Buddhists all over the world celebrated Vesak last week. It is the commemoration of both the birth and the attainment of Enlightenment (nirvana) by Gautama, the Buddha.
In Sri Lanka, a society that prides itself on being the missionary center of Theravada Buddhism, this year’s festivities merged with nationalist triumphalism over the “defeat of terrorism” and hysterical denunciations of “foreign interference” vis a vis allegations of war crimes.
If, to Western observers, the alliance of Buddhism with militarism and ethnic jingoism seems extraordinary, it is because, ever since the 19th century, Western textbook depictions of Buddhism have often served an anti-Christian polemical purpose (e.g., contrasting “Buddhist tolerance” with “Christian bigotry”).
Despite Buddhism’s theoretical commitment to ahimsa (nonviolence), rarely has a Buddhist leader dared to challenge state violence. Often the sangha (the Buddhist clergy) has encouraged it, and monks have been in the forefront of mob attacks on churches and foreign embassies.
No Buddhist leader, monk or layperson, has hitherto called on the state to acknowledge that not all civilian casualties in the war were caused by “terrorists.”
In an editorial on the U.N. secretary general’s advisory panel’s report on alleged war crimes in Sri Lanka, the British newspaper The Guardian wrote: “The point is that truth and accountability, let alone international justice, are not divisible. One country’s ability to bury the evidence of war crimes endangers how civilians are treated in all other conflicts. A single failure of international justice is also a collective one.”
Quite so. And it is precisely why I have been maintaining that the U.N.’s silence over war crimes and human rights abuses committed by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel in Lebanon, the Indian army in Kashmir, or Chinese troops in Tibet make it all the more difficult for those of us in countries like Sri Lanka to convince our own people, let alone ruling regimes, that “truth” and “accountability” are not slogans wielded by the powerful against the weak, but fundamental to the moral order that constitutes our very humanness.
Tragically, Christians in the powerful nations who are most eloquent about “truth” have limited it to religious apologetics.
Rarely, if ever, does one hear the call for truth expressed in the public square, whether local or global, in the way the Hebrew prophets did.
This divorce of apologetics from social-political ethics, the divorce of issues of truth from justice and accountability, lies at the root of the crisis of credibility of evangelical Christianity in these nations.
I have observed how, on my recent speaking tour of American universities, my appeals to Americans to be more outspoken about their own human rights abuses at home and abroad were often met with “stony silence.”
How encouraging, then, to read of more than 250 of the United States’ most eminent legal scholars having signed a letter protesting against the treatment of Bradley Manning, the alleged WikiLeaks source, saying his “degrading and inhumane conditions” are illegal, unconstitutional and could even amount to torture.
The list of signatories includes Lawrence Tribe, a Harvard professor considered to be the country’s foremost liberal authority on constitutional law and who taught the subject to President Obama.
Manning is awaiting a court martial in Quantico, a U.S. Marine Corps base in Virginia. He has been jailed since last July, charged with multiple counts relating to the leaking of thousands of secret documents to the WikiLeaks website.
Until this letter was issued, he was kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, checked every five minutes under a so-called prevention of injury order, not allowed to exercise, and stripped naked at night apart from a smock.
Among the documents alleged to have been leaked a year ago by Manning are the Guantanamo files. These were obtained by the New York Times and shared with the Guardian and National Public Radio, which is publishing extracts, having redacted information that might identify informants.
The 759 U.S. military dossiers reveal how many prisoners were flown to the Guantanamo cages and held captive for years, some on the flimsiest grounds or on the basis of lurid confessions extracted by maltreatment.
The Guantanamo system often focused on extracting intelligence, less on containing dangerous terrorists or enemy fighters. Among inmates who proved harmless were an 89-year-old Afghan villager, suffering form senile dementia, and a 14-year-old boy who had been an innocent kidnap victim.
The 14-year-old was shipped to the prison in Cuba merely because of “his possible knowledge of Taliban local leaders.” An al-Jazeera journalist was held at Guantanamo for six years, partly in order to be interrogated about the Arabic news network.
Obama’s inability to shut Guantanamo has been one of the White House’s most internationally embarrassing policy failures.
The range of those still held captive includes detainees who have been admittedly tortured so badly they can never be successfully tried, informers who must be protected from reprisals, and a group of Chinese Muslims from the Uighur minority who have nowhere to go.
It is easy for Christians in the U.S. or Europe to highlight the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of Buddhists, or the way Buddhism has been co-opted by the Sri Lankan state.
Our critique would carry weight only if we attended to the beams in our own eyes. And this is where the silence of our brethren in the West over abuses of power in their own nations is a massive obstacle to our own credibility.
Vinoth Ramachandra is secretary for dialogue and social engagement for the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. He lives in Sri Lanka. This column previously appeared on his blog.
Secretary for dialogue and social engagement for the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. He lives in Sri Lanka.