China rejects U.N. claim on Tibetan monks’ disapperance
China on Thursday defended its treatment of Tibetan monks it says are undergoing re-education, responding to a U.N. inquiry about what exiled Tibetans have called the forced disappearance of hundreds of monks.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said the monks had not been detained illegally, and urged U.N. human rights investigators to act without prejudice. “It is legal to supervise religious affairs, and protect normal religious order. This issue of forced disappearance fundamentally does not exist,” Hong told reporters at a regular press briefing.
U.N. human rights investigators called on China to reveal the “fate and whereabouts” of more than 300 monks who disappeared after being rounded up by security forces at a monastery in Aba prefecture of the southwestern province of Sichuan in April.
Exiled Tibetans and a prominent writer have said that the crackdown was sparked by a monk’s self-immolation in March, an apparent protest against government controls.
Read the full story by Michael Martina here. For more background, see Chinese forces detain 300 Tibetan Buddhist monks for a month – sources
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Chinese forces detain 300 Tibetan Buddhist monks for a month – sources
Security forces have detained about 300 Tibetan monks from a monastery in southwestern China for a month amid a crackdown sparked by a monk’s self-immolation, two exiled Tibetans and a prominent writer said, citing sources there. Tension in Aba prefecture, a heavily ethnic Tibetan part of Sichuan province, have risen to their highest levels since protests turned violent in March 2008, ahead of the Beijing Olympics, and were put down by police and paramilitary units.
The monks from Aba’s Kirti monastery, home to about 2,500 monks, were taken into custody on April 21 on military trucks, according to two exiled monks and a writer, who said their information was based on separate accounts from witnesses who live in Aba.
Kirti Rinpoche, the head of the Kirti monastery, told Reuters by telephone that it was the first time that Chinese security forces had seized such a large number of monks at a time, and that he had no information on their whereabouts.
“The situation is getting more and more repressive,” said Kirti Rinpoche, who is based in India’s Dharamsala, the seat of the exiled Tibetan government, and receives his information through a network of contacts inside Aba. “The restrictions imposed on the monastery and the monks are getting more intensified. It’s literally a suffocating situation where monks are not allowed to do anything at all.”
His account could not be independently verified as the government restricts visits by foreign reporters to restive Tibetan regions. Repeated calls to the Aba county government and public security bureau went unanswered. The Foreign Ministry said last month everything was “normal” at Kirti.
Excerpts from pope’s London speech to Catholic teachers
Visiting a Catholic school in London on Friday, Pope Benedict said teachers should give their pupils not only marketable skills but also wisdom, which he said was inseparable from knowledge of God. Catholic schools and Catholic religious teachers play an important part in transmitting this wisdom, he said. He also stressed the need to protect pupils from sexual predators.
Following are excerpts from his address to the teachers:
“I am pleased to have this opportunity to pay tribute to the outstanding contribution made by religious men and women in this land to the noble task of education… As you know, the task of a teacher is not simply to impart information or to provide training in skills intended to deliver some economic benefit to society; education is not and must never be considered as purely utilitarian. It is about forming the human person, equipping him or her to live life to the full – in short it is about imparting wisdom. And true wisdom is inseparable from knowledge of the Creator, for “both we and our words are in his hand, as are all understanding and skill in crafts”.
“This transcendent dimension of study and teaching was clearly grasped by the monks who contributed so much to the evangelization of these islands … Since the search for God, which lies at the heart of the monastic vocation, requires active engagement with the means by which he makes himself known – his creation and his revealed word – it was only natural that the monastery should have a library and a school. It was the monks’ dedication to learning as the path on which to encounter the Incarnate Word of God that was to lay the foundations of our Western culture and civilization…
“Many of you belong to teaching orders that have carried the light of the Gospel to far-off lands as part of the Church’s great missionary work, and for this too I give thanks and praise to God. Often you laid the foundations of educational provision long before the State assumed a responsibility for this vital service to the individual and to society. As the relative roles of Church and State in the field of education continue to evolve, never forget that religious have a unique contribution to offer to this apostolate, above all through lives consecrated to God and through faithful, loving witness to Christ, the supreme Teacher.”
A week after riots, Thai capital prays for peace
Thousands of Thais prayed for peace and unity in Bangkok on Wednesday, a week after a deadly military crackdown on protesters sparked a terrifying night of arson and riots that levelled buildings and killed 54 people.
But analysts say without major reforms to a political system that protesters claim favours an “establishment elite” over the rural masses, such prayers and forgiveness will not end a polarising crisis costing the economy billions of dollars.
Hundreds of saffron-robed Buddhist monks received food from well wishers along a shopping mall occupied by anti-government protesters for six weeks until they were dispersed by troops and armoured vehicles last week.
Next to them were Christian, Muslim and Sikh leaders, who also conducted prayers to bless the riot-torn city of 15 million people as predominantly Buddhist Thailand grapples with widening social and political rifts that have spiralled dangerously into the open in the past five years.
“It is very important for all of us in Bangkok to forgive and move ahead,” said Bangkok Governor Sukhumbhand Paribatra, who hosted the “Restore the City With Religious Ceremony” event.
