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Hit {moshits} times. Appleton conference explores ways to deal with problems at Thailand monastery By Cheryl Sherry Post-Crescent staff writer Source from postcrescent.com APPLETON — Nearly 100 Hmong leaders and concerned people from across the country gathered Saturday for an all-day conference to discuss the fate of Hmong graves desecrated at a Buddhist monastery in Thailand. Members of the National Hmong Grave Desecration Committee explained before Saturday’s conference at the Thompson Community Center why exhuming bodies from the grounds of the Wat Tham Krabok Buddhist temple went against Hmong cultural and religious beliefs. The committee is seeking a peaceful resolution toward burying 211 bodies that remain in Thailand. “What we do here is not a Hmong thing, it is more a human thing,” said Vang Xiong X. Toyed, the Hmong Asian Pacific coalition chairman for eastern Washington. After 15,000 Hmong living in the refugee camp at Tham Krabok temple resettled mostly in the United States (with about 3,500 coming to Wisconsin) over the last two years, more than 900 Hmong graves were exhumed. In September, a 14-member delegation representing 13 states in the U.S. went to Thailand to speak with the Thai people, U.S. Embassy officials, the Abbot of the Tham Krabok monastery and members of the two Chinese foundations responsible for exhuming and cremating 480 bodies. “We do not cremate our people. We do not excavate them out of the ground once you put them there,” said Michael Yang, one of the leading members of the delegation. “That is their home and you can’t touch them.” The delegation recovered 211 additional bodies on the trip. These bodies remain in Thailand wrapped separately in green body bags and stored three to 10 deep in concrete storage bins. Issues behind the exhumation of bodies include contamination of water sources and the Abbot’s stance that Tham Krabok is not a burial ground, Yang said. “But we have deep reservations. We believe they may have other plans they aren’t sharing with us. There are a lot of assumptions, speculations, emotions, and we can understand why.” The first step is to bring closure for the 211 bodies. “Each and every group of people have the right to maintain their religious beliefs,” Yang said. “We went (to Wat Tham Krabok) with the intentions of finding out who was responsible for letting this happen, the whereabouts of the remains and the possibility of coming up with a framework with some type of respectful solution. We went there with a spirit of cooperation.” “The route we have taken so far is the peaceful route to find a peaceful resolution with the Thai,” said Sia Lo, a Minnesota-based attorney for the delegation. “If we can’t reach that there are other avenues,” including bringing the disagreement before the United Nations, Congress and the State Department. Litigation, Lo said, is an option that will be exercised only if necessary. “We have done preliminary research and made contact with key law firms in the U.S. as well as in Thailand,” he said. “We don’t want to pursue that route unless it’s necessary. But it’s not a closed door.” Said Toyed: “When people die we use the words ‘rest in peace.’ I think for us as Hmong, this is about healing grace. It doesn’t matter — man, woman, young old, nationality — people deserve to rest in peace. … “We are very grateful to the Thai government for giving us 30-plus years of sanctuary, and I think many of us owe a lot of our successes to the Thai, too. All we are saying is when people die, please let them rest in peace. It’s basic human passion and caring.”
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