[Ung Loung] Genocide survivor encourages activism abroad

Loung Ung, in Reeve Memorial Union Wednesday night, recounted stories of genocide in Cambodia. (Photo: Jared Guess, Advance Titan)

Thursday, November 15, 2007
By Felicia Clark
Advance Titan (Univ. of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, USA)

Educating people about the dangers of land mines and consequences of genocide has become a top priority in Loung Ung’s life.

Ung brought tears and laughter to over 300 audience members in Reeve Memorial Union Wednesday night when she told her story of survival during the Cambodian genocide, sponsored by the University Speaker Series.

“Here on this campus, it is possible to forget that we actually live in a world populated by 6.3 billion people, where 50 percent suffer from malnutrition… and 120 million people in the last century have survived some kind of war in their country,” Ung said.

She penned her memoir, “First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers,” and more recently became an activist to educate others about the dangers of land mines that injure up to 18,000 people each year, according to Ung.

“I am an activist writer,” Ung said. “But I’m an activist first and foremost.”

She said she kept a diary to write about her pain and bitterness because she couldn’t talk to her American friends about what had happened, and she wasn’t able to contact her family in Cambodia until 1993.

In Ung’s book she describes her journey from the start of the genocide in her village Phnom Penh, where her siblings and parents were killed, to being trained as a child soldier and her escape to Thailand and eventually America.

One of her most vivid memories took place when her father, Seng Im Ung, was murdered by soldiers in the countryside.

“I knew what was going to happen but didn’t want to believe it,” Ung said. “We knew we couldn’t hide forever.”

One month after her father was killed, her mother, Ay Choung, pushed Ung and her siblings out of the house, telling them to leave and that she could no longer take care of them.

“How could there be beauty when there was only hell on my Earth?” Ung recalled.

She said she became filled with hate for the world that had turned a blind eye to the genocide and death of her family. She said she also began to believe that her mother was weak and never really loved her.

It wasn’t until she came to America and spoke with other female victims of war and genocide that she finally understood why her mother had pushed her out of her life forever. Suddenly, Ung’s view of her mother completely changed. She did it to save her life.

“She was the strongest woman I’ve ever known,” Ung said. “I regret that I didn’t see that for 18 years.”

There were 20,000 mass graves in Cambodia, a country the size of Oregon, according to Ung.

“They weren’t just numbers and statistics, they were people’s brothers and sisters ...” Ung said.

As a child soldier she attended classes where “teachers” told her that everyone thought she and the other soldiers were enemies because they were the future of Cambodia.

“Hate works in not all that mysterious way,” Ung said. “It works because you take hurt children and people and you train them to kill when there’s nothing else left for them to live for.”

Three years, eight months and 21 days later, she found herself in a bomb shelter with friends she made in the labor camps, and at nine years old she felt bombs strike her shelter.

“What games were you playing when you were nine?” Ung asked. “What kind of … plastic guns and weapons did your brothers shoot you with?”

After 15 years of being away from home, she returned to Cambodia, reuniting with her remaining siblings and attended a memorial service for the victims of the Cambodian genocide.

During the ceremony she learned that 20 members of her family had been killed by the Khmer Rouge troops, the communist group responsible for the Cambodian genocide. Since then, she’s devoted her time to bringing justice and reconciliation to Cambodian genocide victims.

“It’s really easy for us sometimes to feel powerless, to feel like we don’t have the power to make a difference to do something about it to change the state of our world,” Ung said. “… I hope to share with you that [that] is wrong, [and] that we do and can make a difference in this world.”

Ung said peace activists have taught her the most important lesson in her life: the understanding that peace is not automatic.

“We’re all lucky to be here in this room, and yet many millions of people all over the world are not as lucky and not as fortunate as us,” Ung said.

She said she believes her testimony proves that activism matters and that people can make a difference.

“Twenty-five years ago I was living on the streets, eating out of garbage cans, hating the world wondering why the world hated me,” Ung said. “And yet somebody somewhere… they got off their couch, they got out their comfort zones… None of us got here on our own, and that’s why we need to give others that helping hand.”

