Lest We Forget

By Saneitha Nagani If we cannot forget what had happened in the events during 1988, how are we to move on? This question has been lingering on my mind for more than twenty years now. Can we be able to do so after we have managed to achieve a kind of social catharsis in one form or another? The trend of seeking 'social catharsis' in one form another for most countries which have gone through social upheavals such as civil disobedience, civil wars to revolutions was simply to seek some form of closure. According to Patricia J Campbell in her article, The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC): Human Rights and State Transitions The South Africa Model, she said that, In almost all of the literature on truth commissions, the importance of allowing the truth to be heard is described as critical to the countrys ability to move forward. Reconciliation is impossible if a segment of society wants to remain conveniently ignorant about its past while another segment has never has its suffering acknowledged. Some of us may say, Oh! We are Buddhists, we should be able to forgive and forget what has happened. The law of karma (kamma niyama) will take care of what they have done to others. Easy said than done. No one can move on without first setting the record straight. It may be easy for those among us who neither has lost a member of their family nor a close friend. It will be like the monk in a story who tried to comfort bereaved members in his community by telling them, Remember, its anicca (impermanence), sankara (conditioned dhamma); nothing lasts forever, sooner or later we all have to part and thats a fact of life. Then one day the people in his community saw him crying uncontrollably. So, like him they tried to comfort him by his own teachings. Instead of being comforted the devastated monk said to them, That was your sankhara, that was your anicca but this was my mother youre talking about. This brought me back to my school days when I have to learn for my English literature that justice always prevailed in the end. It may take some time but no matter what, justice will always prevailed in the end and that is the law of nature. The story was a translated version into English from the Russian folklore. It was about an innocent man sent to jail for a crime he has never committed but it was only near the end of his life that he found out about his innocence. It seems to me then that God was being cruel to this man. He should have let him have justice when he was still alive. How could He let him wait that long if justice was to prevail in the end? The story was, God Sees the Truth, But Wait and like the man in the story there are those like me and many others in Burma and in other countries where they have settled, waiting for more than twenty years to get that sense of justice. If the word catharsis is to mean to the victims of abuse, psychoanalysts, scholars and political scientists as an emotional release, cleansing or purging then the truth and the awareness of the past evil should and must be the factor able to inoculate a population against its repetition of such evil in the future. At the very least by seeking justice and getting some form of emotional cleansing as a closure is to not let the criminals go unpunished. One of the blessings mentioned in Mangala Sutta is patience (khanti ca savacassata samanan ca dassanam kalena dhamma-sakaccha etam mangalam uttamam). We have been patient. We do not expect that we will have justice overnight but we are sure that justice will prevail. Those who gave orders others to commit shameful and despicable acts will always want to encourage everyone to forget what they ordered others to do; for those who carried out the orders and committed the crimes would resist the demands for justice. They would always dismiss the demands for investigations and punishment as nothing more than distractions and obstacles to national reconciliation which is crucial in moving on to a new form of society. Recently former General Tin Aye, chief of the Union Electoral Commis sion (UEC) was reported to have told officials of political parties that took part in last years elections that the National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, was not handed over power even though they have been promised to do so because the NLD has threatened to take the then military leaders before a Nuremberg -style Tribunal. Little has the general know that like the liver in the human body when cut off will grow back by itself to its original state. Like it the cruelty and injustices that they inflicted upon the people were embedded inside their livers and they would not just disappear or dissipated by killing them off one after another. The generation who were babies in 1988 is now like Wai Hnin Pwint Thone, Zoya Phan and many, many others who are actively working to bring the military leaders who are responsible to justice. This is one aspects of the human spirit that will endure in any human who has been treated unjustly whether they are in Burma, Syria, Libya, Sudan or even China. Their quest for justice will not be diminished in one iota even by the various kinds of obstacle they have to face along the way.