A Hundred Lotuses Blooming? - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 196

wheeled in to hose down the remaining protestors, who hid behind their orange parasols
and chanted defiantly at their attackers. For the first time in decades, the monks were tak-
ing a stand.
As in Burma and Thailand, Buddhism carries great moral authority in Cambodian so-
ciety. During the French period, monks and achars became involved in anticolonial agit-
ation and some went on to play roles in the early communist movement. After the fall of
Pol Pot, who tried to eradicate the country's Buddhist institutions, the re-emergence of the
monkhood was tightly controlled. In September 1979 seven Khmer monks were ordained
in Vietnam and became the core of a new religious hierarchy enmeshed with the networks
of the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party. Monks sat on the party's Central Com-
mittee, and were given other political posts. By 1981, Tep Vong, the youngest of the sev-
en, served as vice-president of the National Assembly and Supreme Patriarch of a unified
Buddhist order—an unprecedented melding of temporal and spiritual authority. Due to
its close association with the Royal Palace, the Thommayut sect, the smaller of Cambod-
ia's two Buddhist orders, was repressed in favor of the Mahanikay, which today includes
around 90 percent of the country's pagodas. The traditional separation between the two
orders wasn't re-established until Sihanouk's return to Cambodia in 1991.
As head of the Mahanikay order, Tep Vong has since been unfailingly loyal to the
CPP, overseeing a pliant monastic hierarchy that sanctifies government actions and dis-
courages political agitation by the country's 60,000 monks. During the 1998 protests Tep
Vong reportedly called on Hun Sen's bodyguards and military police to flush out dissident
monks holed up at Wat Ounalom. 16 In 2002 he banned monks from voting in elections,
and instigated strict controls on their involvement in public protests. After human rights
groups began using pagodas for public forums, he ordered them off-limits for political
purposes. 17 All these actions were justified on the doctrinal grounds that monks should
detach themselves from mundane life and adopt a neutral, compassionate stance. There
was precedent for this—Cambodian monks had never voted prior to 1993—but the re-
introduction of these rules had less to do with a concern for monks' spiritual attainment
than with preventing them from mobilizing political opposition.
Like outspoken journalists, monks who believed they had a duty to stand up against
worldly injustice were subject to harsh and sometimes violent treatment. At midday on
February 6, 2003, Loun Sovath heard that his teacher Sam Bunthoeun had been shot
by unidentified men outside Wat Lanka, a temple on Sihanouk Boulevard in Phnom
Penh. Bunthoeun died in hospital two days later. The motive for the killing was never
established. After a threadbare investigation the police concluded that it was the result
of a “personal dispute.” 18 But Bunthoeun had recently put himself in the government's
crosshairs, speaking out strongly against Tep Vong's voting ban. Ian Harris, an expert on
Cambodian Buddhism, writes that powerful government figures also saw Bunthoeun's