The year 2009 will be remembered as when Sri Lanka’s 30-year-old civil war came to an end.

But as always peace has come with a price…

Like the wind blowing across the treetops, its presence is perceived through the effect it has on everything it touches.

Shallow wells rarely strike water and shallow minds often come up empty. The ability to keep still and simply observe deepens resolve and attracts good fortune. Discern the difference between what is deep and what is surface within yourself — and you will be able to distinguish between the two in the world as well.

During a period between events, the practice of stillness with awareness is fruitful. Only by observing and absorbing the true nature of things — by apprehending the rhythms and cycles that guide all creation — can we discover the laws that apply to our own individual lives. Examine yourself and the overall situation — not just with the thought of discovering truth, but with the vision of concentrating your personal power.

Ogyen Trinley Dorje, the Karmapa Lama/Associated Press

DHARAMSALA, India – It is nearly 10 years since a 14-year-old Tibetan monk made a dramatic escape over the Himalayas to India, travelling over 1,500 kilometres from his monastery in Tibet, evading Chinese border troops and risking death by exposure to the cold.

The monk was the 17th Karmapa, one of Tibet’s most important religious leaders.

Every year, more than a thousand Tibetans continue to risk their lives, defying Chinese- imposed restrictions on travel by secretly making the arduous and dangerous Himalayan crossing into Nepal and India.

On Oct 7, 1950, as United Nations troops under the command of U.S. General Douglas MacArthur crossed the 38th parallel in Korea, 40,000 Chinese soldiers invaded Tibet following a military plan laid down by Deng Xiaoping. Thus began the death of a nation, with the 14th Dalai Lama himself escaping to India in 1959.

However, the Karmapa’s escape on Dec. 28, 1999 was different. He was communist China’s most prized stooge in Tibet, the highest reincarnate lama under Beijing’s control to have the Dalai Lama’s official recognition. The Karmapa is also the head of the Karma Kagyu school, one of the four sects of Tibetan Buddhism, and by tradition the third most important lama in Tibet’s religious hierarchy – after the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama.

The Karmapas were the first lamas to establish the practice of identifiable reincarnation – some 400 years before the advent of the Dalai Lamas. And the young boy represented an unbroken line of succession dating back to the 12th century.

British journalist Mick Brown, fascinated by this charismatic young monk travels to Dharamsala, the seat of the Dalai Lama’s government-in-exile in the Himalayan foothills of northern India, to try to score an interview.

Nonetheless, the interviewee soon becomes the subject of a book.

But Brown’s ‘The Dance of 17 Lives’ is more than just the life of the 17th Karmapa. It’s also about intrigue surrounding the selection of the 17th incarnation, interlaced with stories of miracles and rumours of murder, political conspiracy and the settling of centuries-old scores.

As ‘The Dance of 17 Lives’ points out, due to a controversy the identity of the current 17th Karmapa is actively disputed. There are two claimants – Ogyen Trinley and Thaye Dorje – each supported by a number of important lamas from the Kagyu lineage; however, the majority of the main Karma Kagyu lamas, the Dalai Lama, and the Tibetans, inside and outside of Tibet, have supported Ogyen Trinley.

The current feud began in a Chicago cancer ward, with the 1981 death of a man named Ranjung Rigpe Dorje. After the 1950 occupation of Tibet by China, Ranjung Rigpe, the 16th Karmapa, had established a thriving exile community and engineered the Kagyu school’s current Western popularity. Yet he appeared to have left one task undone: leaving proper instructions for finding the traditional poem, penned by him, that would help his followers find his reincarnated self — and thus the next Karmapa.

Before Ogyen Trinley was found, the Dalai Lama, writes Brown, had a vision in which he saw green mountains covered with meadows and two streams, where the name ‘Karmapa’ – ‘movement of karma’ in Sanskrit — resounded in the air.

Later, when the search party came to Barkor, the community where the boy was born on Jun. 26, 1985, this is exactly what they found: Green meadowed mountains in an area sparsely populated with two rivers on each side of the valley.

In Tibet, great births come accompanied with great legends.

Three days after the birth of Ogyen Trinley, then known as Apo Gaga or ‘happy brother’, ”the sound of a conch shell – an omen of a great birth – resonated across the valley, astonishing all who heard it, for no one could be found blowing such a shell, and no conch shell could sound as loudly as this one,” writes Brown.

But the drama behind the second claimant to the throne of the 17th Karmapa centres on Shamar Rinpoche, from the Sharmapa clan and one of the four ‘heart sons’ of the 16th Karmapa.

The prize is a crown, about 20 centimetres high, said to be woven from the hair of holy women. The stakes: assets worth 1.2 billion U.S. dollars in the 16th Karmapa’s monastery in Rumtek, Sikkim, and the reverence of up to a million followers.

In September 1992 Ogyen Thinley was officially enthroned as the 17th Karmapa in Tibet’s Tsurphu Monastery.

