contrary, he says, an accused person will often, in court, deny a confession
which they allegedly made earlier to the police, and judges have to take notice
of this. This creates another problem, which is that if a judge releases a
suspect because of alleged forced confession in police custody, the police get
angry at the courts.
Defense lawyers, however, say the reality they
see is different. Most victims of forced confession do not recant that
confession when they get to court. “[My] clients are always frightened because
they were intimated, threatened and abused at the police station,” says Ouk
Vandeth of LAC. “I always ask the judge not to accept the confession … [But]
most of the victims still feel intimidated at the court, so they just answer the
same as they answered at the police station.”
Sok Sam Oeun agrees that many suspects, when they
appear in court, repeat all or part of their initial confessions to the police.
“Because of this reason, some judges still support the [use of] torture. Some
judges say ‘Yes, I know about the torture but we benefit from it because at
least part of their [forced] confession was true.”
Judges assume that confessions are true, says Sok
Sam Oeun, who steps up to a blackboard and writes “confession = guilty” on it,
to illustrate the judge’s mind-set. The judiciary, and police, attitude toward
evidence is also a factor: “They think that evidence is written documents. Oral
testimony is not evidence.” Even if a suspect, in court, verbally recants all or
part of his initial written confession to the police, a judge will usually place
more weight on the confession.
With few exceptions, the judiciary tends to be
uninterested in allegations of forced confession or torture of defendants;
raising the issue is not an effective tactic for defense lawyers. “I try to tell
and describe every case where there is torture to the court, but I think it is
not so advantageous for the defense,” Ouk Vandeth says frankly. “When they
describe the abuse, the judge or prosecutor always ask for the evidence [of
torture] … and ask why a complaint was not filed [by the victim] against the
police.”
As judges and prosecutors know full well,
conclusive evidence of torture is often lacking, and most victims are too
frightened to file legal complaints against their torturers.
Lack of Evidence
The key problem of lack of evidence of torture is
compounded by delays in lawyers, human rights workers or others in getting
access to detainees. Bruises and other marks heal over time and – unless there
are permanent disabilities or scars – nothing is left except for the victim’s
testimony.
As noted above, defense lawyers are rarely
present during or soon after police interrogations of criminal suspects. Lawyers
from Cambodia’s three legal defense organizations – LAC, CDP and the Cambodian
Bar Association – are usually appointed by court order, often weeks or months
after the arrest of the accused. (Given the shortage of lawyers in Cambodia,
many defendants, of course, have no lawyer at all.) Frequently, it is not until
the trial is about to be held – long after the arrest, police interrogation, and
court investigation – that a judge will refer a case to a legal organization.
“Often, the court just asks for a lawyer for the trial. They have completed the
investigation and then ask for a lawyer, to complete the file and their
procedures,” says Lean Chenda of LAC.
The delay means that while 80% of LAC clients
report physical abuse of some sort by the police, the vast majority of them do
not have bruises or marks by the time a lawyer sees them. “Most of the time, I
have access to clients about two months [after arrest],” says Ouk Vandeth. “By
then, the bruises are gone.”
It is not only the courts who request lawyers for
accused people. Cases are also referred to defenders organizations by relatives
or friends of detainees, or by human rights groups who visit inmates in prison.
But even when a detainee has signed a written request for a lawyer, it can take
time to get the lawyer officially appointed by a court clerk, prosecutor or
judge. “When I try to get authorization to represent a client, the court,
especially the court clerk, says that he is too busy to give me authorization,”
says Ouk Vandeth. “One case can take one or two months for the authorization to
be given… The court clerk is free to decide [to give authorization] whenever he
wants.”
Other organizations, particularly human rights
groups, can also be frustrated in obtaining access to suspected torture victims
in police stations or prisons. Licadho’s medical team has been subjected to such
delays. As well as constituting a denial of medical treatment for victims, there
is suspicion that the delays are deliberate, designed to allow time for the
marks of torture to fade.
