10 28. Half a decade ago, the President of the Academy of Chinese Culture (the philosopher Tang Yi Jie) and a Professor at the Collège de France (the geophysicist Xavier Le Pichon) engaged into an academic dialogue on death, in which Tang Yi Jie recalled the Buddhist view that "human existence is a sea of sufferings" as well as R. Rolland's remark (translated from Chinese), to the same effect that "La vie humaine est une souffrance. C'est un combat incessant pour ceux qui ne se contentent pas d'avoir une vie médiocre, un combat souvent cruel, sans gloire, sans bonheur, mené dans la solitude et le silence"32. On his turn, X. Le Pichon added that "the degree of humanization of a society is measured by the quality of taking care of those who suffer or those whose handicap exclude the possibility of having a life like the others"33. 29. In the present case of the Moiwana Community, the handicap of, or harm suffered by, the survivors of the massacre and close relatives of the direct victims, of the massacre perpetrated on 29 November 1986 in the N'djuka Maroon village of Moiwana, is a spiritual one. Under their culture, they remain still tormented by the circumstances of the violent deaths of their beloved ones, and the fact that the deceased did not have a proper burial. This privation, generating spiritual suffering, has lasted for almost twenty years, from the moment of the perpetration of the 1986 massacre engaging the responsibility of the State until now. The N'djukas have not forgotten their dead. 30. Nor could they. In the public hearing before this Court, of 29.09.2004, one of the two representatives of the alleged victims (F. MacKay) declared that "the representatives of the victims of the Moiwana massacre and the next of kin stand before this Court today as part of their ongoing efforts to obtain justice; justice for the 39 persons known to have been brutally murdered and mutilated by the national army of Suriname on 29 November 1986; justice for the survivors of that massacre who witnessed their defenceless relatives being shot and hacked to pieces with machetes; their ancestral village with its sacred sites burned to the ground, and who have had to endure forced exile from their traditional lands and the spiritual congress that can only be enjoyed on those lands; and justice for the survivors and next of kin who are obliged by fundamental cultural norms to ensure that the dead are given ritual burials and to ensure that they receive justice so that their spirits may rest in peace. The search for justice is taking place continuously throughout the almost eighteen years that have passed since the massacre. (...) The massacre constitutes a crime against humanity, a gross and flagrant violation of jus cogens norms, obligations erga omnes, and of norms of International Humanitarian Law codified in the Geneva Conventions and judged to have atttained the status of customary international law. (...) The massacre amounts . Cit. in: Tang Yi Jie and Xavier Le Pichon, La Mort, Shanghai/Paris, Presses Artistiques et Littéraires de Shanghai/DDB, 1999, pp. 32 and 76. 50 32 . In ibid., p. 149. 33