But in March 1994 in New Delhi, a defiant Shamar Rinpoche also enthroned his own choice for the job: a bespectacled 10-year-old named Tenzin Chentse, whose parents he said were Tibetan refugees. The boy was later named Thaye Dorje.

Shamar Rinpoche’s welcoming ceremony for the new contender, however, turned into a melee, and the boy spent the next few weeks under the guard of 300 monks and 400 combat-ready Europeans from a militant Buddhist school run by a Danish ex- boxer.

Brown’s ‘The Dance of 17 Lives’ is frank about the centuries-old conflict between the Shamarpas and the dominant Gelugpa yellow-hat sect led by the Dalai Lama.

In 1791, the 10th Shamarpa incited King Prithi Narayanan Shah of Nepal to invade Tibet in order to secure a large quantity of gold from the Tashilhunpo Monastery in Shigaste.

The Chinese who had long considered Tibet as their ‘protectorate’ decided to intervene.

Early in 1792, the Chinese emperor despatched 13,000 troops to join the 10,000 Tibetans already amassed against the Gurkha invaders. Together with the Tibetans, the Chinese managed to drive the Gurkhas across the border into Nepal.

The 10th Shamar Rinpoche then committed suicide. As a punishment for the betrayal, the ruling Gelugpa sect forbade any Shamar incarnations. The Shamar’s red crown was buried under the steps of the courthouse in Lhasa as a mark of disgrace.

It was not until 1963 that the line of the Shamarpa was finally reinstated by the current Dalai Lama’s government-in-exile in Dharamsala – a regrettable move that would cause irreparable damage to the Kagyu school.

The return of the 17th Karmapa Orgyen Trinley, who is currently staying in Dharamsala, to the Rumtek monastery in Sikkim depends entirely on India. New Delhi, so far, has tried to avoid the issue, preferring the Karmapa to remain in the Gyuto monastery near the seat of the Dalai Lama’s government-in-exile so that the Indian government would be able to keep an eye on both.

Politics is cruel and even Tibetan Buddhism is not free from it.

As Brown writes towards the end, ”I had been aware of a nagging doubt growing in my mind; the talk of politics, of disputation that somehow made me momentarily forget the essence of the Buddhist practice. It had dented my faith.”

Fistula is prevalent throughout the developing world and women are susceptible to getting fistulas anywhere there is a breakdown in the health system. credit: Shaleece Haas

As a result of the long labour, Meseret suffered crippling injuries – including the ripping of internal tissue. This created a hole between her bladder, vagina and rectum, a condition that doctors term an “obstetric fistula”. As a result, Meseret became unable to control normal excretory functions – and urine and faeces started to drip down her legs constantly.

The girl’s husband quickly rejected her. She had given him a dead baby and now she smelled bad. He sent her home to her family.

If left untreated, Meseret’s condition would probably have led to infections, kidney failure – and eventually, death.

But fortunately, her mother heard of another girl in the village who had suffered from this ailment – and how she had successfully sought treatment in the capital, Addis Ababa.

The family then sold a cow to pay for the three-day bus journey to the capital and arrived at the gates of the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital, with Meseret, penniless.

For the hospital’s founder, Dr. Catherine Hamlin, this was a common tale. Hamlin is an Australian gynecologist who has spent the last 44 years in the capital.

Her hospital treats 1,200 women annually. However, as the continent marks African Women’s Health and Rights Day today, health experts acknowledge that this is a fraction of the total number of fistula cases that occur in Ethiopia.

The World Health Organisation believes up to 8,500 women in the East Africa country develop the condition every year.

“In many developing countries, the role of women is limited to providing sexual satisfaction for their husbands, producing children and performing the hard labor associated with agrarian life,” says Hamlin.

“Fistula injuries destroy their ability to fulfil these roles, and with it their sense of self-worth. They become social outcasts from their community through no fault of their own.”

Fortunately, most fistulas can be corrected surgically, even after several years.

The cost of the operation ranges from $100 to $450. While this amount is far beyond what most patients can afford, the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital offers free surgery – and a free bed for the patient.

“If done properly, surgical repair can have a success rate as high as 90 per cent and women can usually have more children,” said Hamlin.

Reliable data on obstetric fistula are hard to come by for the whole of Africa, although the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) estimates that between 50,000 and 100,000 women may be affected.

“If obstetric fistula was something that happened to both men and women there would have been more efforts made to study it,” said Ruth Kennedy, the Addis Ababa hospital’s administrator.

But because of poverty and the stigma associated with their condition, most women living with fistulas remain invisible to policy makers both in their own countries and abroad.

“These are girls are illiterate, so they cannot communicate – they cannot write and say, ‘Look, I’ve got this problem, can you help me?’” notes Kennedy.