Danh Teav, a Ministry of
Interior official whose wife was an opposition political party reserve candidate
in the July 1998 national elections, was arrested and beaten by Phnom Penh
police a few days before the elections. He and five other men arrested in
connection with his case, who had also been tortured, were sent to prison by
court order. For the next eight days, Danh Teav was denied any outside contact,
despite repeated requests by his lawyer and wife to see him. He was denied
medical care until August 3, two weeks after his arrest and torture. UN human
rights workers were unable to secure government permission to interview him
until August 6.
Often, attempts to conceal evidence of torture
begin much earlier. There is evidence that at least some police try to ensure
that their torture does not leave permanent scars. Victims have told Licadho of
their torturers making statements such as ‘This won’t leave any marks; no one
will believe you’. Also, as noted previously in this report, Licadho has
documented cases of police administering several common forms of torture (which
would usually leave scars) in modified ways that leave no marks or only bruises
that fade over time.
In other cases, the police may decide to detain
the victim longer at a police station, in the hope that the injuries will heal,
while at the same time depriving them of medical treatment.
A woman was badly beaten and
whipped over three days at a Phnom Penh district police station. She was then
kept there for a further seven days, apparently in order for her wounds to have
time to begin to heal. She heard the police saying they were reluctant to send
her to prison “because they thought that the prison would not accept me – my
health was so bad”. After 10 days at the police station, she was sent to T3
prison. Licadho medical staff examined her there a few days later; she still
bore many signs of torture, including bruises, swelling, and obvious wounds from
whipping.
Even if a victim’s body still bears scars by the
time they go to court, it is only their mouth which can reveal how they were
inflicted. A victim’s words can be challenged by the police, who will usually
claim that scars are self-inflicted or the result of beatings by angry civilians
before arrest.
A further issue is the precautions that police
torturers may take to avoid being identified, such as using blindfolds on the
victim during torture. Even if victims want to allege torture to a judge or
prosecutor, their inability to identify the perpetrators inherently weakens
their allegation.
Lack of complaints
In any event, most victims are too frightened to
allege torture. Most of them are reluctant to speak about torture or forced
confession to a prosecutor or a judge, let alone sign a formal complaint against
their torturers. “I encourage my clients to file complaints against the police
but they are too afraid,” says Ouk Vandeth. Not a single client of his, or any
other LAC lawyer, has ever filed a complaint against police for torture.
A number of reasons – including fear of reprisals
from the police and lack of confidence in the judiciary – conspire to prevent
victims from complaining. Perhaps most of all, they are simply not sure that it
will actually help them. “They need freedom first,” says Sok Sam Oeun of
tortured defendants. “They say ‘I just want freedom, that’s enough’.”
As the UN’s representative for human rights in
Cambodia has noted: “Beatings in police custody are so frequent that they are
almost considered ‘normal’ by many victims, who thus do not report or complain
about them. Fear of retaliation by the detaining authorities is an aggravating
factor. Fear that complaining about torture may aggravate their sentence has
also discouraged victims, and often their defenders, from raising the issue in
court. This has led defendants to admit guilt for offences they have not
committed to avoid running the risk of further ill-treatment.”
As the UN human rights envoy noted, legal
defenders themselves may not raise allegations of torture when defending their
clients in court. Licadho and other human rights organizations have documented
numerous cases where lawyers, whether because of fear, complacency or
instructions from their clients, have ignored the torture issue in court. For
example, out of a sample of 29 criminal suspects tortured by police in
Battambang province between 1995-97, at least eight of them were represented at
their trials by defenders who did not raise the torture issue. In one case, a
defendant attempted to tell the judge about the torture, while his defender
remained silent.
Judicial fear or bias
Even when defendants or their lawyers do want to
raise torture allegations, they may soon learn that it is futile. Court
officials frequently ignore allegations of torture put before them.
One reason may be fear: prosecutors and judges,
like anyone else, can be threatened, intimidated or otherwise swayed. The
Cambodian police and military do not have a good record for respecting the
authority and independence of courts. They have resorted to violence, including
by storming or surrounding courthouse, to express unhappiness at court
decisions.
