Some stories appear that are so heartbreaking, so upsetting to those of a specific frame of mind that one wonders how those people involved in it can even manage to live day-to-day.
Cambodia, that profound orphan of nations, cannot seem to climb out of the shadow of its own recent past - a shadow that even peripherally involves us. But a few small green shoots of hope are finally beginning to sprout up through the wreckage of Cambodia's past.
Please follow me below the fold for a brief parable about the unrequited justice of a distant international tragedy, a frail light of hope that also emerged from that country, and what all this might possibly mean for us.
Slate, in a startling piece,reveals how this country, dotted with thousands of mass graves, is finally beginning to come to terms with its terrifying recent past while for the vast bulk of Cambodians, little has changed in the last thirty years.
SRE LIEV, Cambodia—Squatting before the mound of bones, 68-year-old Chey Mao held her blue flip-flops in one hand and a fragment of skull in the other. "I'm looking for silver or gold—I need it to buy medicine," she explained as she poked through the remains of her compatriots with a wrinkled finger.
Beneath the woman's bare feet lay some 1,000 victims of the Khmer Rouge—save a few hundred souls whose bones were recently unearthed when villagers ransacked the killing field for gold.
A local farmer first spied a shiny earring inside the mass grave last month, when Vietnamese soldiers searching for the remains of their own POWs began digging at the site. The news traveled fast, and soon more than 400 gold-seeking villagers were hacking away at the ground in Sre Liev, a remote settlement about 80 miles southwest of the capital. By the week's end, they had unearthed a total of 27 gold earrings and a single gold necklace in the macabre treasure hunt.
Many Americans (though not from this site, I expect) do not even know where Cambodia is on a map. Cambodia is most widely known as the country that Kissinger and Nixon secretly invaded in 1970 in an ultimately futile effort to disrupt the North Vietnamese Army's supply lines.
Most painfully of all, Cambodia is the site of one of the worst genocides of the latter half of the twentieth century. Almost two million Cambodians died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge in a brutally short 3 1/2 year period, terminated only by a Vietnamese invasion to prevent the Khmers from killing off any more Vietnamese living there. This, in a nation of a mere six million people at the time the Americans fled Saigon in 1975.
Pol Pot and Ta Mok's child killers set out to destroy any Cambodians that even appeared to be educated or to have any vestige of independence, intelligence or worldly success. If you wore glasses, for example, you received a bullet in the back of the head and a muddy grave along with hundreds just like you. Or you could be beaten to death with shovels by a bunch of ten-year-olds.
To this day, Cambodia has not convicted or even prosecuted a single Khmer Rouge for their crimes. Thousands of these child killers still walk free in Cambodia:
To date, not a single individual has been held accountable for the atrocities of the ultra-Maoist regime that has been blamed for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians. When the regime ended in 1979, former Khmer Rouge officers were simply absorbed back into the power structure, and time has made the distinctions between victim and perpetrator even hazier. The nation's textbooks barely address the period, and an entire generation has grown up knowing astonishingly little about the traumas the country suffered.
Finally, according to the Washington Post,in most halting fashion, a chance exists that some of these aging butchers will experience a form of accountability. Unfortunately, most of the ones who remain live freely inside the country and the top two leaders, Pol Pot and Ta Mok, are beyond the reach of justice, having died in the jungle or in custody before trial, respectively.
Also in halting fashion, an actual textbook has finally been written in the Cambodian native language to explain to the current generations what happened to their parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles thirty years ago.
While Cambodia struggles to come to terms with its past, in the misty fields of this intensely Buddhist country where so many died long ago, bodies are being dug up for the gold teeth and trinkets possessed by those who died violently.
After the crowds had dispersed, one Sre Liev villager took it upon himself to gather the shards of bone that the diggers had left behind in puddles of muddy water. "It's not quiet here," said Sao Son as he draped a few large leaves over the remains to shield them from the steady drizzle. "I put them in one place so the monks can come and give a prayer."
A few diggers had been lucky enough to find a bit of gold to buy a cow or a week's worth of provisions for their family. But the victims' ghosts came to haunt them, too, howling in their homes after the gold-digging spree ended, said Chuon Da, the landowner's husband. "The diggers will have a [Buddhist] ceremony this week—to express their thanks for finding the jewelry," he said, watching as three children chased each other inside an upturned grave, pulling at each other's muddied skirts.
I for one cannot imagine being so desperately poor that I would need to dig through a mass grave to find the sustenance I needed to buy a cow or a week's food. The ghosts of a murdered country are being disturbed because people are starving to death in that country's hinterland.
