Nearly 30 years ago, the human legacy of one of America’s other dirty little wars came stumbling out of the forests along the Thai-Cambodian border. Aid workers who set up makeshift camps for them just inside Thailand described them as “walking skeletons.” They brought with them chilling stories of brutality and murder perpetrated by the “Angkar” - the Organization - the name the Communist Khmer Rouge gave to their government.

In the camps, the refugees were met by a small figure in orange robes who, with a bow of his head, handed each one a slip of paper inscribed in the flowing Cambodian script with the teaching of the Buddha:
“Hatred is not overcome by hatred; hatred is overcome by love. This is a law eternal.”

This monk in the orange robes was Maha Ghosananda, sometimes called the Gandhi of Cambodia. His recent death (read NY Times obit) has made me reflect on peacemaking, reconciliation, and the old adage that those who do not remember their history are doomed to repeat it.

In 1969, the US government was in a situation eerily similar to the one we are in today - after years of intensive fighting, the Vietnamese insurgency was stronger than ever. Military intelligence reports suggested that the elusive COSVN HQ (Central Office for South Vietnam, Headquarters) was located just inside the Cambodian border - a country with which the US was not currently at war. Most histories of the Vietnam War that I have read conclude that the COSVN was largely a figment of the Pentagon’s imagination - the Viet Cong leadership was highly mobile and decentralized. Nevertheless, the Nixon administration was convinced that Operation Breakfast - the carpet-bombing of 48 1 square mile “target boxes” inside Cambodia would destroy COSVN HQ and break the back of the Viet Cong insurgency.

“Once the decision had been made in principle that Communist violations of Cambodia’s neutrality justified aggressive reciprocal action, it was not difficult to repeat the performance.” writes William Shawcross in his brilliant history of the US in Cambodia, Sideshow. Operation Breakfast was soon followed by Operations Lunch, Snack, Dinner, Dessert, and Supper. Current estimates are that the US dropped 2,756,941 tons’ worth of bombs, in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites in Cambodia. Not all of this ordinance exploded on impact - these bombs are still killing and maiming even today.
In 1970, US and South Vietnamese ground troops invaded Cambodia to drive out the Viet Cong. College campuses across the US went up in flames. 15 students were shot in anti-war protests, and 4 were killed by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio. The bombing and search-and-destroy missions on the ground in the Cambodian countryside swelled the numbers of Khmer Rouge from 3,000 in 1970 to 30,000 in 1973. By 1975, as the US prepared to pull out of Indochina, the Khmer Rouge controlled most of the country except for the capital, Phnom Penh.

5 days after the last helicopters left the US Embassy compound in Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge marched into the capital. “April 17, 1975 was Day Zero for the new Cambodia - two thousand years of Khmer history were now meaningless.” The first step in the Khmer Rouge’s utopian communist vision for Cambodia was to eliminate all potential sources of opposition to the new state. Though Pol Pot and the other KR leaders had PhD’s from the Sorbonne in Paris, intellectuals and skilled workers were targeted. The Buddhist religion was a special target, as a relic of feudalism. Monks and nuns were killed or forced to violate their vows at gunpoint. Temples were destroyed and ancient Buddhists texts used to roll cigarettes.

Maha Ghosananda was studying meditation in a forest sangha in Thailand when Phnom Penh fell. (The Theraveda Buddhist tradition unites Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Burma) “Every day he listened to news from Cambodia on the radio, and was beset by anguish. His meditation master advised him to concentrate on his spiritual practice - to foster peace within his own heart - and to wait for the right time to return to his people.“

That time came in 1978 with the first wave of refugees from Cambodia. Then in 1979, the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia ( a weird twist on the feared “domino effect”), driving both the Khmer Rouge oppressors and the oppressed peasants into new refugee camps. Maha Ghosananda went there too, setting up temples and spreading the message of compassion and reconciliation: “What is the opponent but a being in ignorance? And we ourselves are also ignorant of many things.”

