Rev. Danny Fisher

The New York Times is reporting that Dith Pran, photojournalist and subject of the 1984 film The Killing Fields, has died at the age of sixty-five from pancreatic cancer. Mr. Dith contributed to crucial reporting of the Khmer Rouge takeover of his native Cambodia. His efforts helped earn Times writer Sydney Schanberg a Pultizer Prize for Journalism. (So much so that Mr. Schanberg accepted the award on Mr. Dith’s behalf as well as his own.) After the takeover, he was a prisoner of the regime from 1975 to 1979. The Times credits his survival to “nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation.”

Mr. Schanberg wrote about Mr. Dith in newspaper articles and in The New York Times Magazine, in a 1980 cover article titled “The Death and Life of Dith Pran.” (A book by the same title appeared in 1985.) The story became the basis of the movie The Killing Fields. The film, directed by Roland Joffé, portrayed Mr. Schanberg, played by Sam Waterston, arranging for Mr. Dith’s wife and children to be evacuated from Phnom Penh as danger mounted. Mr. Dith, portrayed by Dr. Haing S. Ngor (who won an Academy Award as best supporting actor), insisted on staying in Cambodia with Mr. Schanberg to keep reporting the news.

A dramatic moment, both in reality and cinematically, came when Mr. Dith saved Mr. Schanberg and other Western journalists from certain execution by talking fast and persuasively to the trigger-happy soldiers who had captured them.

But despite frantic effort, Mr. Schanberg could not keep Mr. Dith from being sent to the countryside to join millions working as virtual slaves.

[...]

For years there was no news of Mr. Dith, except for a false rumor that he had been fed to alligators. His brother had been. After more than four years of beatings, backbreaking labor and a diet of a tablespoon of rice a day, Mr. Dith, on Oct. 3, 1979, escaped over the Thai border. Mr. Schanberg flew to greet him.

If you’re moved to remember and support the ongoing work of Dith Pran to raise awareness about genocide, I recommend visiting The Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, Inc., to find out how.

I also recommend taking a look at The Killing Fields if you haven’t seen it. It’s a rare bird–an important “message movie” that is also an excellent film. The trailer is below.

The Associated Press has just published a story about political activism in contemporary Asian Buddhist societies. Author Denis D. Gray leads his piece with mentions of the recent demonstrations by monastics in Myanmar and Tibet.

“In modern times, preaching is not enough. Monks must act to improve society, to remove evil,” says Samdhong Rinpoche, prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile and a high-ranking lama.

“There is the responsibility of every individual, monks and lay people, to act for the betterment of society,” he told The Associated Press in Dharmsala, India, discussing protests in Tibet this month that were initiated by monks.

In widespread protests over the past three weeks, crimson-robed monks — some charging helmeted troops and throwing rocks — have joined with ordinary citizens who unfurled Tibetan flags and demanded independence from China. Beijing’s official death toll from the rioting in Lhasa is 22, but the exiled government of the Dalai Lama says 140 Tibetans were killed there and in Tibetan communities in western China.

Bloodshed also stained last fall’s pro-democracy uprising in Myanmar, dubbed the “Saffron Revolution” after the color of the robes of monks who led nonviolent protests against the country’s oppressive military regime.

It’s a solid write-up, and I encourage you to read it. I will have more to say about it and the subject of Buddhist activism in a few days. Stay tuned.

Precious Metal points us to an editorial today at the Boston Phoenix with some insightful bits about international economics, China, Tibet, and the Olympic Games:

It is about money. That is why technology giants such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft allow themselves to be co-opted into helping China enforce domestic mind control; why the world averts its gaze from the Darfur genocide China underwrites through its Sudanese oil purchases; and why whatever international protests might materialize in response to China’s violent suppression of Tibetan revolt are likely to be symbolic.

[...]

At the moment, China’s economy is more or less in the same league as those of the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. The United States and Japan are still, respectively, the first and second most potent economic powers. Sooner rather than later, however, many project China will be number one. China, of course, is the world’s most populous nation. Consumer-driven economies of the First World dream of tapping into China’s unexploited markets. In the meantime, the prosperity of developed nations is buoyed by cheap goods—ranging from toys to cement—produced by China, which is also the world’s fastest-growing economy.

The West’s self-delusional cycle of hoping to cash in on Chinese consumer markets while becoming dependent on Chinese exports holds the US especially captive.

The plight of Tibet’s Buddhist population pales in comparison with America’s need for China’s cash. By the time President Bush leaves office, US national debt is projected to reach about $10 trillion. About half of that is the cost to date of the Iraq War, the first since the American Revolution to be fought primarily with money borrowed abroad. Much of the remaining $5 trillion is also due to the free-spending Bush White House, which, during the years the Republicans controlled Congress, failed to restrain pork while enacting tax cuts that squandered the surplus accrued during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

China, of course, holds a huge slice of that debt. And you do not need an MBA to know it is not smart to insult the one who controls your credit cards. Even a champion of Tibetan liberation such as Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knows that; no doubt that’s the reason she seeks to defuse talk of an Olympic boycott.