How Buddhism Became Force for Political Activism

Khmer Krom monks protest in Phnom Penh

Buddhist monks protesting in Yangon. Unlike Islam and Christianity, Buddhism has often tended to stand aloof from politics but in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, China and elsewhere in Asia, different strands of Buddhism are a powerful spur to political activism. In September, long-fraying bonds between Buddhist clergy and the generals who run Myanmar snapped when monks took the lead in anti-government protests. (Photo: AP)

MUSCULAR MONKS

From China to Myanmar, Once-Quiescent Creed Spurs New Campaigns

November 7, 2007
By ANDREW HIGGINS
Wall Street Journal

After evening prayers on Sept. 18, the abbot of a small monastery in Myanmar's largest city convened the roughly 30 Buddhist monks in his charge. The bonds between secular and religious authority had broken, the abbot said. Then he gave the monks his blessing to take to the streets in protest.

That meeting, one of many held in monasteries across Myanmar in mid-September, helped turn a sputtering campaign of dissent led by secular democracy activists into a mass movement led by Buddhist clergy. The country formerly known as Burma erupted in the biggest wave of antigovernment demonstrations in nearly 20 years.

"We wanted to stay out of politics," says U Zawtiga, a monk at the monastery in Yangon, formerly Rangoon. But "how can religion thrive when the country is so desperate?" Mr. Zawtiga, active in the protests, fled Yangon after the military started shooting protesters on Sept. 27. He is now in hiding along Myanmar's border with Thailand. His abbot, he says, has been arrested.

The vanguard role of monks in the Burmese protests underscores a curious turn for a creed often associated with quiet contemplation. Unlike Islam and Christianity, Buddhism offers no clear scriptural mandate for revolt against unjust rulers. Rooted in nonviolence, a belief in rebirth and a conviction that salvation lies in the conquest of worldly desires, it has no tradition of crusades or jihad in service of an almighty God.

Across wide swathes of Asia, however, Buddhism has emerged as a powerful spur to political activism. Motives differ from place to place. So, too, do the strands of Buddhism involved. But in each case, the faith has taken the lead in often noisy campaigns for change.

The phenomenon extends from Tibet, where Buddhist monks have doggedly resisted Chinese rule, to Myanmar and several other countries of Southeast Asia, where monks have become a significant political force. Monastic activism has taken on a sinister tone in some places, particularly in Sri Lanka, where hard-line nationalist monks have formed a political party that wants all-out war against rebels of the mostly-Hindu Tamil minority.

In China, meanwhile, a Buddhism-tinged group called Falun Gong has eclipsed a moribund pro-democracy movement as the Communist Party's most determined foe.

Buddhism should "not run away from society but reform society," says Sulak Sivaraksa, a prominent Thai champion of Buddhist activism against poverty and injustice. Focusing on just meditation and the next life, he says, is "not Buddhism but escapism." In 1989, Mr. Sivaraksa helped found the International Network of Engaged Buddhists, a group of Buddhist activists that includes some from Myanmar and also Tibet.

Shocks of Modernization

Christopher Queen, a Harvard University religion lecturer, says the trend began in the latter half of the last century, a time when the shocks of modernization and war prodded many faiths to become increasingly political. Some Roman Catholics embraced "liberation theology" and Muslims increasingly turned to political Islam. For Buddhists, though, activism has involved a fundamental re-reading of their generally quiescent creed.

Buddhism holds that an individual's lot in life is determined by actions -- or karma -- in previous lives. This offers hope that evil leaders will pay a price for their misdeeds in a future life but provides little impetus for immediate action. As a result, for much of its history Buddhism has tended to shore up the status quo.

But Myanmar's current plight demands action in the here and now, says Bo Hla Tint, a Buddhist and member of Myanmar's government-in-exile. "We can't wait," he says. He adds that military strongman Gen. Than Shwe will face further punishment later -- with rebirth as a stray dog or an animal raised for slaughter. Rebirth as a household pet, says Mr. Hla Tint, "is too good for him."