Rivalry, distrust and poor cooperation are
hallmarks of the police and judiciary’s relationship. Both sides regularly blame
each other for corruption and failure to follow the law. The police complain
that the courts release people whom they (the police) consider to be guilty;
prosecutors and judges say the police do not follow correct legal procedures,
and arrest, detain, extort money, and release people without referring them to
the courts.
These problems particularly arise in cases of
torture or other abuses by the police or military police. As Henrot Raken, the
Court of Appeal general-prosecutor, says of forced confessions: “If the
perpetrator, in court, denies what he said at the police station and because of
this reason, the perpetrator is released by the court, then there will be
disagreement between the police and the court".
Many court staff – from clerks to judges – are
reluctant to anger the police or other authorities by investigating or
prosecuting them for torture or other crimes. In theory, the police are
subservient to the judiciary; in practice, they have guns and therefore more
power. Licadho staff who attempt to persuade prosecutors or judges to take
action over police crimes are frequently told “This is a difficult case – it
involves the police”, or some such comment.
While some judges may be genuinely scared to
tackle the issue of torture, that is not to say that all are fearful. Others may
simply consider that police torture is not a crime or legitimate concern of the
courts. Judges are well aware of the police’s use of torture and forced
confession but simply consider it “normal”, says Sok Sam Oeun of CDP.
Even when faced with overwhelming evidence of
torture, some judicial officers turn a blind eye.
A 22-year-old man, accused of
stealing 92,750 Thai baht (about $3,700) from his employer, was arrested by
police in Banan district of Battambang early one morning in August 1997. The
money was not found, so he was severely tortured by policemen who wanted to know
its whereabouts. Taken to the commune police station, the man’s hands were
cuffed and his feet chained. Four commune policemen, whose identities are known,
repeatedly slapped and kicked him, and beat his back with a wooden stick until
he was bleeding and semi-conscious. Around midday, the man was transferred to
the Banan district police station, and again interrogated. A senior district
police officer, and a commune policeman, later took the man to a hill where the
stolen money was allegedly hidden. When the police did not find the money there,
he was beaten again: he was held at gunpoint, slapped and beaten, and kicked
several meters down the hill. Taken back to the district police station, the man
was tortured by the senior officer from about 7pm until 3am. He was hit, kicked
and forced to stand on his head for a long time. The district policeman placed a
plastic bag over the man’s head, nearly suffocating him. The same officer then
burned the bag, dripping hot plastic on the victim’s penis. The man’s back was
also burned with a lit cigarette. The man eventually confessed and told the
police where he had buried the money. The police sent the man, but not the
money, to court. The victim’s account of the torture was corroborated by a
hospital examination and by photographs of his many wounds. He was interviewed
by an investigating judge, who examined his injuries. The judge told Licadho
that the man’s body was blue with bruises, and he had burns to his penis and
back. The judge remarked that the police were very cruel. He acknowledged that
the police had tortured the man to get a confession. Despite the judge’s
knowledge of the torture, he did not initiate a prosecution of the police
responsible. The victim, however, was convicted of theft and sentenced to 12
months imprisonment.
Some judges, indeed, seem to be quite at home
with the concept of torture.
