The Dalai Lama’s very equanimity and his refusal to be autocratic (even if he had the time) have left him relatively powerless as all kinds of questionable things are done in the name of his philosophy. Unlike their Catholic counterparts, he says, Tibetan and Buddhist groups “have no central authority. They’re all quite independent.” To top things off, three-hundred-year-old rivalries that used to be conducted in the privacy of the Himalaya are now played out on the world’s front pages.
Five years ago, with no help from the Chinese, an unseemly mess broke out when two six-year-old boys were presented as the new incarnation of the high Karmapa lineage, one of them endorsed by the Dalai Lama, the other by friends of the departed lama’s family. One of the most prominent lamas in the West was banned from entering America for many years after a $10 million sexual harassment suit was brought against him; perhaps the most famous rinpoche in the West was notorious for his women, his drinking, and his brutal bodyguards, and left a community riddled with AIDS. Not long ago, three members of the Dalai Lama’s inner circle were found murdered in their beds, the victims, it was supposed, of some complex internecine rivalry.
The Dalai Lama takes all this in stride—he was putting down insurrections at the age of eleven, after all—but the whole issue of authority (when to enforce it, and how to delegate it) takes on a special urgency as he moves towards his seventies. The finding of a new Dalai Lama when all of Tibet is in Chinese hands would in the best of circumstances be treacherous; it became doubly so three years ago when Beijing unilaterally hijacked the second-highest incarnation in Tibet, that of the Panchen Lama, placing the Dalai Lama’s six-year-old choice under house arrest and installing a candidate of its own. (The Panchen Lama, by tradition, is the figure officially responsible for authorizing the Dalai Lama’s own incarnation, and the maneuver suggested that the Chinese may have few qualms about coming up with their own puppet as the next Dalai Lama.)
In response to this, the Dalai Lama has been typically canny. More than a decade ago, he reminds me, he said, “If I die in the near future, and the Tibetan people want another reincarnation, a Fifteenth Dalai Lama, while we are still outside Tibet, my reincarnation will definitely appear outside Tibet. Because”— the logic, as ever, is impeccable—“the very purpose of the incarnation is to fulfill the work that has been started by the previous life.” So, he goes on, “the reincarnation of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, logically, will not be a reincarnation which disturbs, or is an obstacle to, that work. Quite clear, isn’t it?” In any case, he says cheerfully, “at a certain stage the Dalai Lama institution will disappear. That does not mean that Tibetan Buddhism will cease. But the incarnation comes and goes, comes and goes.”
As ever, few of his supporters are equally ready to acquiesce in such lèse-majesté (when I ask a group of Tibetan officials if this one will be the last Dalai Lama, they all say anxiously, “No, no”). And many of them, too, have found it hard to countenance his policy of forgiving the Chinese (he has referred to Mao as “remarkable,” called himself “half-Marxist, half-Buddhist,” and stepped back from his original demands of independence to calling only for an autonomous “Zone of Peace”). The pressure on him to forswear his policy of nonviolence has intensified as the years go by, and Chinese repression comes ever closer to rendering Tibet extinct.
“In one way, yes,” he tells me, “my position has become weaker, because there’s been no development, no progress. In spite of my open approach, of maximum concessions, the Chinese position becomes even harder and harder.” Last year, all photographs of the exiled leader were banned in Tibet, and monks and nuns continue to be imprisoned and tortured at will, in what the International Commission of Jurists long ago called a policy of genocide. Yet the Dalai Lama takes heart from the fact that more and more Chinese individuals have been speaking out for Tibet (as they would not have done, he feels, if he’d been more militant); not long ago, he gave a special three-day initiation in Los Angeles expressly for those of Chinese descent.
“To isolate China is totally wrong,” he tells me forcefully. “China needs the outside world, and the outside world needs China.” Besides, even China stands to gain from a freer Tibet. “If the Tibetan issue can be resolved through dialogue, and if we remain happily in the People’s Republic of China, it will have immense impact in the minds of another six million Chinese in Hong Kong and, eventually, twenty-one million Chinese in Taiwan. The image of China in the whole world will, overnight, change.”
That is the position he must take, of course, and a skeptic would say, confronted with his stubborn optimism, that it can be a little perverse to celebrate clouds just because they show us silver linings. Yet it’s worth recalling that the Dalai Lama’s policy of forgiveness is not an abstract thing. When he speaks of suffering, it’s as one who has seen his land destroyed, up to 1.2 million of his people killed, and all but 13 of his 6,254 monasteries laid waste. When he talks of inner peace, it’s as one who was away on the road, struggling for his cause, when his mother, his senior tutor, and his only childhood playmate, Lobsang Samten, died. And when he speaks of forbearance, it’s as one who is still publicly called by Beijing a “wolf in monk’s robes.”
