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.
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.
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