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CROSS-CULTURAL PSYCHIATRY IN MEDICAL-LEGAL DOCUMENTATION OF SUFFERING Human Rights Abuses InvolvingTransnational Corporations and theYadana Pipeline Project in Burma Kathleen Allden 15 This chapter describes the suffering and hardship of several villagers from Burma who are now refugees inThailand.Their life experiences reflect the large population of villagers whose families were forced to leave their homes and villages to make way for the construction of a natural gas pipeline in theTenasserim region of Burma by US and French transnational oil companies in collaboration with the Burmese military government (EarthRights News b).The villagers, mostly ethnic Karen people, were subjected to forced labor, torture, rape, death of family members, and other severe human rights abuses.The consequences of the atrocities committed during the construction of the pipeline continue to have farreaching effects on the lives of the villagers.They live as“illegal migrants”in rural villages or as “displaced persons” in refugee camps inThailand.As such, they are not allowed to work legally, which makes it extremely hard to support and feed their families and has resulted in poverty and desperation. In a precedent-setting human rights legal case, eleven villagers are suing the Unocal Corporation for the damage done to them. The plaintiffs in the suit against Unocal are using the AlienTort Claims Act to prosecute the corporation for human rights abuses that it allegedly colluded in and/or committed in Burma.The AlienTort Claims Act states: “The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States” (AlienTort ClaimsAct ). The attorneys representing the plaintiffs asked the author to perform psychiatric/psychological evaluations on each plaintiff to help document the 397 pain and suffering they endured.The information will be used for expert testimony in the case against Unocal. Since the early s, medical and psychiatric experts have increasingly been involved in the legal investigation of human rights abuses. The purposes of medical and psychiatric evaluations and expert testimony include reports of assessments of individuals who allege torture and ill treatment to judiciary bodies such as war crimes tribunals; human rights investigations monitoring; assessment of individuals seeking political asylum; defense of individuals who “confess” to crimes during torture; and assessment of needs for clinical care of torture victims and other victims of human rights abuse. The psychiatrist is conferred the special job of ascertaining an individual’s credibility and of qualitatively documenting his or her suffering. In performing these tasks, the psychiatrist who works with victims of human rights abuses must be sensitive to particular historical, social, and political contexts, as well as to the specific cultural, interpersonal, psychological, and even biological contexts unique to each individual (Kleinman ). Multiple layers of analysis are required to capture and understand the complexity of meanings of the events to the individual, as well as the meanings of symptomatic reactions and the events’ consequences to the individual (Engelhardt ; Westermeyer ). Because this work is usually performed by psychiatrists from different cultures and countries than the victims, psychiatrists have to deal with the tension between what is universal in a victim’s experience and what is culturally specific (Friedman and Jaranson ). Additionally, these tasks present the psychiatrist with a complexity of roles.As caregivers, psychiatrists are concerned with easing the pain of the victims, but during the investigation and documentation of human rights abuses, psychiatrists are also intervening as political actors, criminal investigators, and scholars. As a political actor, the psychiatrist can be viewed as an activist, a player in a worldwide campaign to raise human rights standards and prevent human rights abuses.As a criminal investigator, the psychiatrist gathers evidence in interviews that can be used to prosecute torturers, war criminals, and those who perpetrate or authorize torture and human rights abuse. As a scholar, the psychiatrist may also strive to expand his or her profession’s collective knowledge of how the human mind works and how human beings respond and heal after traumatic assaults and atrocities.Arguably, rather than conflict or detract from one another, these roles complement, enrich, and augment each other. This chapter briefly reviews how the author and other medical, psychiatric, and forensic experts developed international guidelines for medical-legal investigation of torture and severe human rights abuses, and it introduces the reader to the new United Nations document, “Manual on Effective InvestigaMadness , Alterity, and Psychiatry 398 [3.131.110.169] Project MUSE...

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