This message may appear too “soft” to some, too unrealistic. Surely what the Cambodians needed was a war crimes tribunal, not a message of forgiveness. In fact, there were few alternatives available to the Cambodians, other than figuring out how to live together in a new reality. For years after 1979, as continued civil war raged in Cambodia, the U.N. seat for Cambodia was occupied by the Khmer Rouge government in exile, rather than the Vietnamese-backed government that had abolished the killing fields. This was due mostly to US pressure, because our leaders could not deal with the fact of our own defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese. Of course, the US media and entertainment industry offered their version of rescue to the refugees: a brief period of intensive news coverage and a Hollywood movie. Humanitarian aid flowed freely for a while and a certain number of asylum applications were granted before compassion fatigue set in. In the event, a war crimes tribunal to try KR leaders was not convened until 2006, after Pol Pot had died.
Throughout the 1980’s, Maha Ghosananda continued the rebuilding of Buddhism within Cambodia and in the Cambodian diaspora throughout the world. In 1991, he led the first Dhammayietra peace walk (literally “Pilgrimmage of Truth”) to encourage refugees to return to Cambodia and vote in the UN-sponsored elections. These walks were repeated year after year, often serving to raise awareness and action about the problems Cambodia faced such as land mine removal and deforestation.

He never wavered in his message of reconciliation to those who had murdered his family and most of his fellow monks:

“It is a law of the universe that retaliation, hatred, and revenge only continue the cycle and never stop it,’ he wrote in his book of Dharma talks, Step by Step:. ‘Reconciliation does not mean that we surrender rights and conditions, but rather that we use love. Our wisdom and our compassion must walk together. Having one without the other is like walking on one foot; you will fall. Balancing the two, you will walk very well, step by step.”

He participated in many interfaith dialogues on peacemaking, and in 1994 he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Alan Channer wrote of his encounter with Maha Ghosananda:

The fact that Maha Ghosananda had taken Christ’s teaching, ‘Love thine enemy’, further than any Christian I had ever heard of, put me in awe. I found my own inner conflicts and fears dissolving. I ventured to continue by asking how ordinary people like me could become a peace-maker.

“Just take care of yourself,” he said. “Just love yourself. Be compassionate with yourself. Then you are a peace-maker. Peace begins with you.”

I was taken aback. He sat there blinking peacefully. “If I love myself I may want to take something from somebody else,” I said. “If you love yourself in the truth,” he replied, “you do not take things from other people. Stealing makes you unhappy and it makes other people unhappy.”

He went on to list the five moral precepts of Buddhism - refraining from killing, stealing, lying, sexual misconduct and taking intoxicants. He seemed to see these as guidelines for both the love of oneself and the love of others. As a Christian, I couldn’t help making comparisons with my own faith-the moral principles were remarkably similar; the theology very different. I asked if he saw religious differences as a source of conflict. He replied, “If they know the truth there is no conflict,” and looked towards his Jesuit friend, Bob Maat, who was sitting on the floor in the far corner of the room. “Like our friend with Christ here - there is no conflict!” The patriarch then pointed to the bookshelf and said, “All these belong to him. We have many books about Christ now.”

What was Maat’s perspective? The blond American referred to Gandhi’s advice that when you study someone else’s religion you learn more about your own. “That has been a lived experience for me,” he said. “I have learned so much about what it means to be Christian, Catholic and Jesuit from Buddhist friends. Maha Ghosananda said, ‘If you want to work for peace in my country, come follow me.’ He didn’t tell me what to do, how to do it, what to be, how to act as a Catholic. He just said, ‘Come walk with me.’”

Maat, like hundreds of Buddhist monks, nuns and laypeople, has followed Maha Ghosananda on peace marches throughout the Cambodian countryside during the last two years. “People would sit along the road,” he recalled, “with a bucket of water and an incense stick - this would be at three or four in the morning when we would begin the walks. And everyone would bless each person with water, would wish them peace in their own heart, peace in the country. And people would just weep, especially old people. It really showed me you can destroy all the temples, you can take every sign and symbol of a religion away from a people, but you can’t take it out of the human heart.”

I worked with refugees from Indochina in the late 1980’s and the news of Maha Ghosananda’s death brought those experiences back to me. But for most Americans, I think Maha Ghosananda’s life and death passed mostly unnoticed. Our attention is taken up by another war, another quagmire.

I can’t help reflecting how seductive the promise of war and violence is. It seems such a simple, quick solution to our problems. How easy it is to start a war, and how long it takes to rebuild and heal from the wounds of war. War is easy; peace is hard.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 24th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Current Events, Politics, Religion, Uncategorized, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.