The Principle of Double Traumatization

[Ivo Skoric]

In the period immediately following the September 11 tragedy, our 
organization (Raccoon Inc) received a lot of calls from our post-
Yugoslav constituencies, experiencing high levels of anxiety and 
anguish. Indeed, that first week following the attacks, New York 
looked a lot like Sarajevo looked after the market square massacre. 
So, they were afraid that the  war, that they hoped they escaped, 
followed them in their new safe haven. 
(http://balkansnet.org/nada.html)

Apparently, the same is now, following the erruption of the Abu 
Ghraib torture scandal, for the immigrants in the US, who were 
granted asylum here fleeing torture and abuse in their home 
countries: they feel terrified. Because, if Americans are behaving 
just as bad as their countrymen, how can they possibly feel safe 
here?

ivo
------- Forwarded message follows -------
These numbers might be ten times larger if we consider all of 
those/us who suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome as a result 
of domestic torture/rape/abuse.

The Minneapolis Center for Victims of Torture website, which includes
info about current human rights violations & calls for action, is at:
http://www.cvt.org/main.php

For more info about the NYU/Bellevue program, see:
http://www.survivorsoftorture.org/survivors/


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/15/nyregion/15torture.html?pagewanted=a
ll&position=

May 15, 2004
Once Tortured, Now Tormented by Photos
By NINA BERNSTEIN

The moment the television in his small Bronx apartment began to flash
pictures of naked prisoners and grinning guards, Jean Pierre Kamwa
switched it off and went to bed. But like many immigrants who sought
American asylum from torture, Mr. Kamwa, who fled Cameroon in 1999,
said the photographs unleashed a storm of fear and memory that would
not let him sleep.

In the dark, he said, he relived his days as a student activist in
Cameroon, when soldiers from the ruling party imposed martial law. 
Mr.
Kamwa, 34, was repeatedly detained without trial, threatened with
death, and tortured with beatings that damaged his body and seared 
his
mind. After settling in New York, he chose to help victims like
himself as a social service caseworker.

In daylight, he said, he found himself coping with a spike in
anguished calls from his caseload of refugees who had suffered 
similar
abuse at the hands of jailers - the weeping Bulgarian woman in
Brooklyn, the frightened Tibetan man in Queens. Many of them said the
images from Iraq awoke old traumas from distant penal systems, scars
that never healed and that flash easily into pain. For some, the Abu
Ghraib stories even ignited fears for their own safety from an
American government suddenly cast in a harsh new light.

"They don't feel secure anymore," Mr. Kamwa told doctors at the 
Bellevue/N.Y.U. Program for Survivors of Torture, where he himself 
was
treated. "They ask, 'Where to go, how can they be safe in the 
world?'"

There are an estimated 400,000 survivors of foreign torture living in
the United States, and those who work with survivors say about a
quarter of them live in the New York area. While others may debate 
the
fine points of interrogation and the reach of international law, 
these
survivors are now encountering a new dimension of fear, according to
doctors and counselors in the network of specialized torture 
treatment
centers across the country.

"There was a sense of horror and disbelief," said Dr. Allen S. 
Keller,
the director of the program at Bellevue Hospital Center, which 
treated
more than 600 people from 70 countries last year, and gets 5 to 10 
new
referrals a week. "These are individuals who came to this country
seeking safety. We owe it to the torture survivors living in our
country not to condone or practice it."

Rachel Tschida, a spokeswoman for the Center for the Victims of
Torture in Minneapolis, the first such center in the world when it
opened in 1985, said the assumptions of torture victims about America
have suddenly been thrown into question. "The overwhelming feeling,
frankly, is heartbreak," she said.

No city has a higher concentration of torture survivors than New 
York,
where Sept. 11, 2001, and its aftermath already undermined confidence
in the United States as a safe harbor in a violent world. Many, like
Mr. Kamwa, went through additional trauma during months in a 
detention
center near Kennedy Airport before winning political asylum.

But it has been much the same this week in Fridley, Minn., for 
Richard
Oketch, a 53-year-old public school teacher who said he suddenly 
found
his suburban house no refuge from fresh flashbacks to torture 
chambers
in Idi Amin's Uganda.

