Let me write down just a very few lines concerning the project which has been inserted here by Olivier, and which has been written by teh Chairman of the Tibetan Parliament in exile.Just a few lines to open a debate which have to go on keeping in mind that there cannot be any useful debate if it is not strictly connected to action and actions. I mean: Mohandas K. Gandhi used to say that Nonviolence is the greatest and the most active force in the world... Nonviolence is force, and it is stronger than violence. And it is exactly because of it that I look at Gandhi as at a poet, given that the word poetry comes straight from the Greek word POIEO, which means to create... Gandhi was a poet of the action. Which is not a joke...
Back to us. I do believe that even if Samdong Rimpoche says that the Tibetans' struggle should and must not DEPEND on any existing or would be support from outside Tibet and Tibetans - which does not mean that he refuses it, of course - Samdong Rimpoche is fully right. It is just in this piece of his text that I find a fully and gandhian-traditional nonviolent approach. The same approach which was lived by Martin Luther King, and which is precisely and deeply expressed in his Letters from the Birmingham prison. Maybe, we should print a selection of texts by King, while preparing the Satyagraha... Even if the Negroes in USA were not living in their own country invaded by others, even if the counterpart of King's movement was a legitimate and democratically elected government.
King, as well as the latest Malcolm X, was very aware of the fact that you have to have back, or create, your identity, your own identity. National, religious, ethnical.... but your own identity. That is your nonviolent weapon, and your strenght. Look at Italy's Radical Party story, and it will be easy to find some deep teorethical analogies.
In the universalism of Gandhi, such as in the universalism of King, such a concept is absolutely clear.
That's why I do like and understand the enphasys put by Sandong Rimpoche in underlining the need for Independence. Nothing but independence: he is right.
What independence means, in the nowadays world is something different, from the conceptual viewpoint. It doesn't matter; better, it belongs to a further phase. To be more explicit, one thing is the standpoint of a revolutionary action, such as the struggle for the independence of the Tibetan people on its own land, one thing is the form that this independence takes and means. I mean the frame in which such an independence is created and lives.
Radical Party is the tool of nonviolence, and it is a purely political tool. Tibetan can use it, exploit it, take it. KEEP IT, Such as Gypsies, or Bourkinabé... A tool.
As we used to be the party of Italian "betrayed" women and men, RP can be the Party of Tibetan women and men. A tool in their own hands.