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By Antonio C. Abaya

In my article, “Free Tibet…later” of April 7, 2008, I expressed my reservations that the Tibet brouhaha was being deliberately manipulated by a public relations outfit in New York or London or Paris, with the sole purpose of embarrassing the Chinese on their coming-out party that is this summer’s Beijing Olympic Games.

And the reason for my misgivings is the curious fact that right next to Tibet is the Autonomous Region of Xinjiang, populated by Muslim Uyghurs who have been struggling for independence from the Han Chinese as long as the Tibetans have. These people have even exploded several bombs to express their anger and frustration, but no one pays any attention to them.

Why not? Obviously because they have no high-powered PR firm coordinating their moves, no Richard Gere or Mia Farrow to give their struggle a Hollywood cachet that would appeal to Western liberals.

But most of all, it is also because the Tibetans are Buddhists who are seen as docile and pacifist. They are therefore easier to generate sympathy for among Western liberals who are looking for an excuse to bash the Chinese.

The Uyghurs, on the other hand, are Muslims, whom Western liberals are not only not sympathetic to, but are downright hostile to, because of Muslims’ medieval attitudes toward women and their theocratic notions of the state.

That article drew some interesting reactions. A reader in California forwarded to me an article written by a Canadian journalist reporting from Lhasa and Berlin. The Canadian journalist says that preparations for the Tibet brouhaha were first made in March 2005. This resulted in the International Tibet Support Group Conference on May 11 to 14, 2007 in Brussels, Belgium, organized by a German foundation, the Frederick Naumann Stiftung, with the participation of Paula Dobriansky, undersecretary in the US Department of State, and a ranking member of the neo-conservative inner circle in the Bush administration.

That conference was attended by more than 300 participants from 56 countries, 36 Tibetan associations and 145 Tibet support groups.

No wonder there are no crocodile tears for the Muslim Uyghurs, and no one tried to grab the Olympic torch in London or Paris to embarrass the Chinese on their behalf.

Also forwarded to me was a lengthy article “Tibet: Myth and Reality,” by Foster Stockwell, which summarizes Tibetan history, including the incorporation of Tibet into China as early as 1239 when the Mongols of Genghis and Kublai Khan started to create the Yuan Dynasty, and the growth of a feudal theocracy in Tibet over the centuries.

When the People’s Liberation Army entered Lhasa in October 1951, one of its goals was to dismantle this feudal theocracy in which monks had become the biggest landlords and owned the most serfs. Much of this information can be found in Wikipedia.

This article was reprinted in full under Reactions to “Free Tibet…later” (which can be accessed in www.tapatt.org and in acabaya.blogspot.com). A reader in Hong Kong forwarded it to a “China and Tibet expert,” also a resident in Hong Kong, who pronounced the article “accurate as far as it goes” but “is generally worthless” because of its “having a pro-China patina.” But since he/she declined to give his/her name, we are not running it.

So, according to the standards of this academic, an article on Tibet must have an anti-China patina to have any worth, even if it is factually accurate. My, my, how academe has been prostituted to geopolitics!

Writing in “Truthout/Perspective,” J. Sri Raman narrates how the US Department of State, under Dean Acheson, as well as the CIA, have involved themselves in Tibetan affairs as early as 1951, as a lever against the newly triumphant Mao regime in Beijing.

Raman also quotes Michael Parenti, whom he describes as a leftist, who wrote in “Friendly Feudalism: A Tibetan Myth,” that “until 1969, when the Dalai Lama last presided over Tibet, most of the arable land was still organized into manorial estates worked by serfs. These estates were owned by two social groups, the rich secular landlords and the rich theocratic lamas [or monks]… The Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures and 18,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas or monks. Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth. The Dalai Lama himself lived in the 1,000-room, 14-story Potala Palace…”

Perhaps Richard Gere and Mia Farrow should be reincarnated as Tibetan serfs working in one the monks’ manorial estates and subsisting on rancid yak butter.

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NOTE: My Web site at www.tapatt.org was restored last April 20, after a 48-hour embargo by person or persons unknown and for unknown reasons. But my e-mail address acabaya@zpdee.net has remained disabled from sending or receiving e-mails for the past four days.

Dalai Lama has begun roaming around the world as some Westerns whip up their anti-China wave in recent days. This is also the case in 2007, when a new round of the “China threat theory” re-emerged, he made a rush tour of Germany, Canada and the United States.

Although the Dalai Lama insists that his trips had “had nothing to do with politics”, each of his trips, however, has been “timed so accurately” that people doubt his allegation of “having nothing to do with politics.” The Global and Mail (newspaper) of Canada even reports that Dalai’s meetings with (foreign leaders) are precisely set in an extremely sensitive moment.

In fact, some people have tried hard to capitalize on the Dalai clique to add weight onto China, whereas the Dalai clique would take the opposite side to build up a great momentum for “Tibetan independence” elements and play “international cards” in a vain attempt to internationalize the “Tibet issue” and proceed to exert more pressure upon the Chinese government.

