Page 2 of
2 Tibet's
only hope lies within By Peter
Lee
March 10 is the anniversary of the date
in 1959 when thousands of Tibetans gathered to
protect the Dalai Lama at the Norbulinka Palace in
Lhasa before his flight to India, and serves as a
traditional occasion for Tibetans to reflect, make
speeches, and demonstrate to protest the
occupation of their homeland.
The march on
the border and the appearance of the monks in
Lhasa, therefore, may have simply been a
coincidence.
Virtually all observers
dismiss the TPUM as an amateurish and quixotic
venture and question its reach inside China. The
TPUM itself disavowed any direction of the unrest
inside Tibetan China.
However, the Dalai
Lama did denounce the violence by Tibetans
and went as far as to
threaten to resign his leadership of the Tibetan
movement if it didn't stop - a stance that would
have an immediate effect on incitement emanating
from the tiny community of Dharamsala but would
have been almost impossible to convey into Tibetan
areas of the PRC, given the total communications
lockdown put in place by the Chinese government
once the riots broke out.
In any case,
TPUM evaporated as a political presence, and the
leaders of the TYC and other groups interfaced
with the media solely in their capacities as
leaders of their respective NGOs.
Today,
the consensus is that emigre Tibetan militants,
whether affiliated with NGOs or seeking other
outlets, have extremely limited capacity in
coordinating activity inside the PRC or, for that
matter, even engaging in hostile rhetoric, given
the desire of the Indian government to keep a lid
on Tibetan dissent.
Thierry Dodin director
of the research and analysis organization
TibetInfoNet, told Asia Times Online:
There is doubtlessly communication,
partly indeed intense communication, between
Tibetans within and outside the PRC.
Coordination, though, is as good as nonexistent.
Tim Johnson speculates that whatever
contacts the TYC has inside China, they probably
do not extend far beyond the network of returned
graduates from the Tibetan Children's Village
schools in India.
In 2011, Johnson told
Asia Times Online that he doubted the
effectiveness of the TYC as a voice for militancy
in the Tibetan emigre community:
One look at the dilapidated
headquarters of the TYC in Dharamsala is all it
takes to realize it is little more than a
shoestring operation. Its leaders may have a lot
of passion but they have little capacity to
fulfill their goals.
Thierry Dodin
commented that the Tibetan Youth Congress would
have to grow beyond its agitator mindset in order
to gain influence in the Tibetan government ...
and avoid further fracture of the emigre movement
to Beijing's benefit:
TYC is nowadays what we would call
in the West, particularly in Europe, a
fundamental opposition movement or a "protest
party" ... At the moment they live from
projecting themselves as radical ... In order to
get anywhere, become an efficient organization,
they would have to completely re-think
themselves ... They would also have to shed
their populistic character. There have even been
(minor) cases of violent altercations by TYC
functionaries against people not agreeing with
them. So it is not unlikely a possible
'awakening' of TYC would become an internal
exile conflict. Perhaps this is what China is
counting on ...
In this context, any
rhetorical show of militancy from Dharamsala would
probably be welcome to the PRC, as it would
provide political cover and justification for the
brutal headknocking it metes out to its Tibetan
citizens daily as a matter of security and social
control.
The TYC received more publicity
thanks to the Chinese government - which elevated
the group to the status of a terrorist
organization sowing unrest, propaganda, and
weapons throughout Tibetan areas of China in order
to justify the 2008 crackdown - than it had
enjoyed in the previous 30 years of its existence.
The TYC is dismissed as a "paper tiger" by
Dodin:
It is a paper tiger pushed up by
Chinese propaganda in 2008. In Tibet they hardly
knew TYC before 2008, and even today they don't
really know what this is supposed to be. Despite
all solidarity, the gap between exiles and
Tibetans inside is
huge.
Unfortunately, Beijing's
discovery of a militant faction among the emigre
movement served primarily as a pretext to tar the
Dalai Lama with the extremist brush and further
delay negotiations with the vigorous but aging
leader.