In a June 1996 trial in
Kompong Cham court, “a maniacal judge with a vicious sense of humor” harangued
and intimidated a defendant in a manner bordering on psychological torture. The
defendant was a Vietnamese woman accused of poisoning her victim to steal a
motorcycle. During the trial, the judge twice produced a glass of ‘poison’ – the
same poison that she had allegedly used in her crime, he told her – and demanded
that she drink it. The judge’s reasoning, apparently, was that if she drank the
‘poison’ without hesitation, she could theoretically be innocent; if she
flinched or refused, it would prove her guilt and her intent to poison her
victim. The first time that the judge presented her with the glass, the
defendant “stared at him blankly for a couple of minutes, unsure of what do to,”
two observers of the trial later wrote. “Looking helplessly at her defender, and
then back to the judge, she finally relented to his demand. She drank the
substance and the judge laughed, breaking an awkward silence that had filled the
courtroom.” The trial completed, the judge spent the time set aside for his
deliberations pacing the room, joking with the prosecutor and court clerk. “How
much do you think she should get?” he asked several onlookers. He reasoned out
loud that as a Vietnamese woman, the defendant probably intended to sleep with
her victim before stealing his motorcycle. After his ‘deliberations’, the judge
returned to his chair to deliver his verdict. Before he did so, he forced the
defendant to drink another glass of ‘poison’. “Do you feel dizzy,” he inquired
after she did so, before sarcastically offering to allow her to sit down. The
‘poison’, it turned out, was just water and an innocuous powder; the defendant
got six months in prison.
A defendant or lawyer may well think twice before
raising an allegation of police torture with this particular judge, whose
actions, coincidentally, bear some resemblance to the 13th Century
practice in which suspected thieves were given the choice of confessing or
plunging their hands into boiling oil, safe in the knowledge that if they were
innocent they would supposedly be unhurt.
Whether out of fear, indifference or spite, the
judiciary’s failure to confront torture reinforces the police’s attitude that
beating people is acceptable. As one Phnom Penh prosecutor in a 1996 trial
reportedly yelled at a defendant who complained of forced confession under
police duress, “Court hearings [are] not the place for complaints about police
misconduct”.
Box 7.2
TORTURE OF THE INNOCENTS
As a
Cambodian proverb says, “A thief never admits to being a thief”, so violence or
the threat of it is considered an effective way of loosening a thief’s tongue.
Within this context, there is no presumption of innocence, just criminals who
haven’t confessed yet. The only way a criminal suspect can, perhaps, prove his
innocence is to withstand torture without confessing, which is likely to in turn
lead to more severe torture to overcome his resistance.
Does someone who is not a
thief, but who is falsely suspected of being one by the police, confess in order
to avoid torture? Most police apparently don’t think so, according to a former
provincial policeman. Asked whether the police ever consider the possibility of
an innocent person confessing under torture, he sums up the police attitude: “If
someone gives a confession, they must be guilty.”
Sok Sam Oeun, of the Cambodian
Defenders Project (CDP), takes a somewhat different view. The police are well
aware that some of the people they arrest may be innocent, he argues. But the
police still consider that securing a confession is “the starting point” of a
criminal investigation after an arrest. The only variation, he says, is that a
good police investigator will make inquiries to try to corroborate the
confession afterward, while a bad investigator will simply accept the confession
and consider the case proven.
The reality is that innocent
people are arrested and tortured in Cambodia. Some of them confess. If the
victim is lucky, the police, or the courts, might eventually realize the
mistake.
Kim Phal, a 29-year-old pregnant woman, was arrested in Phnom Penh for theft in
November 1994; she was accused because she had arrived at a house to visit a
friend around the same time as a thief robbed the house next door. Taken to a
police station, she was tortured and then detained in a small toilet for six
days, and given only a bowlful and a bottle of water during that time. At one
point, a policeman taunted her, saying: “I thought you would have hanged
yourself already.” When first taken to court, she collapsed on the floor and
admitted: “Yes, I did steal.” Sent to prison for pre-trial detention, she began
bleeding and had a miscarriage after being transferred to hospital. Kim Phal
later recanted her confession, saying that she had been afraid of being tortured
again. At her trial, in which she was represented by a CDP lawyer, she told the
judge of the police torture: she showed scars on her hands from cigarette burns,
and told how her hearing in one ear was impaired from being slapped in the head.
She stated that, if she had been detained one day longer at the police station,
she probably would have committed suicide. The judge rejected Kim Phal’s
confession – which was the only evidence against her – and found her not guilty
of theft. The judge never, however, mentioned the word torture in his verdict,
and did not seek any investigation of Kim Phal’s alleged torturers.
