UNDER THE 'LAMALAND' SKY

by Massimo Lensi

L'Opinione, November 5, 1998

I begin to enter into contact with the Tibetan plateau during the 60-mile journey from Lhasa airport: the 3800 m. altitude, the shortage of oxygen, the beating sun, the crisp, rarefied air and the deep blue, almost looming sky. In the jeep that brings me to the Tibetan hotel booked in Katmandu, I recall the faces and the voices of the many friends and companions in the last fours years of campaigns for the "freedom of Tibet". Friends met many times in Budapest, Brussels, Geneva, and Bonn, to whom for the last four years the Radical Party has proposed the world-wide nonviolent Satyagraha for the freedom of occupied Tibet as the only political solution to the Tibetan issue.

But I also think with some concern about the latest conciliatory messages between the Kashag, the Tibetan government-in-exile, and the Beijing authorities, about the path taken by the Dalai Lama towards secret discussions with the Communist government of Zhou. Towards the end, therefore, of the forty-year struggle for the acceptance of a new status for Tibet. But what status?

Lhasa no longer exists! In its place the Chinese have built Lamaland, an adventure park for tourists in search of the Mystical or for the many wealthy Chinese who will then be able to testify that, all things considered, the Tibetans are treated with respect, tolerance and also devotion by the authorities of the "Tibetan Autonomous Region": a wonderful example of the worst sort of propaganda.

In Lamaland, as in any other adventure park around the world, you pay for everything. It costs you the same amount of yuan as a meal in a restaurant to visit the Potala or the monasteries of Drepung or Scra. Want to buy a kata? Or a Tibetan rosary, or a prayer banner? You will find them at the Bakhor market, near the Jokhang monastery, the most sacred in Lhasa and perhaps in the whole of Tibet. Made in Hong Kong or Katmandu! For a small sum you can have your exotic souvenir.

There are, however, two cities in Lamaland. The Chinese city, well-lit and clean, with its glittering Western-style emporiums, its luxury hotels and picturesque restaurants. And the Tibetan city, badly-kept, dark, exactly the opposite of the Chinese part. This is the "Reserve", where Western visitors discover the theocratic Middle Ages of the great Lamas. Or at least that's what they think, after experiencing the smell of yak butter that fills the air.

The young Tibetans, dressed in the leftovers from some Cultural Revolution, speak their own language, reintroduced into the school curriculum three years ago by the T.A.R. in order, I suspect, to perfect the Reserve, and Chinese. Their Chinese contemporaries also speak English, wear jeans and trainers, and listen to U2. The "half-blooded" form the majority in the Tibetan community. Another generation or two and Beijing will have obtained the "perfect Tibetan".

The slow, entertaining bureaucracy of the Lhasa Immigration Office prevents me from returning to Katmandu overland, a journey planned to take in Shigatse, Tashi Lumpo and Sakya, but despite the fast-approaching expiry date on my visa, obtained with great difficulty in Katmandu, I manage to make a few trips.

The work of Beijing is remarkable, perfect. Lamaland stretches all around Lhasa. Tickets to be paid for, silent monks to be photographed, scenery to remember under the deep blue sky on the roof of the world. A meticulous organisation that leaves no room for adventure or alternative travel. Just Lamaland, and nothing else.

On the last day, finally acclimatised, I climb the steps of the Potala and begin the long, slow journey-cum-pilgrimage around the "accessible" rooms of the Dalai Lama's Palace. The route must be followed clockwise, as tradition demands, and winds through narrow gaps and steep stairways. Tibetans and Western tourists follow the route correctly, while waves of Chinese tourists come in the other direction from the exit, to signal their cultural distance from the religious superstitions of the Lamas, thus creating terrible ethnic-religious traffic jams. The Potala, like Lhasa, has by now become Chinese, and the Chinese rewrite the rules. Without any right of appeal.

After your exhausting day in Lamaland, you can spend your time sending exotic e-mails from one of the many Internet Points, or risking a few yuan in the casinos of the many international hotels, or roaming the well-lit streets in the Chinese sector to try out the brothels, the picturesque restaurants or the pubs. A city ready to satisfy the tastes of all sorts of tourism, which also comes in increasing numbers from China itself.

My predictions are coming true: Lhasa is exactly what I expected: a horrible, fake Chinese city where the "real" Tibetans have been turned into "Red Indians on the reserve". I think to myself that a campaign to boycott tourism to Tibet might have a political and economic effect in the struggle. But these are just thoughts floating in the wind like the thousands of prayer banners.

And what can I tell my friends in the Tibetan community in Katmandu who helped me before I left what can I tell them about their land that they don't already know? That Lhasa no longer exists and that His Holiness perhaps wants to put an end to forty years of struggle in order not to lose the last battle: that of the reincarnation of the 15th Dalai Lama, the last piece missing for Beijing's final triumph, for an end to the Tibetan

problem, for the international tourist glorification of Lamaland. But these too are fleeting reflections, inspired more my by anger at the reality of Lhasa than by reason.

My mind returns to the one and a half million Tibetans killed and tortured, robbed for decades of their religion, their culture and their language. I think of the 10th March 1959. Where is all this hidden? Only in the Tibetan diaspora in Dharmsala or Zurich?

In Lamaland, obviously, there is no trace of anything. Perhaps the more attentive tourists have seen the freedom of Tibet in the eyes of an Amdo child clinging to his mother's back on the steps at the Potala, or perhaps they have relived the 10th March in the unique, unforgettable early-morning sky in Lhasa. Perhaps.

But the excitement is not over. Lamaland offers me one last thrill: the Southern China Airways flight for Katmandu. An hour and a half in the dream-world of the Himalayas, over Mount Everest and Mount Lhotse, so that the doubting tourist will forget his last remaining questions about the Tibetans in the Reserve. Long live Lamaland!

I ask myself - rather cynically, I admit - whether the Dalai Lama will one day, perhaps very soon, return to Lhasa on this flight, or whether he will choose the flight from Beijing. But I ask myself this without the anguish of the journey here. I only think that still now, even more than before, the only path to the final, peaceful political solution to the Tibetan question is the public opening of Sino-Tibetan negotiations under the aegis of the United Nations. As soon as possible. This is what I will tell my friends in the Tibetan community in Katmandu. And after a week, with a considerable sense of release, I leave Lamaland.