One cannot legitimately say that America's actions in Cambodia - secretly bombing and invading the country - had any effect in agitating the Khmer Rouge. This statement has been raised in the past without any objective evidence to support it. The ideological madness of the Khmer Rouge and other entities does not need an explosive-driven stimulus to perform its evil work. However, America's footprints remain in this region, and is it really such a stretch to equate the consequences of our invasion of Iraq with the events in Cambodia those decades ago?
The consequences of our actions in Iraq have yet to be fully borne. One thing, to my mind, is certain: if America does not hold its current Administration officials accountable for their crimes and their consequences, whatever they may ultimately be, we risk at least a pale imitation of the current Cambodian fate - the desire to forget the past without any effort at reconciliation and accountability.
It may be that the United States may have to form a constitutional court to try the highest officials of the current Administration in order to expiate and repair the damage that has been done to the Republic of the United States.
In my view, nothing else will be sufficient. Only after fully acknowledging our mistakes can our country endeavor to clean up the messes we as a country have made in six short years.
And what of little, orphaned Cambodia? I would like to think that the upcoming tribunals will make a difference. However, even if they don't, there is a still a small light in the Cambodian soul that gives hope. I would like to conclude this depressing discussion with a note about a Cambodian saint named Preah Maha Ghosananda, who was a Buddhist monk that lived through the Khmer Rouge era. He was isolated in a Thailand hermitage for many years until 1978, when he went to refugee camps and found out about the destruction of his homeland.
Now, it is only because of the March 24th issue of The Economist that this person came to my knowledge. All further quotes are from that back-page article, which can be followed through the link above.
In the early 90's the Cambodian government, which had been installed following the Vietnamese invasion that finally put paid to the bulk of the Khmer Rouge's crimes, was still fighting a bush war with the remnants of the Khmer Rouge, who were still led by Pol Pot at the time. Violence still ruled many parts of the Cambodian countryside.
Where he walked was often remote, but it was neither safe nor quiet. He would tread, a little bird-like man with hands folded and head bowed, along narrow paths that threaded through the jungle-forests of central Cambodia....
Though Ghosananda led these Dhammayietra, or "Pilgrimages of Truth" in the early 1990s, well after the signing of peace accords to end a civil war between the remnants of the murderous Khmers Rouges and the new, Vietnamese-backed Cambodian government, he often found war still raging. Shells screamed over the walkers, and firefights broke out round them. Some were killed. The more timid ran home, but Ghosananda had chosen his routes deliberately to pass through areas of conflict...
Many of the villagers they met had not seen a Buddhist monk for years. In the old Cambodia, before the Khmers Rouges in April 1975 had proclaimed a new Utopian era, "forest-monks" had been a part of rural life, wandering through with staves and bowls, exchanging a handful of rice for a blessing. Now, though the Khmers Rouges had outlawed nostalgia, had razed the monasteries and thrown the mutilated Buddha-statues into the rivers, old habits stirred. As they caught Ghosananda's chant, "Hate can never be appeased by hate; hate can only be appeased by love", soldiers laid down their arms and knelt by the side of the road. Villagers brought water to be blessed, and plunged glowing incense sticks into it to signal the end of war...
More of the fascinating details can be read in the article linked to above. I strongly recommend taking them to heart. I will not quote them here, except for a Buddhist epigram:
With a boundless heart
Should one cherish all living beings:
Radiating love over the entire world
Spreading upwards to the skies,
And downwards to the depths...
When things seem blackest and there appears to be no hope, when one is intensely frustrated with one's ostensible allies and friends, it is well to be aware that a larger purpose also exists. Sometimes, that larger purpose is extremely difficult and demanding, requiring acts like walking barefoot through active battlegrounds to create peace where none exists. Sometimes, that larger purpose requires us to forgive our friends and allies their errors while renewing our call more strongly to redress the mistakes we have made.
Sometimes, it's good to recall that we are all grains of sand, and that all the doings of America, as compellingly important as they are to all of us here, are utterly insignificant in the broader scale of existence, the scale of which we cannot even begin to fathom. The egoism of human beings (including myself) is unstoppable. While we go out to pursue our work and our defense of freedom in this country, let's not forget that anger rarely changes many minds.
But Republicans? All bets are off. Go get 'em. Anger is understandable. Determination is vital. We have the WPE (Worst President Ever) and a regime of sociopaths populating the Federal government.
In this case, Buddhism isn't enough. Resistance is critical. Keep fighting. To save our country, for our children, keep fighting.