·
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·
In early 1998, a Kompong Som farmer was arrested on suspicion of
committing robbery. Four policemen smashed a chair over his head, punched and
kicked and struck him with a rifle butt. The torture was designed to extract a
confession from the man, but he resisted giving one. The police eventually
realized they had the wrong man (when the robbery victim told them so), and they
packed him off home with an apology.
At times, the police jump to conclusions about
supposed crimes being committed, without any evidence.
In
October 1998, two men in Kompong Som town, one of them aged in his 60s, went
drinking without their wives’ knowledge. About 8:30-9pm, they were the only
customers at a local restaurant. Worried that their wives might come and find
them, they asked the restaurant owner to turn off the lights, and continued
their drinking by candlelight. A group of police, who were apparently passing
by, saw the two men, thought they were suspicious, and arrested them at
gunpoint. The two men were taken to a police car, where one of them was punched
several times, before being taken to the municipal police commission. They were
punched and kicked repeatedly, and one of them had a gun pressed against his
head, in a bid to get them to confess to planning or committing thefts. The
torture lasted 20-30 minutes, before they were transferred to another police
station. They were eventually released without charge the next day, after
explaining the story of the candlelit drinking session to the police. A
complaint against the police was made to the Kompong Som court; the police were
not prosecuted.
It is usually in such cases (involving a clear
police mistake) in which victims are most willing to file court complaints
against their torturers. Even when they do, prosecutions are – in Licadho’s
experience – never initiated against the police. The complaints are either
ignored, or are settled out of court by the police paying compensation to the
victim.
The number of innocent people who are falsely
accused and tortured by the police is unknown, as is the number of them who
succumb to providing confessions that are not true.
Vietnamese woman Lam Heung, aged 48, had come to Cambodia to visit a dying
relative in Battambang province in June 1996. When she arrived, her relative had
already died. As she was about to return to Vietnam, Heung found herself accused
of theft while shopping in Battambang’s central market on June 18. Someone
grabbed a necklace off another shopper and escaped. The victim clutched her neck
and screamed. A crowd of people focused on Lam Heung, who was nearby, and
started asking her questions in rapid Khmer, which she had difficulty
understanding. Unsatisfied with her response and sensing that she was an
outsider, the crowd concluded that she was the thief and began to beat and kick
her. Members of the crowd searched Heung and found a nail clipper in her handbag
– ‘evidence’, they said, of her guilt – but no necklace. The police arrived and
joined in the attack, kicking and beating her. She was arrested and taken to
Svay Por district police station, where she was robbed of her belongings
(including all her savings, which amounted to about $200). Under interrogation,
in which she denied being a thief, she was punched, kicked and beaten on her
legs with a wooden stick until she was bleeding. A policeman held a pistol at
her head and bragged that if he shot her, nothing would happen to him.
Terrified, Heung confessed to being a thief in order to stop the beatings. She
was detained for two days in a dark room without food or medical attention; she
received only two small cups of water. At one point, as she was screaming loudly
from pain, a policeman entered the room and gave her an injection and some pills
that made her lose consciousness. After two days, she was taken to Battambang
prison and then to court. She was carried into the courthouse because she could
hardly walk, and questioned by a prosecutor who did not inquire about her
injuries or offer her medical attention. Out of fear of being beaten again,
Heung “confessed” to the prosecutor. When NGO workers visited her in prison two
weeks later, Heung was afraid that the police would come to beat her again.
After a month in prison, her legs were infected and still bleeding; five months
later, they still bore scars. At her September 1996 trial, she and her legal
defender told the judge about the torture; photographs of her injuries were also
presented to the court. The judge ignored the torture and her claim of
innocence, convicting her on the grounds of her confession to the prosecutor; no
other evidence was presented against her. Lam Heung was sentenced her to a year
in prison and a fine. The police who tortured her were not prosecuted.
