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April 22, 2008
I was astounded and sickened by an article the Maui News ran on April 6, 2008, addressing recent events in the unraveling crisis in Tibet.
For those who aren’t aware by now, Communist Chinese Army forces and police recently clamped down on what began as a peaceful demonstration by monks marking the 49th anniversary of the Tibet National Uprising in Lhasa. This peaceful protest in the Himalayan capital swiftly escalated into widespread riots after police fired live ammunition into the crowd. It was a brutal crackdown reminiscent of the atrocities of Tiananmen Square, complete with tanks and troop carriers. CNN reports 140 protestors were killed at the hands of the army, with nearly 1,000 arrested.
Those events have snowballed into worldwide demonstrations against the oppressive occupation of Tibet by China for fifty years. Truth be told, it’s hardly an image the world’s emerging superpower, China, likes to convey, especially while it’s trotting the Olympic torch around the world on a “Journey of Harmony” not unlike Hitler first did in the days preceding World War II.
Besides the reporter’s blind eye to what is visually documented on Lhasa’s streets, I especially take exception to their way of equating the construction of a road, a railroad, or a few high-rise buildings or schools to progress and a better life for Tibetans.
To suppose that the Tibetan people are better off today because of their invasion and near-extermination is colonialist at best. At its worst, it reeks of 18th and 19th century imperialism. One can well imagine politicians and industrialists spouting the same twaddle in 1860s America as Native Americans were either rounded up onto reservations or exterminated. Sure, they could boast they’d brought them the railroad, schools, and a new religion, along with haircuts and high button collars. All it cost the indigenous people was their land, their culture, their lives… their freedom.
Today the same thing is happening in Tibet. When the Communists invaded in 1950, they killed over 1.2 million Tibetans. They destroyed over 6,000 Buddhist temples. Over the past fifty years, there have been massive resettlement programs. Hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese have moved into Tibet, set up businesses and intermarried. In exchange, they receive the best jobs, exclusion from the one-child policy and preferential treatment in China if and when they return.
The touted completion of the railroad from Beijing to Lhasa has only accelerated Tibet’s annihilation. The former annual invasion of a hundred thousand tourists has recently increased to several million. Old Lhasa, the capital my wife and I once knew, has been ravaged and replaced by strip clubs, karaoke bars, pool halls and brothels. A garish park featuring a Chinese fighter plane now surrounds the Potala Palace, one of the world’s architectural gems and traditional home to the Dalai Lamas.
Should the Tibetans be grateful?
At school, lessons are taught in Chinese – not Tibetan. The currency is Chinese. The best jobs go to the Chinese or Chinese-speakers. Traditional Tibetan clothing and food is being replaced with Chinese goods. Many villages have loudspeakers that broadcast music and news from China several times a day. The remaining temples have been turned into museums, while the atheistic Chinese decide who may even join monastic life. Their ranks now decimated, a would-be monk has to profess love of the Communist Party.
Today, even as you read this, over a hundred monks and nuns suffer torture and imprisonment in the worst conditions imaginable: most are there for small infractions such as having a picture of the Dalai Lama or singing songs of freedom.
Is this progress?
The Panchen Lama, second in the hierarchy of Tibetan Buddhism, was kidnapped as a six-year-old boy ten years ago and hasn’t been seen since. He remains the world’s youngest political prisoner. Shortly after his disappearance, the Communists had the excuse, as well as the audacity, to appoint their own Panchen Lama, a task normally reserved for the Dalai Lama.
The invasion and rape of Tibet has been highly successful while much of the world looks the other way. Today the Tibetan people are a minority in their own country and most are not permitted to legally leave its borders – although thousands risk their lives every year, escaping each winter in severe conditions, to walk over the high Himalayas to India.
Yet this is just a brief summary of the many injustices they suffer. These conditions are not imaginary or fabricated. Their misery is very real and has been documented by the Red Cross, Amnesty International, the UN, International Campaign for Tibet, and human rights groups worldwide.
My problem is not with the Chinese people, as many of them are just as oppressed. It is with the Communist Chinese government, the five percent who control the country.
As someone who personally has walked across Tibet and stayed each night with peasant families or former monks, I have seen much of this with my own eyes. I have heard the conditions and despair whispered around their fires over a cup of yak butter tea. What is happening today is nothing less than what the Nobel Peace Prize winning Dalai Lama called “cultural genocide.”
So, I must ask, “Is this progress? Should the Tibetan people be truly grateful the Communists have ‘liberated’ them?” Or perhaps I should ask, “Isn’t fifty years too long to suffer – even while the Dalai Lama repeatedly calls for tolerance, patience and a middle path of nonviolence?”
No, the western world has been all too silent. For a while the U.S. aided Tibetans with smuggled arms through the CIA, until Nixon took office and went courting Chinese business. Since then, especially after Clinton granted China “most favored nation” trade status – worth billions of dollars – our dollars have spoken louder than words. Our stores have been flooded with their cheap exports. Meanwhile, our workers have lost their jobs. Then, by selling the Communist Chinese party billions of dollars of treasury bonds, we have made the world’s largest violator of human rights our friendly banker.
But there is still hope – and the time has never been better. The worlds’ eyes are upon China. Call or email Congress to insist the Communist Chinese sit down to negotiate autonomy for Tibet with the Dalai Lama. This is a simple act they have resisted for over a decade. Pressure President Bush to personally boycott the Olympic ceremonies, as other conscientious world leaders plan to do. (One might think he’d have better things to do these days anyway.) Pressure China to cancel the Olympic torch relay across Tibet, as it will only result in more violence and death. Demand that the Panchen Lama be released. Pray for peace.
Finally, I would hope the enlightened people of Hawaii and especially native Hawaiian people would be sympathetic to the Tibetan cause. After all, these islands know all too well the problems wrought by the ill-conceived notion of “manifest destiny.” Let us not wish the same fate on any other sovereign nation.
Today, we are all Tibetans. And no man is free – until all men are free.
Brandon Wilson is the author of Yak Butter Blues: A Tibetan Trek of Faith.
Brandon Wilson
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