Religion-themed films take top prizes at Cannes Film Festival
A Buddhist-inspired Thai film has won the coveted Palme d’Or for best picture at the Cannes film festival. “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” a mystical exploration of reincarnation as a well-to-do farmer confronts his imminent death, was directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Xavier Beauvois’ “Of Gods and Men,” based on the real-life story of seven Catholic monks murdered during unrest in Algeria in the 1990s, took the runner-up Grand Prix award at the closing session on Sunday.
“I would like to thank all the spirits and all the ghosts in Thailand who made it possible for me to be here,” Apichatpong, who has won other prizes in Cannes before, said after receiving the award. He said during the festival that his thoughts were mainly on violence back home between government forces and protesters in the “red shirt” movement.
Here’s our full story Thai film surprise winner in Cannes by Mike Collett-White and James Mackenzie and Cannes: le festival honore des filmographies oubliées by our French service film buff Wilfrid Exbrayat. The Thai film divided the critics. The French daily Le Figaro slammed it as “Uncle Boonmee, Palm of Boredom” (hmmm, was this sour grapes because the “miraculous film” by Frenchman Beauvois only came in second?), but Britain’s Guardian praised it as “lyrically beautiful.”
We also ran a profile of Apichatpong, Thai Cannes winner steeped in spiritualism, and Factbox: Winners at the Cannes film festival 2010. FaithWorld highlighted “Of Gods and Men” last week when it was screened in our post Cannes film follows French monks killed in Algeria.
Apichatpong’s triumph was a change in front-page news for Bangkok newspapers after weeks of unrest and violence there. Here are the reports from the Bangkok Post and The Nation.
Cannes film follows French monks killed in Algeria
The unsolved murder of seven French monks in Algeria during the brutal civil conflict of the 1990s is recounted in “Of Gods and Men,” a sombre and reflective entry at the Cannes film festival.
The seven members of a Trappist order, who lived in a monastery in Tibehirine south of Algiers, disappeared in 1996 during a savage wave of killings by both Islamist militants and government forces. Only their severed heads were ever recovered and the exact circumstances in which they died are unclear.
Director Xavier Beauvois takes no side in the controversy over who to blame, focussing instead on the unhurried rhythms of life in the monastery and ending the film as they disappear with their captors up a snowy mountain path.
As the violence that pervades the country comes closer to their community, the monks are forced to choose whether to stay or leave and Beauvois shows clearly the fears and doubts they experience as they wrestle with their choice.
Burmese monks who fled to the U.S. are a vanishing breed
Burmese monks were beaten, jailed and killed while protesting Myanmar’s military regime in 2007, and dozens found refuge in America. But now most have been forced to swap their saffron-colored robes for blue-collar workwear and abandon their monkhood out of a need to scratch out a living in their adopted land.
The few remaining monks are clinging to their vocation in the rundown former textile mill town of Utica some 240 miles (380 km) north of New York City, trying to adapt.
Some 38 monks were granted asylum in the United States soon after the Saffron Revolution, the 2007 protests during which barefoot, shaven-headed monks shielded and led civilians to march against rising fuel prices which snowballed into the biggest challenge to military rule since a 1988 uprising.
Today, just eight remain monks.
Can saffron be red in Thailand?
At the sprawling red shirt encampment in central bank, Buddhist monks clad in their distinctive saffron robes mingle with men wearing helmets walking around with sharpened bamboo sticks.
Just about every night, rumours sweep the the sprawling encampment of tents, sounds trucks and makeshift stalls that a long anticipated crackdown is imminent. The men stare at the three-metre barricades made of tyres, bamboo poles and rubble that surround much of the encampment, about the size of a large city park, waiting to pelt soldiers armed with assault rifles with pellets from their sling shots and thrusts of their bamboo spears.
The monks are there for moral support, and to receive “merit” from the red shirts, who have occupied some of the most expensive real estate in Thailand for the past seven weeks in their campaign for early elections. “Making merit” involves giving an offering — food, some spare change to a monk — perhaps in the hope of a more accommodating afterlife, should death suddenly intervene. As it well could on the barricades when you’re fending off automatic weapons fire with a bamboo stick.
But the presence of Buddhist monks at the rallies — including some carrying sharpened sticks – is unsettling to many in Thailand, where monks are supposed to be politically neutral. They are not even supposed to vote. Amnart Buasiri, director of the Secretariat of the Sangha Supreme Council, the clergy’s governing body called on police to arrest monks for taking part in the red shirt rallies, which are illegal under emergency decrees imposed after the protests turned violent three weeks ago.
It should come as no surprise that monks are joining the red shirt movement (though it’s difficult to check their authenticity). They often come from the same social strata as the protesters — the rural poor and urban working class.
Their hero, former premier Thaksin Shinawatra, ousted in a 2006 coup and now living abroad to avoid jail on a corruption conviction, is a devout Buddhist aligned with the powerful Dhammakaya movement. During the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, this monastic community famously collected gold jewelry to enable Thailand to pay off its debts to the IMF. Dhammakaya was also major force in the formation of the Thaksin’s populist Thai Rak Thai party, which has banned.
