Tibet is involved with China. Tibet is de facto part of the Chinese
empire. It is a sad fact. Having India on the other side is not necessarily an
advantage either. They were the lot that invaded
Goa in 1961 after getting
independence. They are also making war in
Sri Lanka, supplying
weapons to trouble makers in what was a peaceful country.
Speak
Bitterness - Isabel Hilton Reviews A Tibetan's Book
A few months later, a Tibetan monk called Kalsang Yeshe set fire to
himself in the town of Tawu in what was once the Tibetan province of
Kham, and is now Sichuan province. He was the third person to set fire
to himself that week, and the 136th since 2009, when Tibetans began to
burn themselves to death. The police confiscated Kalsang Yeshe’s remains
to deny him his final religious rites. So far, the state has responded
to the self-immolations by equipping police patrols with fire
extinguishers and arresting anyone who survives the flames. The
authorities have also extended criminal responsibility for the act to
families, communities, villages and monasteries. These measures have
slowed the rate of self-immolations, but have not stopped them. That any
Tibetan citizen should choose an agonising death over life under Chinese
rule falls some way short of an endorsement of the harmonious society of
the Lhasa Consensus. That so many have done so might have caused
Davidson to hesitate. In the absence of any public explanation of his
remarks, we are left to judge him a fool or a knave. Arguments over the ‘truth’ about Tibet aren’t new. There is a
striking lack of agreement, outside official propaganda, on almost every
aspect of the country and its history. All are disputed between Beijing
and its supporters, the exile community in India, scholars around the
world and activists of many different persuasions. In this contested
territory a voice such as that of Naktsang Nulo, author of My
Tibetan Childhood, is extremely rare. Naktsang is a Tibetan, a
retired government official who worked as a teacher, a police officer,
court official, prison governor and county leader in Qinghai, a vast
province that stretches across the eastern part of the high Tibetan
plateau. This isn’t a wild-eyed rebel, or an ill-informed Western
journalist, but a man who was a state official all his working life. Knowing this background, the reader might anticipate an account of
joyful liberation from feudal serfdom and a journey towards the
prosperity and social harmony of the Lhasa Consensus. But that is not
the story he tells............. Memories of the culture of the nomads of the plateau, and of their
fate, are now confined to an ageing generation. As one of that
generation, Naktsang clearly feels his responsibility to history......... But,
he continued, ‘I do not have the habit to tell lies and smile over a cup of tea
to fool myself and others.’
Tibet In Flames The Chinese response has been
repression and abuse. The affected provinces have been flooded with
security forces, and Communist Party officials have condemned the
protesters as anarchists, terrorists and rebels —or, in the words of
one official, "rats" born of "weasels". The state-controlled media claim
that the deaths are orchestrated by the
Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, who has lived in exile
in India since 1959. They also insist that the
Dalai Lama's real goal is separatism —the revival of the independent Tibet
that existed until the Chinese troops marched back in, in 1951
—although the protesters themselves demand only the return of the
Dalai Lama and respect for their culture and religion. Meanwhile, the
Dalai Lama goes on
doing what he does best: he keeps Tibet before the world's
attention. As part of that process he visits world leaders and
collects various honours like the Nobel Peace Prize - and he never
attacks the Chinese regime directly. Instead, he patiently and politely
insists that China must respect Tibet's cultural and religious
autonomy. He never demands Tibetan independence, nor does he let his
followers in the large Tibetan exile community talk about
independence. And, of course, he laments the self-immolations. Yet the
Dalai Lama also believes that he will one day return to Tibet. He is 76
years old, but he is in good health, "so I am expecting another 10,
20 years", he told a BBC interviewer this week. "Within that (time),
definitely things will change." What will change Of course, he does. Most people
who know any history think that. Despite the death of Communist
ideology in China, the regime has managed to stay in power for
almost a quarter-century since the Tiananmen Square protests of
1989, but it has been helped by continuous, high-speed economic
growth. Would it survive a major recession? Nobody knows, but there is
certainly a reasonable chance of regime change in China in the next
10 or 20 years. And that would be Tibet's great opportunity, as the
Dalai Lama must know. The precedent is what happened
when Communist Party rule ended in the old Soviet Union 21 years
ago. The Soviet Union was the old Russian empire under a new name,
and only about half of its population was ethnically Russian. When
it collapsed, all the republics with non-Russian majorities took
their independence. More homogeneous It has to happen fast because the
window of opportunity doesn't stay open long: once a new regime is
firmly established, no politician who wants a long career will take
the blame for negotiating "the division of the motherland". And if
the Chinese worry that an independent Tibet would fall under the
influence of their great Asian rival, India, or if they are under
attack by Tibetan terrorists, they will be very reluctant to let the
Tibetans go. The
Dalai Lama certainly knows all this, too. His job, therefore, is to keep the
spirits of the Tibetans up while waiting for the window of
opportunity to open - and to keep the impatient younger generation
from launching some futile 'war of liberation' involving terrorist
attacks in the meantime. He has been successful in that for a long
time, but the wave of self-immolations is a warning that patience
may be running out.
QUOTE
Last August, speaking
at an international forum on development in Tibet sponsored by the Chinese
government,
Neil Davidson, a Labour peer and former advocate general for
Scotland, criticised the Western media for bias. The story they had failed
to tell, according to Davidson, was that of the remarkable economic
development the Chinese government had brought to Tibet in a ‘short time’,
by which we must presume he meant the more than sixty years since its
‘liberation’ by Chinese military force.......
UNQUOTE
Naktsang Nulo, author of My
Tibetan Childhood, tells it like it is. At all events I am happy to believe
him. It fits well with what Gwynn Dyer, a Canadian has to say. It is a sad
story. Being a nomad on the high plateau was a hard life. Chinese army massacres
did not make it better.
QUOTE
Published: Thursday | May 17, 2012
By Gwynne Dyer
THE NUMBER of Tibetans burning themselves to death in protests
against Chinese policy has grown very fast recently: the first
self-immolation was in 2009, but 22 of the 30 incidents happened in
the past year. And while at first it was only Buddhist monks and
nuns who were setting themselves on fire, in the past month both a
teenage girl and a mother of four have chosen to die in this
gruesome way.
What does he think will change?
Surely not the attitude of the Chinese Communist regime, which will
never allow him to return to Tibet since it fears that would unleash
a great wave of anti-Chinese nationalism. Well, then, he must think
the Chinese regime itself will eventually change.
The People's Republic of China is
more homogeneous: 90 per cent of its population is Han Chinese. But
in the few areas that still have non-Chinese majorities, like Tibet,
separation would be possible when regime change happens in Beijing -
on two conditions. It would have to happen fast, and it can only
happen if the Chinese people do not see Tibetans as enemies.
UNQUOTE
Mr. Dyer is a naval
man who taught at Sandhurst Military College. His appreciation of
the strategy makes a lot of sense.