The day before a small protest of Buddhist monks was foiled by Chinese security forces, sparking the riots that have roiled Tibet and prompting demonstrations in Chinese communities with substantial Tibetan populations, the State Department removed China from its list of the top-10 most repressive nations.

[...]

The world today is a smaller, more interdependent place since China invaded Tibet nearly 60 years ago. The US needs China’s help to keep Iran from going nuclear and to disarm the North Korean nuclear threat. Those important imperatives, coupled with incremental steps toward a more open society, undoubtedly figured in the decision to reassess America’s official view of China as the worst sort of international pariah. But these factors are symptomatic of America’s addiction to China’s cash.

[...]

There is no doubting China’s economic might. But China’s rulers are insulated and, in many respects, insecure about their place in the world. The international community’s failure to censure China’s support of the murderous Sudanese regime is not a mark of approval; it is a ploy that allows China to save face, to maintain the illusion of dignity in the shadow of monstrous and murderous acts. Such is the case with Tibet.

The Olympics are a glittering prize that was awarded China as, some might say, an incentive to better behavior. Others might call the games a bribe.

The point is now moot. The Olympics, viewed through the prism of China’s conquest and occupation of Tibet, are proving to be not a source of strength but a point of vulnerability. How confident can China be of its place in the world if it must pressure neighboring Nepal into closing the peak of Mount Everest, over which the Olympic torch is supposed to pass, because it fears a pro-Tibetan expression of sympathy? What should be a moment of glory, will instead be a moment of ignominy — for China and for the world.

From The Guardian:

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, yesterday became the first world leader to decide not to attend the Olympics in Beijing.

As pressure built for concerted western protests to China over the crackdown in Tibet, EU leaders prepared to discuss the crisis for the first time today, amid a rift over whether to boycott the Olympics.

The disclosure that Germany is to stay away from the games’ opening ceremonies in August could encourage President Nicolas Sarkozy of France to join in a gesture of defiance and complicate Gordon Brown’s determination to attend the Olympics.

Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, became the first EU head of government to announce a boycott on Thursday and he was promptly joined by President Václav Klaus of the Czech Republic, who had previously promised to travel to Beijing.

“The presence of politicians at the inauguration of the Olympics seems inappropriate,” Tusk said. “I do not intend to take part.”

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s foreign minister, confirmed that Merkel was staying away. He added that neither he nor Wolfgang Schäuble, the interior minister responsible for sport, would attend the opening ceremony.

Hans-Gert Pöttering, the politician from Merkel’s Christian Democratic party who chairs the European parliament, encouraged talk of an Olympic boycott this week and invited the Dalai Lama to address the chamber in Strasbourg, while another senior German Christian Democrat, Ruprecht Polenz, said a boycott should remain on the table.

“I cannot imagine German politicians attending the opening or closing ceremonies [if the Tibetan crackdown continued],” he said. Merkel enraged the Chinese leadership a few months ago by receiving the Dalai Lama in Berlin for private talks.

Brown is to meet the Tibetan spiritual leader when he visits Britain in May, but is determined to be in Beijing. “We are fully engaged in supporting the Olympics,” said David Miliband, the foreign secretary. “We want to see it as a success, and I think it’s right that the prime minister represents us.”

While announcing that German leaders were staying away from Beijing, Steinmeier denied they were boycotting or staging a political protest against the Chinese military and police campaign in Tibet and surrounding areas.

While expressing scepticism about a complete boycott, he did not rule one out. “This is not the right moment to talk about a boycott … We should watch how the Chinese government deals with the situation in the next weeks and months.”

If Merkel and others do not attend the opening ceremony, it is likely to reinforce a growing sense in China that the Olympics is being used to vilify the host.

China had hoped to use the games to highlight its economic development and growing openness. But it is increasingly proving an opportunity for critics to bash China’s one-party political system, human rights abuses, treatment of minorities and tightly controlled media.

The Tibet crisis has been pushed on to the agenda of a meeting of European foreign ministers in Slovenia, with the French, who will be presiding over the EU during the Olympics, calling for a team of European officials to be dispatched to China on a fact-finding mission.

British and US diplomats were among a group of outside officials allowed to travel yesterday to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, for the first time since the crisis erupted a fortnight ago.

The EU foreign ministers are to discuss the China quandary at lunch in Slovenia today, with calls being made for a common European position.

“We don’t support a boycott and don’t intend to boycott the opening of the games,” a British Foreign Office spokesman said. “None of the 27 [EU states] are calling for a boycott yet.”

The French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, has described the boycott proposal as “interesting”, while Sarkozy this week hedged his bets and said his attendance depended on China’s conduct.