3rd International Conference of Tibet Support Groups

Emma Bonino Speaking Points

The Berlin State Assembly Hall 14.05.00

DRAFT

Allow me to begin by recalling the rather unusual atmosphere that characterised the Dalai Lama's last visit to Europe in October 1999. While in Italy the principal exponents of the left-wing government (Massimo D'Alema, Prime Minister at the time, and Walter Veltroni, Secretary of the Democratic Left) were laying down the red carpet - better late than never - for the Dalai Lama, the living symbol of the Tibetan resistance against the Chinese occupation, at the same time the British Prime Minister Tony Blair (with whom D'Alema and Veltroni profess a strong political and ideological affinity) was giving the red-carpet treatment to the Chinese President Jiang Zemin, the symbol of the oppression of Tibet by the last Chinese empire.

At the time of these visits, some Europeans (not very many, to tell the truth) decided to take to the streets to point out that, despite the rather tardy sympathy of our left-wing rulers for the Tibetan cause, the fight for the liberation of Tibet from Chinese occupation deserves the unconditional support of every free man and every free country, whatever their ideology or national interests. Among the few who took to the streets were the Italian Radicals. And this is by no means a coincidence. For although the Tibetan cause is now apparently popular all over the world, this has not always been the case. And this is something that we would do well to remember. We Europeans and our Tibetan friends.

In 1984, when no-one in the West was interested in Tibet, it was Petra Kelly, the founder of the German and European Greens, who revealed to the absent-minded, forgetful Europe the suffering of a country ten times bigger than Italy, a country that had "disappeared" a few decades before, annexed and colonised by the Chinese colossus. A country of ancient, extravagant traditions, a country of mountains, a piece of the Himalayas, buried by snow, closed and mysterious. In 1988, Giovanni Negri, the then Secretary of the Radical Party, and Piero Verni imported the "lost cause" of Tibet from Germany to Italy, inviting a representative of the Tibetan government in exile to the Radical Congress. Since then, a lot of snow has fallen on the Roof of the world, many thousands of Chinese colonisers have been moved to Tibet, and many thousands of Tibetans have been imprisoned, killed, or forced to flee. Lhassa has become Lamaland, an enchanted destination for thousands of Westerners in search of a new Eldorado of the spiri

t. The virtual Tibet has been born.

Thanks to the Dalai Lama, a great traveller and a great communicator, the Tibetan question has exploded on the world stage. It reached Hollywood while Petra Kelly was dying, forgotten, here in Berlin. The Dalai Lama, quite rightly, has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Tibet has entered parliaments the world over. And as well as the virtual Tibet, the holiday-brochure Tibet, the world has discovered the real Tibet, with its age-old history. It has discovered that Tibet is not China and that since the Chinese invasion in 1949 over one million Tibetans - 20% of the population - have died, first in the war of resistance and then in the concentration camps. It has discovered that the Tibetans have become a minority in their own land.

The Dalai Lama has never lost heart. He has never stopped invoking dialogue with the Chinese authorities, nor repeating that he does not want independence. He wants real autonomy. He wants to save the unique character of the Tibetan civilisation. And around these aims he has gathered a vast body of solidarity and support all over the world. Under the banner of nonviolence. Two imposing, unforgettable demonstrations have been held in Europe: in Brussels in 1996 and in Geneva in 1997. Both organised by the "transnational" Radicals, by the Tibetan diaspora and by a myriad of support groups. Over 1,500 parliamentarians from all over the world have signed a request to the governments of the free world: for the opening, under the aegis of the United Nations, of negotiations without preconditions between the Chinese authorities and the Tibetan government and parliament in exile.

Although this liberating wave seemed to be uncontainable, it has recently slowed down - and I am obviously expressing my own personal opinion here - by two different mirages. The first I would define as "Dalaimania": the hope, unfortunately illusory, that the explosion of sympathy for Tibet in the West, and the transformation of this sympathy into an intellectual fashion that has even reached Hollywood and given rise to a rather ambiguous political-cum-spiritual business, might in themselves constitute a success: that they might be a surrogate or a substitute for liberation to alleviate exile. The second mirage has deceived everyone, Tibetans or otherwise, who assumed that economic reform in China would lead inevitably to political reform, that the free market economy would lead to individual freedoms. And this, as we know, has not happened.

In fact the political and diplomatic mist that has recently shrouded the whole Tibetan issue only dissolved when the Dalai Lama announced, not long ago, that the unofficial negotiations with China had been broken off unilaterally by the Chinese authorities. The time for closure and for the return of repression has come: for Tibet and for Taiwan, for the Spratley Islands, and for internal democracy. This is the way things stand, but the West is slow to decipher the behaviour of Beijing towards the outside world, slow to understand that the leopard - to put it bluntly - cannot change its spots.

We should perhaps ask ourselves whether the time has not come to review the whole Asiatic policy of the West, based as it is on a special "partnership" with Beijing. Whether the idea of a "peaceful transition", based on modernisation, which has guided the choices of the Western diplomacies, has actually not ended up consolidating the role of the party-state. It is true that a huge market has opened up, but it is neither free nor regulated, and we are only just beginning to realise the enormous political and social costs that this "growth without rights" involves. In China, only the worst and the most essential aspects of the Communist tradition have survived. The technocratic imprint. The state control of the mechanisms of industry and of private enterprise. The repression of all forms of political and social conflict.

We must stop covering up our eyes. Real progress in terms of democracy and the respect of fundamental rights in China and in the occupied territories of Tibet, East Turkestan and Inner Mongolia must become the central point around which Europe must base its economic, cultural and political relations with Beijing.

We propose an "abstract" response to the failures of Western Realpolitik. Any proposals for economic sanctions would be destined to remain on paper. We must change our objective: instead of continuing to back the process of change taking place in China (with the vague intention of limiting its excesses) we must try to influence this process until the underlying, essentially conservative trend is reversed. Beginning with the concrete case of Tibet. We must not leave the "negotiations" with the Beijing regime in the hands of national or parallel diplomacies, but make them the object of a genuine international initiative.

[For Tibet, as happened in the case of East Timor, we must start from the United Nations, from the UN Resolutions of 1963, 1964 and 1965 which condemned the occupation of the country on the part of China. It is within this framework that Europe must promote the opening of negotiations between the Chinese government and the Tibetan government in exile under the aegis of the Secretary General of the United Nations.