A big factor pushing Myanmar's monks onto the streets is their own economic pain. Dependent on donations of food from an increasingly impoverished populace, monks are going hungry as public almsgiving declines. "If people are starving, how can they give to us? If they suffer, we suffer," says U Kaw Thala, 48 years old, another Yangon monk now moving between safe houses in the Thai-Myanmar border zone.

In contrast to secular activists, who are often easily silenced by arrests and intimidation, these faith-fired Buddhist campaigners have demonstrated tremendous stamina. Such perseverance is often helped by the fact that monks and nuns usually have no spouses or children to worry about. Activists also benefit from a loose but durable support network provided by their faith.

Mr. Zawtiga, the Yangon monk, entered the monkhood at the age of 7. Now 39, he has lived in five different monasteries and has a network of contacts across the country. During the September protests, he traded information with old monastic friends and helped coordinate street protests. His parents are both dead. Two of his brothers are abbots.

When the military started raiding monasteries the night of Sept. 26, Mr. Zawtiga took refuge at the home of a devout Buddhist. The next day, accompanied by two other monks, he traveled by bus to the border with Thailand. Local Buddhists gave him shelter and a set of orange-colored robes to help him pass himself off as a Thai monk. Burmese monks wear burgundy. Mr. Zawtiga stays in touch with monks in Yangon and elsewhere by cellphone.

"Everybody knew the military would use violence," he says. "This was not unexpected. We are not afraid." Students and other pro-democracy forces, he says, have been severely weakened by years of repression but "the Sangha [Sanskrit for Buddhist clergy] is getting stronger and more organized." Last week, more than 100 monks took to the streets again in Pakokku, a town in the center of the country. They chanted a Buddhist prayer associated with the democracy cause.

One of the better-known demonstrations of stalwart Buddhist resistance is in Tibet, a Buddhist theocracy until China invaded in 1950. Its monks again defied Beijing last month by celebrating the U.S. Congress's decision to award its highest civilian honor to the exiled Dalai Lama. Clashes were reported in several towns between Chinese security forces and monks.

Persistence and organization are also hallmarks of China's banned Falun Gong movement, a blend of Buddhism, Chinese folk religions and pseudoscience founded in 1992. After initially tolerating the group, authorities cracked down hard in 1999, branding Falun Gong an "evil cult" and arresting thousands.

Since then, the movement has taken up politics with gusto, promoting a political tract called "The Nine Commentaries," a denunciation of communism written in 2004. Falun Gong has no monks or clergy but, through a web of motivated and well-organized lay followers in Hong Kong and elsewhere, it continues to needle Beijing. A TV station and radio network run out of the U.S. beam anticommunist messages into China.

Toughened Resolve

The head of China's state-controlled Buddhist Association denounced Falun Gong, but a few activist Buddhists rallied to defend the group. Among them was Xu Zhiqiang, a protest leader during China's 1989 democracy movement who, after being released from jail, joined a Buddhist monastery. Buddhism, he says, offered him a sanctuary and also toughened his resolve.

In 2004, Mr. Xu helped in a civil suit filed on behalf of an imprisoned Falun Gong follower. He says he doesn't support Falun Gong's reading of Buddhism but does support religious and political liberty. Last year, authorities booted Mr. Xu out of his monastery, accusing him of corruption and "improper relations" with three female Buddhists. He denies the allegations.

Though often wary of Falun Gong's sometimes cultlike behavior, secular Chinese dissidents voice admiration for its staying power. Democracy campaigner Wei Jingsheng, who spent 19 years in Chinese prisons and now lives in exile in the U.S., isn't a believer but sometimes attends Falun Gong events outside China to show solidarity. At a big July rally in Washington, he looked out on a sea of anti-communist banners and said his own dwindling band of secular democrats "could never get a crowd like this."

Buddhists have moved beyond cloistered contemplation before. In medieval Japan, a time of political turmoil, monasteries ran their own armies. China, too, had warrior monks. Starting in the 13th century, China saw periodic rebellions stirred up by the White Lotus, a Buddhist sect greatly feared by rulers as a symptom of dynastic decline.