Without a capacity to organize or
direct events inside China, and their effective
function limited to providing second-and-third
hand accounts of Chinese outrages to the foreign
media, Dharamsala's militants may find themselves
serving primarily as China's external national
security excuse for its heavy-handed internal
ethnic policies
Therefore, it appears that
Dharamsala will have little ability to further the
Tibetan agenda, either through moderation or
militancy. As the title of his book (subtitled
How the Dalai Lama Conquered the World but Lost
the Battle with China) indicates, Tim Johnson
is pessimistic about the future of the Tibetan
political project, and the Tibetan identity
itself:
More and more Han migrants will
arrive on the Tibetan Plateau, and almost
inevitably Tibet will head the way of Inner
Mongolia and other regions of the mainland
subsumed by the vast Han majority. The race is
nearly over. (page 299)
Returning to
the subject in 2011, after the Arab Spring,
Johnson told Asia Times Online:
I believe some Tibetans hope that an
exogenous factor to their own struggle may open
a door for them. Whether that is internal strife
on the mainland or some other event, they (and
we) don't know. And the chances of this may not
be great. That is why I choose a term from
American football to describe it, that what they
seek is a chance at a "Hail Mary pass" in which
a losing team attempts an all-or-nothing play to
avoid defeat. Clearly that calls for a
confluence of circumstances to be successful, as
it was for Timor-Leste in 1999. Is such an
opportunity likely to open up for Tibetans? I
have serious doubts.
However, the same
escalating domestic repression that is enabled by
Dharamsala's lack of diplomatic, political, and
organizational reach may elicit such dug-in
opposition from ethnic Tibetans that China, sooner
or later, may have to deal with it instead of
crushing it with truncheons or sweeping it aside
with a flood of economic development, Han
immigrants, and tourists.
Dodin emphasized
that the emigre community operates near the
periphery of awareness for Tibetans within the
PRC, and to focus on Dharamsala, even with the
presence of the 14th Dalai Lama and especially
after he is gone, is to ignore the main and
important drivers of Tibetan activism:
We should not commit the mistake
China seems to commit all the time, namely to
consider that the exile community is the alpha
and omega of everything ... . Dissatisfaction,
alienation and frustration are the cause for the
Tibetan issue. The exiles are a product of that
too. They have a role to play, for sure, or
rather they can play a role if acting
congruously and with a clear sense of purpose
and without exaggerating their significance, but
real and powerful movement can only come from
within Tibet. It is dissatisfaction, alienation
and frustration that creates troubles inside
China, not the Dalai Lama. Hence that will also
go on after his passing away.
It
appears that moral and political leadership of the
Tibetan cause will more and more fall to religious
leaders within the PRC.
In Tragedy in
Crimson, Johnson writes about the case of a
charismatic monk, Jigme Phuntsok, whose modern
monastery, Serthar, in western Sichuan, has
attracted over 1,000 monks and nuns despite
intermittent efforts by the Chinese government to
raze it or, alternately, assert control over it:
Local leaders said [in 2008] the
soldiers amassed at the gates had announced that
they would enter the community and hoist China's
red national flag over the entire settlement.
"The rinpoche told the Chinese that 90% of the
monks would kill themselves if their soldiers
entered and raised the Chinese flag," ... he
warned the holy men and women to hold passions
in check. "Every day, he tells monks and nuns,
'Don't do bad things ... Practice compassion,
and be patient."
The Dalai Lama, who
is now 76 years old, made the prediction that he
might outlive the PRC. That seems unlikely. But
perhaps in the future the PRC will find it
necessary to reach out to Tibetans inside its
borders and in Dharamsala to overcome the
demoralizing consequences of bad policies, bad
decisions, and bad karma.
Notes 1. Tragedy in
Crimson, Tragedy in Crimson: How the Dalai Lama
Conquered the World but Lost the Battle with
China, by Tim Johnson. Nation Books, New York,
Feb 2011. ISBN-10: 9781568586014. US$26.99, 352
pages (hardback). 2. Black
Days for the Dalai Lama, China Matters, Mar
18, 2008.
Peter Lee writes on
East and South Asian affairs and their
intersection with US foreign policy.
(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online
(Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and
republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