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who was then Chief of the Partys General Office to the then disgraced Party Secretary General Zhao Ziyang may have forgotten about the students who were killed in the Tiananmen Square that very night they went to see. It is all gone and totally forgotten. How could the people in Tibet forget when the atrocities against the Tibetans that took place were under President Hu Jintao when he was Party Secretary of the Tibet Autonomous Region? Unlike we in Burma remembering the events of 1988 year after year, anniversaries of Chinese students uprisings on 4 June 1989 and their killings in the Tiananmen Square went by, gone without a stir; neither in China nor elsewhere (with Hong Kong being the only exception). There were neither demands for justice nor the demands for truth heard from anyone. In a country when a slogan like, To Get Rich Is Glorious is driving people to catch on a consumer culture how can you expect the people to respond to commemoration of past injustices? No wonder when the pianist Lang Lang was asked for his view on detained Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, or the protesters outside the Opera House calling him a propaganda tool of the Communist Party, he had little to say. He said that he was an artist making music, it was his mission. That's it. He just brushed it off as if that the Chinese government detaining his fellow artist doesnt concern him at all. Should we be surprised that China as a nation is propping up the military government in Burma that went on killings its own people with arms bought from China? If Lang Lang has put his interest above the welfare of his fellow Chinese and fellow artist how can we expect China to think above its own interests? The kind of extrajudicial killings that happened in Burma during 1988 were the crimes that took place in Burma not only then. The culture of military intelligence (MI) in Burma has been such that, particularly in areas where the ethnic minorities live, this kind of extrajudicial killings, the disappearances have been quite common occurrence even during U Nus Parliamentary democracy period. I was young when the Pao Member for Parliament U Aung Tha and his colleagues were murdered by agents of military intelligence just beyond the outskirts of our town while they were on their way to another town. My brother and his friend found the bodies of the murdered victims while they were out hunting. Some agents who took part in the assassination later confessed to us by telling us who got the watch, who got the ring or the money of the victims. Burying the past not only buried the very values and ideals upon which we hoped to build our society but also nurtured a culture of impunity in the military intelligence as an organization above the law. Can anyone be surprised when some asylum seekers living in Australia for years have recently went to the media to confess of their crimes, real or imagine? Even though the veracity of their claims are yet to be determined these claims in a way further strengthened the culture of impunity that exists within the Burmese military in general and the Burmas military intelligence in particular. In a report from Joshua Kurlantzick in Foreign Affairs about a stampede in Phnom Penh at water festival killed as many as 350 people. According to him, The fact that no one will be punished is indicative of perhaps the most pervasive problem in Southeast Asian politics, one that every country in the region except Singapore struggles with: Impunity. Perhaps no one really was to blame for the Phnom Penh disaster. He even added that, in Southeast Asia punishing wrongdoing is exceedingly rare, outside of Singapore. Saya U Kyaw Htut, in his book on Abhidhamma, said that If a person has neither the sense of shame nor the sense of fear then nothing can stop that person from doing evil things. What is it that enables one group of human beings to treat another group as though they were subhuman creatures? David Livingstone Smith in his book, Less Than Human Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, Dehumanization isnt a way of talking. Its a way of thinking a way of thinking that, sadly, comes all too easily to us. Dehumanization is a scourge, and has been so for millennia. It acts as a psych ological lubricant, dissolving our inhibitions and inflaming our destructive passions. As such, it empowers us to perform acts that would, under other circumstances, be unthinkable. Law Professor Jonathan Turley said on The Rachel Maddow Show: Its the indictment of all of us if we walk away from a clear war crime. It is equally immoral to stand silent in the face of a war crime and do nothing. Stanley Milgram mentioned in his book, Obedience to Authority, that, The essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another persons wishes, and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his action. Once this critical shift of view point has occurred in the person, all of the essential features of obedience follow. Should anyone be surprised when a high ranking official from Burma military intelligence Major Aung Lynn Htut recounting his personal experience confessed to the Voice of America (VOA) that 81 innocent people on Christie Island were murdered at the order from Senior General Than Shwe? If we, the Burmese society, like any other society, considered that it is important for us to come to some kind of closure on what has hap pened during 1988, during 2007 and many others incidents where people were killed, people just disappeared and people still languishing in jails around the country merely on trump up charges under unjust laws we need to have a truth commission. We should neither forget nor forgive until we have one. END