The Face of Torture, by Susan Dicklitch

Torture is an ugly word. But what does it really look like? I recently found out when I sat through the testimony of a thirty-something Cameroonian woman who was seeking asylum in the United States.
Claudette (not her real name) clutched her hands nervously as she sat in the sterile immigration courtroom. She was surrounded by her support team, a Harvard-trained pro-bono lawyer working for a large law firm in Washington, a clinical psychologist specializing on victims of torture, a representative from C.A.i.R Coalition (Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition), and me, a country conditions expert on Cameroon.
Within two to three hours, Claudette would find out her fate – whether she would remain in the United States, or be deported back to Cameroon and possibly face more torture. It was no wonder that she was so nervous. Only one out of five asylum cases that are referred to an immigration judge are granted asylum.
It is estimated that about 5,000 asylum seekers are held in detention in the United States, awaiting their immigration court hearing. Since 1996 with the implementation of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), any asylum seeker who enters the United States without proper documentation is detained. Also, unlike criminal law, asylum seekers are not entitled to the equivalent of a public defender. If they can afford to hire a lawyer, or have pro-bono legal advice, they are lucky, if not, they have to present their case in an adversarial hearing, pro se, in front of a government trial attorney, and an Immigration Judge. Asylum seekers have to prove that they have both a subjectively and objectively credible “well-founded fear” of past persecution and/or future persecution.
Claudette had a better chance than most – she had a team of experts working for her, and she was not in detention.
But this was little consolation to Claudette who looked so frail and scared, struggling to retell her encounter with torture. She spoke of being forced to watch others being tortured, of being threatened with rape and electrocution of her private parts. She showed us scares from cigarette butts put out on her arm, and she recounted how she was forced to clean up the human feces left in the prison cells. It was the smell that still haunts her on a daily basis, so much so that she refuses to eat very much to avoid having to defecate.
She started to talk about her third and final detention in one of Cameroon’s most notorious prisons, La Gendarmerie du Lac. Because she was Francophone and required a government-issued translator, there was often a pregnant pause between questions from the Immigration Judge and the BICE (Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement) trial attorney, and the translated response. When the translator asked her to repeat herself at one point, Claudette lost it, screaming out, “du Lac”, “du Lac”, sobbing uncontrollably. Everyone in the courtroom froze, as Claudette gushed out a guttural “kkkkkk” sound, unable to stop reliving her traumatic experiences.
Thankfully, the Judge, sensing the inhumanity of making her continue with her testimony ordered everyone out of the courtroom except for Claudette’s psychologist. I sat in the waiting room with the others, avoiding their eyes, and trying to hide my tears, shocked by my own reaction to Claudette’s testimony. We tried to ignore the continuing shrieks coming from Courtroom 4.
But why would this soft-spoken, intelligent woman be subjected to torture by government security forces? Was she a terrorist, a freedom-fighter, or a threat to society?
Claudette was detained and tortured because she dared to express her political opinion. She had participated in political demonstrations in Cameroon against the government’s detention of a prominent journalist, and the murder of nine boys (the infamous Bependa 9) by a government-sponsored shady paramilitary group called the Operational Command.
I was intimately familiar with Claudette’s case, having read it many times whilst preparing my own affidavit in support of her asylum case. But I never felt her case.
All of us in that courtroom shared the anguish of having to watch Claudette relive her torture – what psychologists call secondary trauma. We shared the shame of humanity that allowed this to happen to this mother of two, but most of all, we shared an unspoken relief that we live in a country that continues to allow individuals to freely express their political opinion, and even protest in the streets without being arrested or detained.
Claudette was granted asylum that day, but she will never be free from the scars of her torture. We got off lucky that day, we just stared torture in the face.