UNFPA began fistula prevention programmes in 2002. But President George Bush, alarmed by reports that the agency was supporting forced abortions in China, later withheld $34 million worth of funding for UNFPA. This has had a knock-on effect for the agency’s work in other parts of the world, including Ethiopia. The UNFPA denies the charge of endorsing forced abortions in China.

Postponing the age of marriage and delaying childbirth can significantly reduce the risk of subjecting young women to the arduous labour that induces fistulas. However, educating Ethiopian women about these facts is proving an uphill battle.

At present, the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital runs an awareness programme in conjunction with the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association.

“We have a women lawyer who gives talks to the girls, here in the hospital, about their rights: that they don’t need to be married early, and should be going to school instead,” says Hamlin.

“But it is very difficult to alter the culture when you’re sitting in Addis Ababa, unless it comes from the people in the village,” she adds.

“So we have to go to the villages, I reckon, to talk to the people there, if we want to see change.”

KALAIVANI: Learnt to forgive...

Forgiveness was a difficult word for Kalaivani Saravani when she was growing up as a war orphan in Sri Lanka. But recently the 18-year-old Tamil university student, almost by accident, discovered personal healing.

 This happened when she was selected to participate as a trainee radio producer in a weeklong Internews cross-production workshop in early May that brought together 15, mostly young, Tamil, Sinhalese and Muslim journalists to cover stories that affect the lives of local communities.

 Kalaivani, who grew up in the troubled Batticaloa district in Sri Lanka’s east coast, related, “In 1994, there was heavy fighting in my village in Batticaloa between the Sri Lankan armed forces and Tamil Tiger (LTTE) rebels. My father was killed by the Sri Lankan army and my mother went missing.’’

 Her voice hoarse with emotion, she continued, “My eight siblings and I were in an IDP camp for a while and then we were transferred to an orphanage. Till today I don’t know whether my mother is alive or dead.”

 Since 1983, the people of Batticaloa district have suffered the consequences of the war between the Sri Lankan forces and the Tamil Tigers. Until December 2006, 80 percent of Batticaloa district was under rebel control and 20 percent under the Sri Lankan government. After five months of intense fighting, the whole district is now under Sri Lankan government control and administration.

 While Kalaivani excelled in her studies in the orphanage and managed to get entrance into the Open University, she confessed that she had extreme hatred for all Sinhalese.

 ‘’The Sinhalese form the majority of the Sri Lankan forces that killed my father,’’ she explained with pain in her eyes.

 ‘’But I realized that hatred was destroying me. While I was good in Tamil language and English, I refused to even learn a word of Sinhala and avoided coming into contact with Sinhalese people. I was killing myself with this burning anger,’’ she said.

 Little did Kalaivani realize that she would be undergoing a personal transformation when she was selected by Internews for a journalism training workshop. As part of the workshop, she joined a group of Tamil and Muslim journalists traveling from the east to the predominately Sinhalese-dominated southern coast in the cross-production workshop.

 She was assigned to report and produce a radio story in Tamil on communities displaced by the construction of a superhighway from Colombo to Matara. To produce her story, she had to talk to Sinhalese villagers in Akmeemana village, near the tourist resort of Galle. An interpreter was available to help her.

 “My initial nervousness all proved to be just a bit too stupid,’’ she admitted. “The Sinhalese people in Akmeemana village opened their hearts out to me even when they knew I was a Tamil and couldn’t speak Sinhala. They made me feel so welcome.’’

 “I was touched when they wanted to tell me their problems. They wanted their sufferings to be heard by Tamil listeners of the radio stations. They, too, were trying to reach out to their Tamil brothers and sisters to say that all poor people have the same problems, regardless of whether you are Sinhalese, Tamil or Muslim.’’

 At the end of the cross-production workshop in Ampara, a city 200 kilometers from the capital, Colombo, on Sri Lanka’s east coast, Kalaivani shared with all the 15 Tamil, Sinhalese and Muslim trainees the story of her personal transformation.

 “The people in Akmeemana village made me realize that my anger and hatred were all just misplaced. I’ve been conscientiously trying to learn Sinhala this week and will continue to do so when I return to Batticaloa,’’ she said in halting Sinhala, to a round of hearty applause.

 Stimulating community dialogue and raising community awareness of youth issues are an essential part of Internews’ Real Voices Radio program, which creates a space for common voices in the mainstream media, regardless of ethnicity. Through four cross-production series since the 2006 inception of the USAID-funded Regional Media Houses in the east and south of Sri Lanka, Internews trainers have managed to introduce empathy, nonviolence and creativity into stories done in the conflict areas with Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim reporters.

 These reporters are trained to understand conflict partners from the inside and recognize in all parties their joint creativity in finding ways to transcend the incompatibilities. This in turn is reflected in their stories, which are broadcast by four radio stations transmitting the Real Voices programs in East and South Sri Lanka. Two of the radio stations – Ruhunu Sevaya FM and Uva Radio – are popular with young Sinhalese listeners.