The shame of Tibet will not go away

(01/12/99 Sydney Morning Herald)

By Senator BOB BROWN (Bob Brown, a senator from Tasmania, visited Tibet in July posing as a tourist in order to avoid official scrutiny.)

"We want our hero back!" a courageous young student told me, in the Jokhang, Tibet's most sacred temple. The hero is the Dalai Lama.

I had walked alone into the temple forecourt. The Tibetan girl came over from a group near the altar where two old women were repeatedly prostrating themselves before Buddha. Outside, dozens of worshippers were prostrating at the front door. Thousands more are out every day swinging prayer wheels as they walk clockwise around the temple.

The girl knew what her people wanted. She also knew what she wanted: to get to India to meet the Dalai Lama. And she knew what she wanted of me: after pointing to the beautifully painted upstairs windows, which are highlighted with pots of red geraniums at the front of the Dalai Lama's apartment, and to the empty yellow throne below, she asked, in halting English, that I help get him back to Lhasa.

I was on my first visit to Tibet, spending most of the two weeks in the capital city Lhasa under the dominating presence of one of the world's great buildings, the Potala Palace built in the eighth century and extended in the fifteenth.

But the Potala, seat of the last nine Dalai Lamas, seems dead. It is like St Peter's Basilica without the Pope. In 1959 the young 14th Dalai Lama and a bevy of courtiers hurried across the Lhasa River and then over the Himalayas to India to escape the encircling People's Liberation Army (PLA).

In the 40 years since, he has become a global celebrity. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy of all humanity living in harmony, his determined non-violence (a policy increasingly frustrating young Tibetans in the exiled community which now numbers 130,000), and his wit and forbearance despite enduring decades of calumny from Beijing.

This most holy of beings is not just a devout man to the Tibetans, he is their reincarnated and ongoing soul of Buddha and human enlightenment. But to the atheist Chinese President Jiang Zemin, the Dalai Lama is a "splittist" and "criminal". (I should add here that I, too, am an atheist.)

To see Tibet's plight as simply political is to mistake the motivation and determination of its people. Above all, theirs is a religious resistance. The Dalai Lama is a live connection with their own souls. The Chinese in Tibet acknowledge that almost all Tibetans are devout Buddhists and are motivated to be in the presence of the living Buddha, the Dalai Lama, at least once in their lives. The Dalai Lama to Tibetans is as Mecca to the Muslim faithful.

This is why one to four thousand Tibetans undertake the hazardous journey, on foot, over the Himalayas each year to see "His Holiness". They risk frostbite, starvation, death from altitude sickness or beatings if caught by police on either side of the Sino-Nepalese border. On the return journey, they need approximately $A300 to bribe officials to let them back in without a passport. Beijing does not allow passports for ordinary Tibetans whose average annual income is about $A200.

As you land at Lhasa's civilian airport, a squadron of fighter jets is lined up next to the runway. Armed soldiers walk the perimeter. A military barracks is adjacent. On my exit drive from Lhasa to the airport I counted 49 army trucks, full of troops, in three convoys. The bridge halfway to town is patrolled each end and centre by soldiers with semi-automatic rifles. So are the major banks, official buildings and some hotels in town. When I tried to enter the avenue to the Tibet Autonomous Region Parliament, set up by Beijing, I was waved back by one of the Chinese soldiers at the gate.

I have never seen such a concentrated military presence. Even the Potala has an internal compliment of 20 Chinese soldiers for "fire-fighting".

I arrived in the year of China's celebration of 40 years of "liberation" for Tibet (the Dalai Lama readily acknowledges this "liberation" had one good effect - the end of feudalism). The huge square below the Potala was jammed with Chinese and Tibetan singers and dancers. However the show was dominated by performing military troupes, including a delightfully accomplished squad of PLA soldiers doing an open-air form of pas-de-deux. The Potala was draped with huge red banners carrying Chinese slogans.

For China, Tibet is a treasure trove of minerals, forests (some logging, blamed for this year's disastrous floods downstream in China has now been banned), hydro-electric potential and tourist developments. Downtown Lhasa has high rise glitzy hotels and shopping emporiums strangely out of kilter with the ancient temples and population of 200 000. Much of the old Tibetan architecture is being bulldozed.

With all manner of incentives, including tax breaks, which irk businessmen in other regions, the Chinese are pouring into Tibet where, soon, the locals will be a minority in their own land. Signs are in Chinese with Tibetan sub-titles. Most business investment and ownership is Chinese. The news is Chinese. So is the watching eye.