Police and social
attitudes
If the police – and perhaps some judges –
consider harsh treatment of criminal suspects normal, they are, to some extent,
merely reflecting attitudes of wider society. “When we shoot [alleged robbers],
the people are happy and congratulate us,” as Ministry of Interior Chief of
General Staff Mao Chandara has reportedly said. Coincidentally, at least one in
every 13 arrested criminal suspects in Phnom Penh in 1998 was killed or injured
by police during arrest. The beating of alleged criminals at a police station
may be seen in the same light.
In this context, to oppose the torture or
execution of people in police custody is to support thieves, robbers and
killers. “Human rights protect robbers,” is a common refrain addressed to human
rights workers in Cambodia from police and other officials as well as civilians.
“It is sad to see property owners killed by robbers and then see that the
robbers remain alive,” Kompong Cham provincial governor Hun Neng reportedly told
a 1996 human rights seminar. Another speaker at the same seminar, to justify the
beating of criminal suspects to obtain confessions and convictions, reportedly
stated: “If we apply Western standards [of detention and interrogation], all the
crimes will go unpunished.” On another occasion, a senior government minister
remarked in a meeting with human rights workers: “On one hand you have human
rights, and on the other hand you have justice.”
Such statements have a familiar ring to them. It
is common for police and other officials to complain of attempts, usually by
human rights workers, to impose ‘Western’ standards of law and human rights on
Cambodia. The implication is that such an ‘imposition’ somehow does not take
into account the reality of crime and justice in Cambodia.
A justice of sorts?
So what is the current
‘Cambodian’ way of law enforcement, and does it provide a justice of sorts? Does
it weed out the guilty from the innocent, and punish them – even in unlawful
ways, such as torture – in an arguably equal, even-handed manner?
Even the briefest observations of the Cambodian
justice system reveal that any suggestion that criminals receive equal ‘justice’
is spurious. For a start, the innocent may be punished as well as the guilty
(see Box 7.2, above). Secondly, the law enforcement process is chronically
corrupt, and the guilty – if they can literally afford it – can avoid
punishment.
Whether it means avoiding torture and getting out
of a police station, or securing the dropping of charges or an acquittal from a
court, your opportunities for freedom are commensurate with the size of your
wallet. As Ang Eng Thong, of the Bar Association, notes dryly: “You do not see
rich men in prisons. That does not mean that the rich respect the law.”
This is part of a broader picture in which power
or weakness, rather than guilt or innocence, are the dividing lines of justice,
and wider society. “If you look at torture in police custody from a Western
view, it’s terrible, horrible,” says a former government official. “But if you
look at it in the [Cambodian] context of the general populace – where the strong
always abuse the weak – it’s not unusual. It’s cultural.”
Discontent with the
justice system
It is that ‘culture’ of
impunity and injustice which fosters widespread disgruntlement at the justice
system, and encourages more acts of torture and other crimes such as executions,
in a vicious cycle.
“The ordinary people say ‘A robber is arrested
today and in a few days we will see the same face [on the streets] again’,” says
Henrot Raken, the Court of Appeal general-prosecutor. “If a robbery happens,
people don’t have confidence in the police to catch and arrest the robber, and
they do not trust the courts either… They do not have confidence…because they
say the perpetrators are usually released. So they look for other ways to get
justice.”
The alternative way to get justice is torture and
murder. To many Cambodians, the best way to ensure punishment of a robber is to
beat or kill him. Suspected robbers are frequently beaten severely, often to
death, by mobs of people in Cambodia, on city streets and in the countryside. In
documented cases, the police have stood by and watched – if not orchestrated –
the beating of alleged robbers by civilians (see Box 7.3 below).
It is perhaps easier for officials to stick to
the perverse logic by which any attempt to build a rule of law can be labeled as
an attempt to protect criminals. And why should anybody care what happens to
criminals? As a senior Battambang military police commander retorted to a human
rights worker who complained of severe torture of detainees: “What do you want
us to do – treat them like babies?”