Generally, though, Buddhism has tended to support established power. This pattern dates back more than 2,500 years to the religion's founder, Siddhartha Gautama, better known as Buddha or the "enlightened one." A north India aristocrat, he found spiritual liberation -- Nirvana -- through meditation under a tree. Unlike Jesus and Muhammad, he didn't challenge ruling elites.

Roughly two centuries after Siddhartha Gautama's death, King Asoka of India declared Buddhism a state religion. Since then, Asian rulers through the centuries have sought to emulate his example, supporting monasteries in return for the clergy's blessing of their rule.

Washington, struggling to beat back communism in Asia, also saw Buddhism as a potential force for stability. But in 1963, a Vietnamese monk set himself on fire to protest the anti-Buddhist bias of South Vietnam's U.S.-backed Roman Catholic president, Ngo Dinh Diem. Eager to calm Buddhist anger, the U.S. helped topple President Diem.

Even fanatical atheists have cloaked their rule in symbolism borrowed from Buddhism. In May 1975, shortly after their conquest of Cambodia, Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot and his lieutenants retired to a Buddhist sanctuary, the Silver Pagoda, to plot a murderous program that would result in an estimated 1.6 million deaths and include the slaughter of many monks. Pol Pot slept on a raised dais previously used to display a statue of Buddha.

Burma, as Myanmar was known until 1989, has a particularly deep Buddhist heritage. According to Burmese tradition, the faith was first brought to the country by a mission sent by King Asoka in the third century B.C. When Britain seized Burma in the 19th century, loyalty to Buddhism helped rally resistance.

Since independence in 1948, Burmese leaders have all sought to revive the ancient model of close bonds between monastic and state power. More than 80% of the population is Buddhist. U Nu, the country's first prime minister, rebuilt temples and monasteries and, in imitation of King Asoka, held a Buddhist Council that brought together faithful from across Asia. After a 1962 coup brought the military to power, dictator Ne Win, a Buddhist inspired by Marx and Stalin, built two huge new pagodas -- but also purged the clergy of monks suspected of disloyalty.

Democrats tapped Buddhism, too. When students took to the streets in 1988, Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the democracy cause, visited Yangon's Shwedagon Pagoda to call for an end to military rule. Monks joined the movement, which mushroomed into a peaceful mass uprising. In September 1988, the military crushed the protests. As many as 3,000 people died. Nine months later, on June 4, 1989, similar scenes played out in China, Burma's closest ally. Hundreds and possibly many more died when the army launched an assault on Tiananmen Square to end student-led protests.

In both China and Myanmar, democracy activists went into hiding, fled abroad or were jailed. In both countries, various strains of Buddhism helped fill the void as a vehicle for dissent.

China worked hard to shore up the Buddhist bona fides of its increasingly beleaguered allies in Myanmar. Starting in the mid-1990s, it arranged several times to have Buddha's tooth -- a relic greatly revered by Buddhists -- sent from China to Myanmar for display. Myanmar's generals built a special sanctuary to house the tooth and invested in other Buddhism-related construction projects.

The lavish spending on temples won over some monks but in general, ties between the state and the clergy continued to fray. Dissident monks set up the All Burma Young Monks Union to organize resistance to the junta. Ms. Suu Kyi, the opposition leader, reached out to elderly abbots and, while in detention, calmed her nerves by reading a book on the "liberation teachings" of Buddha.

The deepening economic crisis of recent years hit monasteries hard, pushing even apolitical monks toward activism, says Mr. Kaw Thala, the Yangon monk now in hiding. He says he used to collect small donations of rice and other food from around 20 people each week. The number of almsgivers, he says, had dwindled to a handful by this summer.

Meanwhile, soaring unemployment drove many jobless men to seek shelter in monasteries. At a monastery in the hills above Myawaddy, a town on the border with Thailand, a 44-year-old former professional kick boxer explained that he grew too old to practice his martial skills and couldn't find another job. He decided six months ago to become a monk.

Recent Protests

Myanmar's recent protests were initially triggered by an abrupt hike in the price of fuel on Aug. 15. Veteran political activists, mostly former student leaders from 1988, organized a series of small marches and delivered fiery speeches. Most were promptly arrested. The protests died down.