The very name of the Dalai Lama is taboo unless bundled in "splittist" abuse. Monks and nuns are forced to make written denunciations of their idol (he has absolved them of this heresy). The authorities regularly drag people off to prison. One third of the political prisoners in Tibet's jails are nuns. Most of the rest are monks. Rape, electrified cattle prods, inhuman "exercises" with bricks held on outstretched back-of-hands, while the tortured hop forward on one leg, and solitary confinement in fouled cells has been the common lot of those who dare to declare their true allegiance.

While I was in comfortable Chinese-owned hotels in Lhasa, hundreds of monks and nuns were in nearby prisons. You can see the prison walls from the hilltop monasteries open to tourists. But only if you narrow your gaze from the splendid scenery to the barbed wire.

Tibet is beguiling. The ebullient Tibetans smile, especially at westerners who represent their only hope. They are the poor amongst the conquering rich. Beggar children call "hallo" and hug tourists' legs for a one yuan (10 cents) handout. "Oh, I could take that one home" is the common tourist cry of delight where outward cuteness belies a deeper inward misery.

I seethed my way through Lhasa. Not just because of the massive abrogation of human rights there, but because of the studied ignorance of 20 western delegations of politicians since US Congressman Frank Wolf in 1997 covertly broke ranks to find the real Tibet, which he described as "under boot-heel subjugation" and "China swallowing Tibet".

Gaggles of politicians get escorted by delightful guides to see just how much Beijing does for this backward "province". To top it, in May last year, a contingent of European emissaries, including the British Ambassador, were even hosted to the notorious Drapchi Prision beside the smokestack of the Lhasa cement works. Their report was a 50-50 mixture of concern for civil rights and admiration for China's achievements. They saw nothing untoward in Drapchi.

But in the previous days two protesting political inmates, one a monk, were shot. In the ensuing weeks another three monks and five nuns died. According to the London-based Tibet Information Network, China claims that one nun hung herself while three others stuffed scarves in their mouths. One does not have to try this means of suicide to recognise the absurdity of the claim. The poor women, for their devotion, were murdered, while the delegation was back in Europe publishing its report.

It was the plight of a Drapchi Prison nun, from the Gari Nunnery, perched high in the alpine meadows northwest of Lhasa, that stirred me to approach US President Clinton when he visited the Australian Parliament in Canberra in November 1997. According to the international wires, she had had her sentence extended to 18 years for disobedience. The President told me he would raise the whole plight of Tibet with President Jiang Zemin whom he met the following week in the Philippines. I wrote to Mr Clinton asking how Mr Jiang responded. There has been no reply.

Nor will there be. China's booming economy is a trade bonanza for the west. Lip-service to western constituents who support the Dalai Lama is balanced by the US, Britain and Australia acquiescing to Chinese dictates that Tibet go off the diplomatic agenda. Bilateral talks are replacing international condemnation. The hallmark of these talks is the Chinese dictate that they be held in secret and not reported.

However, as China opens up to the world and seeks respect in the age of mass communications, the shame of Tibet will not go away. The night before I left Lhasa I teenager who I had met briefly earlier passed me a traditional white silk scarf in which I found this note:

"Beloved Mr, I would like to express [our] warmest welcome to you and hope you [have] an enjoyable trip in Tibet, by the way, on behalf of six million Tibetans.

"We warmly thank you for helping our (pursuit of) freedom, and we hope you'll continue to help us. We have full confidence that His Holiness the Dalai Lama will come back [to] his own country soon and hope Tibet will become peaceful soon.

"We are very proud that many great people like you help us. And we have His Holiness' great compassion."

A cry in the dark? Not for those of us who know that suppression of Tibet cannot ultimately succeed because at the core of the Tibetans' resistance is a spiritual impulsion much stronger than materialist or political persuasion.

The International Commission of Jurists has condemned the abrogation of human rights in Tibet and called for a referendum on self-determination. The Dalai Lama has repeatedly advocated talks with Beijing, not predicated on independence but to formulate domestic autonomy for his people.

Beijing wants Tibet's natural resources but also fears the troublesome colony and the world's reaction to the next bout of open insurrection. As the ancient Chinese proverb warns "dead ashes flare up again".

Whatever the political fix, the return of the Dalai Lama to the Potala would cause a mass outbreak of happiness on the roof of the world. It is a result which China as well as Tibet could genuinely celebrate in the square below.