Box 7.3
MOB ‘JUSTICE’
A group of students,
watched by several monks, beat two suspected thieves to death in the sacred
grounds of a Buddhist pagoda. University students, studying at the Faculty of
Fine Arts, run to join a crowd beating a suspected robber in a busy city
street; they pick up heavy stones to smash on his head as he lies motionless
on the ground. A man with a mental problem wanders closes to someone’s cow,
and is attacked and beaten to death by the cow owner and other people who
think he is acting strangely and must be a thief.
Cases of vigilante justice
such as these (which all occurred in the past 18 months in Phnom Penh) are not
uncommon in Cambodia, fuelled by popular anger at criminals and lack of trust
in the judiciary.
The police frequently orchestrate or condone
mob violence. They may stand by and watch while torture or murder is carried
out before their eyes, or they may even actively facilitate such crimes by
handing over suspected criminals to violent bystanders.
The true number of such cases, and whether mob
justice is on the rise, is uncertain. However, between July and October 1999,
there were at least 10 incidents in which suspected thieves were beaten by
“angry mobs”, causing the death of 11 people and serious injuries to several
others. In six of these cases, the suspects were in police custody prior to
being beaten to death by mobs.One of the cases was that of Bich Phoeun:
Bich Phoeun, a 22-year-old from
Kompong Cham, came to Phnom Penh with his father around October 11, 1999. They
stayed at the house of Phoeun’s sister and her husband, Kong Vy. Kong Vy
allegedly is a well-known robber who has been arrested more than 30 times; he
never stayed in prison for long because the court always released him,
according to neighbours.
On October 13, Bich Phoeun was
arrested in Dangkor district of Phnom Penh, allegedly in the possession of a
motorcycle which had earlier been stolen at gunpoint. The police alleged that
he, Kong Vy and another man had stolen the motorcycle. Phoeun was the only one
arrested.
After interrogating Phoeun, the
police brought him to show them where his sister’s house was, so they could
search it for Kong Vy and the other alleged accomplice. Neighbours watched as
20-30 police, with motorcycles and two cars, arrived at the house in Russei
Keo district. They dragged Phoeun out of one of the cars by his handcuffs and
butted him with an AK47 on the head.
The police stormed the house but
found only Phoeun’s 70-year-old father. Searching the house, they found four
license plates, mirrors and other motorcycle parts. They took photographs of
Phoeun with the ‘evidence’ of robbery. They interrogated Phoeun about the gun
which the robbers had allegedly used, but he said he didn’t know where it was;
he told them that maybe Kong Vy had it.
The police didn’t believe Phoeun.
They took him to a nearby street, about 70 meters from his house, and removed
his handcuffs and pushed him away. He refused to run away, knowing that he
would be beaten or shot, and crouched down on the ground. A group of moto-dops
(motorcycle taxi drivers) edged closer, picking up pieces of wood and other
weapons.
The police walked away from
Phoeun. The moto-dops, knowing they had the police’s permission, moved in to
attack him. Some kicked him, while others swung wooden sticks – some of them
with protruding nails – over his head. They kicked and beat him on his head,
body, legs. Phoeun begged for mercy, cried and pleaded for his father to help
him, according to witnesses.
Eventually, Phoeun knew he had no
choice. Bleeding profusely, he ran away. His right shoulder appeared to be
broken, but he struggled to remove his shirt and wrap it around his bleeding
head as he ran. He headed toward an area, just across some railway tracks,
where there was some high grass; he was presumably thinking of trying to hide
in the grass. About 15 meters from the railway tracks, a group of police lay
waiting for him. Ambushing him, they opened fire. He died almost immediately.
His body, bearing four bullet wounds, was dragged out and thrown in the middle
of the road.
Some policemen went back to
Phoeun’s sister’s house, where his father was waiting. They told him that his
son had escaped and that he shouldn’t worry. They gave him 2,000 riels (less
than $1).
