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THE mysterious woman sits for hours at a time,
silently staring at the floor or at the villagers thronging to see
her, fear occasionally flashing across her unsmiling face.
She emerged from the thick
jungles of northeastern Cambodia more than a week ago, her past an
enigma. The family caring for her says she is their daughter, who
disappeared 19 years ago, but there are growing doubts over her
identity.
Yet the family is still adamant
she is Rochom P’ngieng, who they say vanished as a child while
guarding water buffalo.
“I dare anyone to wager $10,000
if they think she is not my daughter,” challenged Sal Lou, a
policeman in isolated Oyadao village.
He said he recognized his child
immediately by an old scar when she was brought from the jungle,
naked and dirty, 10 days ago.
The woman was caught nearby as
she tried to steal food from a farmer. She was hunched over like a
monkey, scavenging the ground for pieces of dried rice in the
forests of Ratanakkiri province, some 600 kilometers northeast of
the capital Phnom Penh.
The woman has tried three times
to escape back into the jungle since being taken to Oyadao, tearing
at the dirty white blouse and patterned skirt in which her would-be
parents have dressed her.
“Over the weekend she acted
crazy—she was scared of the crowds and the journalists trying to
take pictures of her,” said Rochom Ly, 27-year-old Rochom
P’ngieng’s supposed younger brother.
Sal Lou said he wanted the woman
to be taken to Phnom Penh for medical treatment and appealed for the
necessary funds.
But rights advocates say the
woman has obviously suffered some sort of trauma, and possibly
sexual abuse, and should not be taken away from those claiming to be
her family.
A psychologist will travel to the
village Tuesday to examine the woman, said Kek Galabru of the
Cambodian rights group Licadho.
“After that he will decide what
to do . . . we were advised not to take her away from her family
because it will cause new stress,” she told Agence France-Presse.
“We believe she is the victim
of some kind of violence,” she added.
Pen Bunna of the rights group
Adhoc, who visited the woman on Saturday, said she may have
experienced a traumatic event around the time she went missing.
“She may have faced a hard
incident that caused her to wander from the house,” he said,
adding that Adhoc would help pay for medical treatment.
Since the weekend, though, the
woman appears to have become more settled under the glare of curious
villagers and foreign journalists, who have made her an
international story.
Scores of people have come to
watch her, milling around Sal Lou’s ramshackle house, staring
silently at the woman as she sleeps, squats against the wall or is
spoon-fed by Sal Lou’s wife, Rochom Soy.
Many have begun to question Sal
Lou’s story. How, they ask, could a woman from the jungle have
such smooth hands or soft feet. If she had been truly wild, why are
her fingernails neatly trimmed and her hair not a matted tangle,
they say.
Mysterious scars around her wrist
appear to be the result of being bound for long periods of time,
further adding to the questions many have over the woman’s past.
“I am doubtful that she went
missing 19 years ago. I came here to see what she looked like, and
she looks normal like us,” said Dub Thol, who traveled from a
neighboring district to see the woman.
The woman has offered up no clues
as to how she spent the past nearly two decades—uttering
unintelligible grunts or gurgles and communicating only her most
basic needs with simple gestures.
Sal Lou told AFP that despite not
speaking, she has begun to understand his hill tribe language of
Phnong.
“When we talk to her she
understands, but she cannot reply to us. This is because she has
forgotten the language, she has not spoken it for a long time,” he
said.
“She follows what we tell her
to do. When we tell her to sit, she sits. When we tell her to sleep,
she sleeps and when we tell her to stand up, she stands up.
“So, sooner or later, she will
know how to speak. From day to day, she has begun to understand.”
The jungles of Ratanakkiri—some
of the most isolated and wild in Cambodia—are known to have held
hidden groups of hill tribes in the recent past.
In November 2004, 34 people from
four hill tribe families emerged from the dense forest where they
had fled in 1979 after the fall of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime,
which they supported.
They had lived in the jungle in
total isolation for a quarter of a century, limiting speech for fear
of detection and moving at any sight of an unfamiliar footprint or a
freshly cut tree.
--AFP
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