As I left Dharamsala, in fact—at dawn, with the Dalai Lama leading his monks in a three-hour ceremony while the sun came up—it struck me that the man has lived out a kind of archetypal destiny of our times: a boy born in a peasant village in a world that had scarcely seen a wheel has ended up confronting the great forces of the day, exile, global travel, and, especially, the mass media; and a man from a culture we associate with Shangri-La now faces machine guns on the one hand, and a Lhasa Holiday Inn on the other, while J. Peterman catalogues crow, “Crystals are out! Tibetan Buddhism is in!” It says much about the challenges of the moment that a spokesman for an ancient, highly complex philosophy finds himself in rock-concert arenas obliged to answer questions about abortion and the “patriarchal” nature of Tibetan Buddhism.
Yet to these twenty-first-century conundrums, the Dalai Lama is aiming to bring a state-of-the-art solution. Tibet’s predicament, he tells me with practiced fluency, is not just about a faraway culture hidden behind snowcaps five miles high. It’s about ecology, since the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Mekong, and Yellow Rivers all have their sources in Tibet. It’s about natural resources, since, “according to Chinese official documents, there are more than one hundred sixty-six or one hundred sixty-seven different minerals in Tibet.” It’s about human rights, and a unique and imperiled culture, and a buffer zone “between these two giants, India and China.”
Most of all, it’s about a different way of moving through the world. Far from turning his back on the strangeness of the times, the Dalai Lama is taking it on wholeheartedly, to the point of working with forces that many of us might see as compromised. (“We’re just fallen sentient beings,” Richard Gere says, touchingly, of the Hollywood community. “We need some help, too.”) If part of the Dalai Lama is suggesting that monks can’t afford to be unworldly hermits, another part is suggesting that politicians need not be aggressive schemers. Compassion, he argues over and over, only stands to reason.
If the Dalai Lama were a dreamer, it would be easy to write him off. In fact, he’s an attentive, grounded, empirical soul whose optimism has only been bolstered by the breakthroughs achieved by his friends Desmond Tutu and Václav Havel. Havel, indeed, who became the first head of state to recognize the Dalai Lama, within thirteen hours of coming to power, has been a powerful spokesman for this new kind of statesmanship. The politician of conscience, the Czech leader writes, need not have a graduate degree in political science, or years of training in duplicity. Instead, he may rely on “qualities like fellow-feeling, the ability to talk to others, insight, the capacity to grasp quickly not only problems but also human character, the ability to make contact, a sense of moderation.” In all those respects, the Czech president might well have been thinking of a canny Tibetan scientist with a surprising gift for repairing old watches, tending to sick parrots, and, as it happens, making broken things whole once again.
1998
HAPPY HOUR IN THE HEART OF DARKNESS
For almost twenty years now, Tuol Sleng has been a notorious memorial to the Khmer Rouge killers who ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Bump down a potholed backstreet in the capital of Phnom Penh, and you come upon a former girls’ school bare except for the rusted beds on which Pol Pot’s men interrogated victims, and the U.S. munitions cans they used as toilets. Display cases are littered with the hoes and shovels and iron staves they used to beat people to death; along the walls hundreds upon hundreds of black-and-white faces stare back at you, dazed or terrified, recalling the people, often children, and often themselves Khmer Rouge executioners, who were executed here. One large wall is dominated by a map of Cambodia made up entirely of skulls.
Outside, in rough letters, the regulations of the place are written out by hand, in English and Cambodian—“While getting lashes and electrification, you must not cry at all.” Step out into the sun, and cripples swarm around you, crying, “Sir, I have no money to buy rice. Sir?”
The “Museum of Genocidal Crime,” as the road signs call it, has long been one of the principal tourist sights in Phnom Penh, long enough for locals to have stubbed out cigarettes in the eyes of Pol Pot in one photograph. But a little while ago, the currency of the torture center changed when the man who had overseen it for four years, Kang Khek Ieu, generally known as “Duch,” was suddenly discovered, by foreign journalists, in a western village. He was running a crushed-ice stall in the countryside and had certificates of baptism to prove his status as a born-again Christian. The man who oversaw the execution of at least sixteen thousand of his countrymen had papers from American churches testifying to his “personal leadership” and “team-building skills.”
Like many of his Khmer Rouge comrades, Duch, now fiftysix, had been a teacher (educated, as it happens, in U.S. A.I.D. schools); unlike them, he admitted that he had done “very bad things” in his life. More recently, he claimed, he had been working for international relief organizations, helping out in local camps. “He was our best worker,” said a refugee official when told that the man who had tried to protect children from typhoid was the notorious torturer who had once written
Kill them all
over lists of nine-year-olds.