"It brought me back to where I was - the bodies on the floor, the
naked bodies," said Mr. Oketch, a former patient and current board
member of the torture victims center in Minneapolis. "It's difficult
to comprehend that that can be done by the United States, because it
represents the values that people are looking for - human rights,
safety, security. The first reaction is, it cannot be."

He has been awake until 4 a.m. night after night, he said, reading
stacks of his children's picture books to battle the tormenting 
images
from his past. But a single glance at his subscription copy of Time
magazine, which showed a sketch of a hooded prisoner on its cover,
sent him spiraling back to his own ordeal. Besides being hooded,
beaten and bayoneted, Mr. Oketch, whose family was prominent in
opposition to the Ugandan dictatorship, said he was forced to clean
away dead bodies and mop blood from torture rooms where others were
mutilated.

"I got lost," said Mr. Oketch, whose testimony before Congress in the
mid-1990's helped win passage of federal grants for torture treatment
centers like the one in Minneapolis he credits with winning back his
life. "I didn't expect it at all. It took me a few days to come back
and realize, maybe it's just like where I was, a few people involved,
it's not the entire United States."

The nation's 23 torture treatment centers received $10 million in
federal funds last year, and Congress has authorized - though not yet
appropriated - an increase to $25 million. Additional money goes to
the United Nations for similar centers it helps finance abroad. But
some veterans in the field are now haunted by the prospect that
survivors of torture at American hands could one day be among their
clients.

"You don't get a lot of second chances to build trust with this 
population," said Paul Stein, executive director of the Rocky 
Mountain
Survivors Center in Denver, where the Abu Ghraib revelations changed
the course of a women's support group on family issues, veering the
discussion into anguished accounts of violence and humiliation. "The
country that they trusted to offer them safety and to help explain
torture is now the country that is perpetrating torture."

Some reject that conclusion. "I don't feel like the standard of the
U.S. government has changed," said a Tibetan artist in New York who 
is
still awaiting a decision on his application for asylum and asked 
that
only his first name, Samten, be published.

Yes, he said through a translator, he had been deeply disturbed by 
the
picture of a pile of naked prisoners and an Iraqi on a leash. "I felt
sorry for them," he said. "I was shocked. I never thought prisoners 
of
war would be treated like that."

But then he decided it was the work of a few and tried to put it out
of his mind, he said, holding out his hands to reveal scarred and
pocked palms. Chinese soldiers burned them in an oven, he explained;
doctors at Bellevue, America's oldest public hospital, saved them 
with
surgery.

The scars still burn sometimes, Samten said. The nightmares still
come. "But I am making art again," he said. "And I still believe in
America."

So do some whose faith takes different tack. In a French-speaking
group therapy session run by Hawthorne E. Smith, co-director of
clinical services at the Bellevue program, several West African men
voiced the hope that the full truth will come out in the United 
States
in ways that it never could in their own lands.

Many doctors who treat torture victims have warned for months that 
the
United States was dangerously disregarding the hard-won international
conventions against torture. They were distressed, they said, that
government officials have asserted that interrogation techniques like
"water boarding" - immersing a detainee in water and making him
believe he is going to drown - stops short of torture.

"Make no mistake, that's torture," Dr. Keller said, recalling the
patient from the Ivory Coast who had suffered just such treatment at
the hands of a military faction. Years later, just taking a shower or
being caught in the rain, he would panic and gasp for breath.

Sitting beside him, Mr. Kamwa, an alumnus of the program, closed his
eyes as though in pain, and rubbed the furrows on his brow. "My skin
crawls when I just talk about it," he said softly in French.

"I come here to have a safe place, to be out of these tortures," Mr.
Kamwa said. "But it is still in my heart in America to speak for 
human
rights."


Caption for accompanying illustration (not attached):
Jean Pierre Kamwa, center, with Hawthorne E. Smith, left, and Dr.
Allen S. Keller, who run a New York program for torture victims.
(Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times)

------- End of forwarded message -------------------------------------
---------------------------
Ivo Skoric
19 Baxter Street
Rutland VT 05701
802.775.7257
ivo at balkansnet.org
balkansnet.org