Photographs were taken of
virtually the entire sequence of events surrounding Phoeun’s beating and
death, and were published in local newspapers. Faces of police officers and
the license plate number of one of their cars were shown clearly in some of
the photographs. Despite this evidence, no prosecution was mounted over
Phoeun’s beating and execution.
·
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·
·
·
·
·
·
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|
Box 9.2 |
|
WATCHING TORTURE |
| One
Kampot court judge cannot deny the use of torture against criminal suspects:
on one occasion, he watched it. In April 1995, guards at Kampot provincial
prison tortured an inmate, who had been detained for alleged robbery and
murder three months earlier. The man was repeatedly beaten, in front of
other prisoners gathered for the occasion. The guards wanted him to admit to
being a robber, which the man strongly denied. Beaten on the back with an
iron bar, he fell to the ground in agony. He tried to get up again and
again, but the guards continued to strike him with the bar, breaking his
left arm. During the torture, an investigating judge and his court clerk
were present, according to inmate testimonies collected by Licadho, but it
was unclear in what role they were there. The injured man was taken to
hospital, where his broken arm was bandaged, and returned to prison |
· · ·
· · ·
· · ·
· · ·
· · ·
In 1994 alone, for example,
the catalogue of Khmer Rouge atrocities included: the killing of at least 16
Cambodians in Kampot province; the ethnic cleansing of Vietnamese civilians,
including the killing of 13 people, nine of them children, in Kandal province,
the kidnapping and/or killing of 11 people in Kompong Chhnang province, and
other abductions or murders in Kratie and Kompong Cham; the interception (and
alleged subsequent murder) of 18 government police officers in Battambang; the
murder of 50 inhabitants of Battambang and abduction of 71 civilians, including
seven women, in one day alone; the rape of female villagers in Banteay Meanchey
and Battambang; and the use in two provinces of entire villages as human shields
to deter government shelling. Also in 1994, information emerged about one Khmer
Rouge prison, in which (government and Khmer Rouge) soldiers and civilians were
held, some of them were shackled 24 hours a day and allowed to bathe only once a
month. Captured government soldiers were reportedly severely beaten, and all the
detainees were said to be sick with malaria and skin diseases from poor hygiene.
(These cases represent known Khmer Rouge abuses cited in two sources only.)
On the Cambodian government side, the military
and police used torture to punish or interrogate suspected Khmer Rouge agents.
At times, they were quick to accuse, without evidence.
On the night of March 6, 1996, bombs (allegedly planted by the Khmer Rouge)
exploded at a government building in Battambang town. Military policemen
arriving at the building saw a man – the building’s night watchman, aged 66 –
and immediately seized him. Marching him from the bombed building, they beat
him, including hitting him on the head with a pistol, causing a 3-4cm long
injury, and in the chest with a rifle. Taken to the Battambang municipal police
station, in Svay Por district, he was threatened with further beatings and death
if he did not confess. Police, presenting him with a bucket of liquid, also
threatened to make him drink salty fish sauce. The man was released without
further injury thanks to the timely arrival of his boss, who vouched for his job
as night watchman, and his innocence. Two months later, the victim still
complained of chest pains, memory loss and poor eyesight, conditions he
attributed to his beating. He quit his job out of concern for his security and
refused to file a complaint to the court for the same reason.
·
·
·
On May 4, 1998, a local
government army chief sent one of his soldiers, along with two civilians, to go
and catch fish in the remote Phnom Krom area of Siem Reap. The three were given
an AK47 rifle each and a ‘letter of permission’ from the chief. While on their
fishing mission, the three were spotted by eight soldiers from another military
unit, who suspected they were Khmer Rouge. The three men were disarmed, arrested
and taken to a Buddhist pagoda. They were tied to a post at a school and beaten
by the eight soldiers’ commander. Two of them were beaten on the head with an
AK47 ammunition magazine, while the other suffered a broken right leg from being
beaten with a piece of wood. They confessed, and were detained in a soldiers’
camp. The two civilians escaped 11 days later and the soldier was eventually
released after the intervention of his chief (who had sent him fishing).