In early September, security forces threw gasoline on the dying embers by manhandling a group of monks in Pakokku, the central Myanmar town where monks marched again last week. Rumors quickly spread of a bloodbath. Senior monks demanded an apology from the military. Officials ignored the plea.

When a mid-September deadline set by monks for an official apology for the Pakokku incident passed, monastic anger bubbled over. At meetings in monasteries across the country, monks denounced the military's failure to apologize and called for action.

Mr. Zawtiga, the monk from Yangon who is now on the run, says discussion of the Pakokku episode dominated the meeting held at his own monastery on Sept. 18. The military "insulted our religion," he says. "We can't tolerate that."

Write to Andrew Higgins at andrew.higgins@wsj.com

Village tours offer glimpse of the "real" Cambodia

Tue Apr 10, 2007
By Thin Lei Win

SIEM REAP, Cambodia (Reuters Life!) - The village where rickshaw driver Buntheoun lives is only 15 minutes away from Cambodia's famed Angkor Wat temples, yet it might as well be hundreds of miles away.

There are no tourists, no signboards depicting the 800-year-old ruins and the gaggle of kids playing among the modest wooden homes aren't pushing you to buy anything.

This is the side of Siem Reap that tourists rarely see, but hotels and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) helping the poverty-stricken villagers want that to change.

Hotels catering to all price ranges now offer travelers a chance to connect with the locals in one of Cambodia's poorest provinces at the same time as seeing the sights.

Earthwalkers, which runs a local guesthouse, organizes tours of the area called "NGO trips", costing $12 and with most of the money going towards villagers, many of whom would otherwise be getting by on less than a dollar a day.

The full-day trip includes visits to local orphanages, a silk farm, a non-profit hospital and a landmine museum -- a grim reminder of Cambodia's recent past, from the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge "Killing Fields" to decades of civil war.

The tours can also include visits to the home of locals who have received aid from the NGO, such as 34-year-old Buntheoun.

Thomas Holdo Hansen, one of the Norwegian siblings who started Earthwalkers five years ago, says visitors to the temples should see the "real" Siem Reap.

"The average length of a tourist stay in Siem Reap is less than three days. Many people come in a group, see the temples and fly out. They don't leave much behind," he said.

"We believe our trips will enhance guests' experience. This is not 'instead of' but 'in addition' to the temples."

The 20-room, basic Earthwalkers hostel bustles with independent travelers and local staff who receive training through the non-profit Earthwalkers Fund.

But if you want to help the locals without sacrificing luxury, stay at the Hotel De La Paix, which offers packages starting from $639 that include a Khmer menu and visits to some of the neediest villages in the province.

SIGHT-SEEING AND SEWING MACHINES

"Our community focus is extended everywhere in the hotel, from the food to the Arts Lounge, which showcases traditional and contemporary Cambodian arts," said Noelene Henderson, the hotel's director of sales and marketing.

With the help of guest donations, the hotel is funding a small sewing centre for disadvantaged girls. Overseen by a monk, the centre will soon produce its first batch of graduates, and each with get her own sewing machine.

"We have 29 girls, mostly from outside Siem Reap, who used to work in brick factories or come from abusive families. They're usually illiterate so we teach them not only sewing skills but English and social skills," said director Hoeurn Somnieng.

Hotel De La Paix's sister property, Shinta Mani, also encourages guests to participate in community projects. The most popular initiative is building water wells, which costs $90, according to General Manager Chitra Vincent.

The hotel can also arrange a visit to the nearby village of Prie, where the parched land has been transformed into fertile fields for 250 families.

Here, kids ride bicycles donated by hotel guests to school, while their parents, including some widows, till the land.

Vincent said the hotel gave the villagers their first bag of rice. "If they can farm well, we give them two pigs," he said. "Then we buy the piglets to give to another family. This gives them $600-$700 -- money they've never had before."

With over 200 registered hotels and guesthouses, Siem Reap is fast becoming a tourist town and the community initiatives are helping make the hospitality here stand out.