At one moment, they appeal to the international community to link the Tibet issue with Beijing’s 2008 summer Olympic Games when dealing with China and, at another moment they urge international community to set up “an independent committee of inquiry” to make a thorough investigation of the Lhasa unrest on March 14.

They thought they were clever to play “international cards”. Some people have worked in coordination with the Dalai clique ever since the latter stepped up its scheme to promote the “internationalization” of the “Tibet issue” in the 1980s. The Dalai Lama presented a Five-point Peace Plan in his address to the U.S Congress in Washington D.C. on September 21, 1987, which was followed by the release of the “Tibet issue” motion by the US Congress in September of the same year. At the repeated call of the Dalai Lama in the wake of riots in Lhasa and other ethnic Tibetan areas since March 14, the US House of Representatives and Senate and the European Parliaments (EP) adopted their respective “resolutions” on the so-called “Tibet issue”.

Of course, the attainment of these achievements is also related to the self-promotion ability of the Dalai clique. The Dalai Lama and his ilk have got to know well how Western nations think of their own interests during their half a century of exile overseas; they also know how to cater to and appease to Western society on such topics on human rights, peace, environmental protection, culture and … but they have never uttered a single word on the dark feudal serfdom under his own rule over five decades ago and the cruelty of the Tibet Youth Congress (TYC). Moreover, they denigrated tremendous progress scored in Tibet, either with the so-called “genocide” of Tibetan culture or with the absence of freedom in religious belief.

So, it is quite understandable for Dr. Eberhard Sandschneider, a China scholar who is head of the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), to say that the Dalai clique has the best market promotion capability, and a US congressman has even noted that the Dalai clique is good at doing public relations for the international Tibet (independence) movement.

The effect of “international cards” is still limited, nevertheless. To date, not a single nation on earth recognizes the so-called “Tibet independence”. Meanwhile, the Dalai clique should not forget its own “honor and disgrace”. Their requests for assemblies were rejected and visits turned down time and again in the era of cold war and, with ensuing changes in the world situation, they have turned increasingly “hot” again, from an “orphan” of the cold war to a “darling” of the world. It also indicates that they are merely a card for some countries to play with, whose value is decided by the interests of other parties, instead of having anything to do with the desire of the Dalai clique or the settlement of the so-called Tibet issue.

The Dalai clique should be aware that the “international card” does not work at all. Neither the people of China will allow its attempt for Tibetan independence to succeed, nor the international community will pay any heed to it, since the “Tibet issue” constitutes an issue of sovereignty without any room for bargains. This can be seen from the unprecedented unity demonstrated by people in China since the March 14 Lhasa incident and gigantic protests by Chinese expatriates and students overseas. So, in this sense, “international cards” cannot rescue the “dream of Tibetan independence”.

By People’s Daily Online and its author is He Zhenhua

By Han Lei (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2008-04-22 23:12


A Tibetan expert slammed Dalai Lama’s hypocrisy on Tuesday in response to the exiled monk’s accusation of human rights violations by the Chinese government.


Beijing Forum on Human Rights opens in Beijing, April 21, 2008. The theme of this forum is “development, security and human rights”, and more than 40 experts from 32 national and international organizations are present at the forum. [Xinhua]


“He wants to spread lies that China violated human rights in Tibet,” said Sherab Nyima, vice president of the Central University for Nationalities at the Beijing Forum on Human Rights.

The scholar, who is a Tibetan ethnic himself, said: “The Dalai Lama talked about human rights, but what did he do for human rights when he was a ruler?”

Buddhism was stipulated as the only legal religion, and other religions were banned as heresy, he told reporters on the sidelines of the forum. That is in sharp contrast to the current religious freedom protected by the constitution across the country, including the Tibet Autonomous Region.

Under the feudal serfdom of old Tibet, most people were merely slaves who were denied of basic human dignity. The serfs lived miserably with no personal freedom, and no right of life, not to mention political and other human rights, he said.

Sherab pointed out that Dalai Lama just used human rights as a tool to achieve the purpose of “Tibet independence.”

“The Dalai Lama said during a visit to Europe in 2007 that the year 2008 is a key year and Olympic Games might be the last chance for Tibetans,” he told the forum.

Talking about today’s Tibet, Indian editor Ram Narasimhan said welfare and quality of life are two key indicators of human rights, sounding similar to Chinese government’s emphasis on the rights to life and development in its drive to improve human rights.

Ram, the editor-in-chief of The Hindu Newspaper Group, has visited Tibet twice in the past seven years. Local people’s living standards have seen jumps and leaps in these years, Ram told the forum, calling that is in itself a reflection of human rights progress.

He said he was deeply impressed by the farmers who got rich through hard work, subsidies from the central government and new opportunities provided by a construction boom.