Such black ironies are still much too common everywhere you turn in this bleeding, often broken country where every moral certainty was exiled long ago, and a visitor finds himself in a labyrinth of sorts, every path leading to a cul-de-sac. On paper at least, this is a time of hope for ill-starred Cambodia. In 1998 Pol Pot finally died in his jungle hideout, and just before the new year, two of the last three Khmer Rouge leaders, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, turned themselves in to the government of Hun Sen. The last Khmer Rouge bigwig still at large, Ta Mok, a one-legged general known as “the Butcher,” was captured in March, and now (alone among them) awaits trial. For the first time in more than a generation, there are no Cambodians in refugee camps across the border in Thailand, and the Khmer Rouge, held responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians during their four years in power alone, are silent.
Yet every prospect of new sunlight in Cambodia brings new shadows, and justice itself seems a rusty chain that will only bloody anyone who tries to touch it. To try the Khmer Rouge chieftains would be, in a sense, to prosecute the whole country: almost everyone around—from the exiled King Sihanouk to the one-eyed prime minister to the man next door—has some connection to the Khmer Rouge killers. And even those who don’t have come to strange accommodations: the local lawyer who agreed to represent Ta Mok lost his own wife and twelve-year-old daughter to his client’s comrades. “So many people killed many people,” says a young Cambodian in the western town of Siem Reap. “Even my uncle, he killed many people. That is how my father was safe. So we say, ‘If you kill Khmer Rouge, you must kill everyone.’ ”
To pursue the old men who committed their worst crimes twenty years ago is to risk setting new furies into motion, the government protests, and to perpetuate the cycle of violence when already forty thousand Cambodians are limbless and more than 50 percent of the country’s children are stunted. Yet to turn over a new page and let bygones be bygones is to leave justice itself as broken and legless as the Buddhas in the National Museum. Almost certainly, the government will try to stage enough of a trial to satisfy the international community, on which it depends for funds, while disrupting as little as possible.
Even the sudden death of Pol Pot left a hollowness in many Cambodian hearts: the man who obliterated the country, its society, and its fields, died, without explanation, just as there was hope of trying him. “I don’t want to think more about Khmer Rouge,” says Keo Lundi, a gaunt, sad-eyed thirty-nine-year-old who shows visitors around the blood-stained floors of Tuol Sleng. “I don’t want to know that Duch dies.” He bangs his hand against a rusted post. “They killed my brother. They pulled down my life. They took my education—everything—to zero. I want peace.”
The prospects for that are better now than they have been for many years: the main war visible in Phnom Penh is between five rival “hand-phone” companies fighting for the loyalties of ubiquitous cell-phone addicts, and a few weeks ago the country was finally admitted to the Southeast Asian economic community, ASEAN. Women who would otherwise be pushed towards prostitution are now employed in huge numbers—135,000 of them in all—in 165 government factories, and tourists, for the first time in thirty years, can fly directly to the great temples of Angkor, bringing money to the country’s empty coffers. Yet the suspicion remains that peace can be acquired only at the expense of justice. To embrace the future, it seems, is to evade the past.
It is a curious thing these days to wander around Phnom Penh, a city of potholes and puddles where most of the elegant French colonial buildings behind gates look like haunted houses taken over by squatters too concerned with their survival tomorrow to worry about upkeep today. Side streets are piled high with rotting garbage, and the small handmade signs above the open sewers say things like SAVING AIDS AND MADMAN VICTIM ASSOCIATION. Policemen crouch on the sidewalks, playing tictac-toe in the cracks of the pavement, and the fanciest hotel in town shuts its gates every night as if to keep the jungle and the darkness at bay.
The potholes extend psychically, too: almost every Cambodian you talk to has huge gaps in his life story, long silences. Since Pol Pot eliminated all those with education or knowledge of the outside world, Phnom Penh became a city of country people, as well as of orphans, and you still will not find doctors or teachers or lawyers of a certain age. No one knows what their neighbors suffered, or how exactly they survived. To survive today, school-age girls sell themselves for two dollars a visit— ignoring what may be the fastest-rising AIDS infection rate in the world—and children scramble in the dust for foreigners’ coins long after midnight. Their faces, you can’t help but notice, are the same as the ones in the torture center.
Amidst all the dilapidation, there are gaudy, anomalous explosions of affluence—huge, multistory palaces offering KARAOKE MASSAGE in neon letters, and ads in the local paper for Harry Winston jewels. Above the Mekong a grand casino posts notices about what you must do if you have $3,500 in cash, and the minimum bet at many tables is $20. The security guards who frisk you—NO KNIFE OR OFFENSIVE, say the signs, NO MILITARY⁄POLICE UNIFORM UNLESS ON OFFICIAL VISIT— wear yellow smiley buttons.
Much of the money comes, of course, from overseas investors eager to make a killing out of need, and gambling that the economy can only improve. “This is the first time since I came here in 1992 when I can feel truly confident of making a profit,” says a Singaporean businessman, sipping pumpkin soup with gold leaf in it (in a hotel where even the telephone receivers are scented with jasmine). The appetizer alone costs as much as a local judge (generally uneducated) earns in maybe six months.