The Thai political divide that broadly pits this underclass against what they call an establishment elite is beginning to be reflected in religion. Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva’s government relies for support on the Muslim-dominated provinces of southern Thailand along with an establishment that includes Buddhist leaders appointed by the crown.
Climatic cracks of doom threaten monastic fortress in Bhutan
For centuries the Punakha Dzong monastic fortress in Bhutan’s Himalayas has sheltered ancient Buddhist relics and scriptures from earthquakes, fires and Tibetan invasions. Now the lamas here may have met their match — global warming.
At least 53 million cubic metres of glacier melt is threatening to break the banks of a lake upstream in the Himalayan peaks and spark a “mountain tsunami” in Punakha valley.
The government is pressing the lamas, so far unsuccessfully, to transport relics to a nearby hilltop for safekeeping. Massive flooding could inundate these valleys, which hold about a tenth of Bhutan’s population, by 2015.
“Pollution has disturbed our deities,” Leki Dorji, a red-robed lama, said in a courtyard as monks chanted mantras. “It’s for that the rains have not come on time, that we have not had snow for five years.”
Vietnam’s not-so-simple eviction of Buddhist monks and nuns
A government-backed mob in Vietnam about a week ago booted nearly 400 Buddhist monks and nuns out of a monastery in the centre of the country, bringing an apparent end to an ugly standoff with complicated origins. The incident has raised questions about the ruling Communist Party’s commitment to progress on religious freedom, but the Bat Nha Monastery narrative is much more complex than simply an “authoritarian government cracks down on the faithful” story.
Some of the basic facts seem pretty straightforward. For nearly three years, the monks and nuns had lived at Bat Nha monastery in Lam Dong province, largely with the blessing of the local authorities via cooperation with local Buddhists, after their leader, the Vietnamese-born, French-based Buddhist zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, visited Vietnam in 2005 for the first time in 39 years. Last year, the local authorities started to put pressure on the followers of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village school of Buddhism. In late June of this year, electricity, water and phone services to the monastery were cut and a mob attacked the group to try to evict them, but they refused to leave. In July, a smaller mob attempted another attack. The government set Sept. 2 as a deadline for them to leave, but that date came and went. Then, on Sunday, Sept 27, the group’s overseas adherents reported that “an unidentified mob” of about 150 people, believed to include plain clothes policemen, violently evicted the 379 resident monastic followers of Thich Nhat Hanh.
The central government’s line has been that local Buddhists wanted Thich Nhat Hanh’s followers out of their monastery and the government had nothing to do with it. Asked about the incident, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Nguyen Phuong Nga said in a statement it was “an internal issue between two groups of people following Buddhism at Bat Nha monastery. The dispute was non-violent, nobody was injured or detained.”
But Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village followers said police were involved in the eviction. A local government document from last month obtained by Thich Nhat Hanh’s followers and shown to Reuters stated that the group was not recognised by the state or the official Buddhist congregation and was staying at Bat Nha illegally. The roots of the problem may go back, in part at least, to Thich Nhat Hanh’s late 2007 visit to Vietnam. During that trip, he told Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Triet that the government should abolish the arm of the police that tracks religious groups and disband the government’s Religious Affairs Committee, which regulates religious activities.
Then, in early 2008, the annual journal of Plum Village proposed that the government abandon Communism, take the word Communist out of the name of the ruling political party and remove “Socialist” from the country’s official name, Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Although the comments may have been made with the interests of the Vietnamese nation in mind, they were resented by the religious police who, from that point on, pretty much had it in for Thich Nhat Hanh and his followers, a Plum Village document detailing the background of the incident said.
The local Bat Nha abbot, Thich Duc Nghi, first welcomed the Plum Village followers, but later appeared to sour on the group. Whether he did so because of pressure from the authorities or for his own reasons is unclear. The Plum Village followers believe he and the head of the religious police teamed up to bring down the Plum Village congregation, or sangha. He has stopped making public appearances, said Hong Kong-based Plum Villager Thich Phap Kham.
It is interesting to note that President Triet was in Communist ally Cuba when the Bat Nha evictions happened, just after a trip to New York for a United Nations Security Council meeting and a General Assembly debate. At least least two trials of Vietnamese political dissidents scheduled to take place when Triet was due to be in New York were postponed, possibly so that they would not be irritants when he was on American soil. It is also worth noting that in 2004, Vietnam chafed when it was placed on the U.S. State Department’s list of “countries of particular concern” on religious freedom, and took steps to be removed. Two years later, before President George W. Bush visited Vietnam, the State Department took Vietnam off that list, citing progress. The State Department’s 2008 human rights report on Vietnam issued this February noted improvements in respect for religious freedom, saying restrictions had been enforced less strictly than in previous years and participation in religious activities grew.
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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The only thing the lamas/monks are doing while receiving government stipend is ‘preserve’ the Tibat culture. To become more ‘productive’, they protest Chinese government’s ‘cultural genocide’. These lamas need to be put to work, to produce something useful to themselves and to others.