Along the broad streets—still called Quai Karl Marx and Mao Tse Tung and Yugoslavie on many of the maps—there are clusters of Irish pubs and new French cafés, “Little Tokyo” restaurants and Filipino drinking-places. Local boys in fezzes sit outside a new Turkish restaurant along the Mekong, and the Royal Palace—almost too fittingly—stands where Lenin Boulevard meets “English Street” (so nicknamed for all the English classes on offer). Outside the latest cybercafé, urchins in wheelchairs swivel around at foreigners, crying, “No have mother!”
For a certain kind of foreigner, there is a half-illicit thrill in living in a place where the officials are running drugs and girls and antique Buddhas when the guerrillas are not. At night, in the Heart of Darkness bar, the talk is all of $200 hit men and whole villages in the business of peddling thirteen-year-old girls. Pizza restaurants are called “Happy” and “Ecstatic” in honor of their ganja toppings, and two of the main sites of entertainment are shooting ranges (public and private) where you can lob hand grenades or fire away with M-16 assault rifles. To rent a twenty-four-room guest house on a lake, with a view of distant temples, costs $425 a month.
“I lived for two years without electricity,” says a South American restaurant owner, sitting at a café while a woman crouches at her feet, giving her toenails their weekly polish. “Only by candle. It cost me two dollars a week.” Wander off the main streets and you are in a maze of little lanes—completely unlit and unpaved—where a former Zen monk runs a guest house and Africans on the run live by teaching English.
In such places Cambodia has the air of a society with no laws where some protective coating, some layer of civilization keeping Darwin’s jungle remote, has been torn away. The local paper reads like it was written by a Jacobean playwright with a taste for black irony. A motorist crashes into the Independence Monument, it says, the seventh such fatality this year. More than twelve thousand “ghost soldiers”—nonexistent employees—have been found on the Ministry of Defense payrolls. A Frenchman here to help Cambodia is charged with running a brothel full of underage boys.
It seems almost apt that half the cars you see have steering wheels on the left and half have them on the right, ensuring bloody accidents every day.
In the midst of all this, the ones who live among ghosts conduct their own private investigations. “My friends think I’m crazy,” says a well-to-do Cambodian who returned here from Canada. “People tell me, ‘Why do you want to look at these things? It’s easier to forget.’ But I want to understand why it happened”—he means the self-extermination of his country— “so it will never happen again.” When Pol Pot died, Keo Lundi, from the Tuol Sleng center, says, “I spent my own money to go to his province, to talk to his brother and sister. I wanted to know what he was like as a child.” What he found was that Pol Pot— born Saloth Sar—was a notably mild-mannered boy, pious and delicate, who “never played with a gun” and often accompanied his mother to the pagoda. His own siblings claim not to have known that it was their courteous brother who was “Brother Number One,” the man who loosed a national madness.
The hope now is that Duch, the last Khmer Rouge leader to leave the city when the country’s longtime enemies, the Vietnamese, took over in January 1979, may shed some light on what happened. But though the government has, for the time being, acceded to the demands of the world, and the U.N., to hold a partly international tribunal of the Khmer Rouge leaders, almost everyone agrees that terms like “justice” and “democracy” are virtual luxuries in a country as desperate as Cambodia, where politics can often look like a Swiss bank account under a false name.
“I don’t want to watch the trials,” a diplomat in a Western embassy says with feeling. “Because everything that has happened in the past year has been staged. So we know already what will happen. They will blame everything on Pol Pot, on others who are gone. Or on the Americans. Or the King. It will be lies.”
On New Year’s Day, as a visitor inspects carvings of demons and gods and mythological battles at the haunted temple of Angkor Wat, suddenly a Cambodian standing nearby clutches a pillar till his knuckles turn white. “Look,” he says, swallowing. “There’s Khieu Samphan!” He points to a trim elderly man in white shirt and slacks, walking with relatively little protection towards his helicopter. “He killed so many,” says the visitor. “He killed my mother, my father,” says the man, who was himself forced out of his home as a boy to work in the fields. Khieu and Nuon Chea are walking through a city they have orphaned, among people whose lives they have destroyed, VIP sight-seers (courtesy of the government) this bright festival day.
“Let us finish the war,” says a twenty-five-year-old local nearby, flush with the promise of a new future. “We are Buddhists: if you do badly, bad will come to you. Let us shake hands.”
Six months later, the debate continues like a tolling bell. On the twenty-third anniversary of Pol Pot’s announcement of national collectivization, a thousand or so people gather at dawn in the killing fields, among 129 mass graves, some of them reserved for women and children, some for 166 corpses found without heads. For years the rite was known as the “Day of Hate.” Now, in more hopeful times, it is called the “Day of Memory.”
1999