Published by: World Tibet Network News, Thursday, June 27, 1996

The Times - London

June 27 1996

A war of religion is looming, says JonathanMirsky

To the West, it is baffling that a harmless resolution by the Bundestag condemning human rights violations in Tibet [Next Hit] should have soured Bonn's relations with Peking, which has cancelled a visit by the Foreign Minister, Klaus Kinkel. Nor does the Dalai Lama's visit to Germany explain Peking's reaction. The solution lies in the overwhelming importance China attaches to its vast Tibetan and Muslim regions.

Herr Kinkel's China-watchers had probably already drawn his attention to recent lethal pronouncements from China's western frontiers, which are on perpetual red-alert: "The struggle is a long-term, bitter, complex you-die I-live battle with no possibility of compromise . . . We must crush the arrogance of enemy elements. We must destroy the soil from which they take nourishment."

This is the language of the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen killings; it must be taken literally. This time, however, it is not aimed at political dissidents but at Muslims and Buddhists in Xinjiang andTibet, regions inhabited by fewer than 20 million people, a drop in China's vast sea of 1.2 billion people, but taking up almost half its land mass.

For two months Peking has been focusing its attention on Xinjiang andTibet. Officials in Xinjiang have called for a "Great Wall of Steel" to curb the ambitions of "splittists". This phrase was last used by Deng Xiaoping on June 9, 1989, when he congratulated the army's senior commanders for crushing the Tiananmen uprising by serving as a Great Wall of Steel. Splittism is also the fear in Tibet "Prevention and eradication of the terroristic destructive activities of hostile forces," the Tibet Daily warned recently, "is the new task of the struggle against splittism."

Superficially, Peking seems, as the Chinese say, to be "dropping a stone on its own feet" by provoking international outrage from Muslims and the millions for whomTibet is an icon. Things are not going badly for China. It has weathered the failure of its clumsy bullying of Taiwan in March. Everyone has welcomed its far from watertight agreement to stop nuclear testing. It is getting its way in Hong Kong, and has signed treaties with Russia and three bordering states. Most dissidents are either in exile or under lock and key.

So why the Wall of Steel? Why guarantee opposition by tearing down pictures of the Dalai Lama in monasteries where they have been allowed for over ten years?

Every country's leaders have nightmares. Behind the vermilion walls of the Forbidden City, the dreams that troubled the sleep of Chinese emperors still disturb the Communist Party's leaders. These include official corruption, an uneasy peasantry and an all-powerful ruler who is dying. But restive "minorities" along the western and northwestern frontiers are especially frightening. In the 8th century, Tibetan cavalrymen sacked the capital of the Tang, the greatest dynasty in Chinese history. Mongol and Manchu horsemen swept out of the Steppes in the 13th and 17th centuries, establishing the Yuan and Qing dynasties.

Even today Chinese learn two conflicting things about the Mongols and the Manchus. They were "barbarians" who ruled the Central Kingdom with great cruelty for about 500 years, before being overthrown by the real Chinese, the Han. But the borders established by those barbarian rulers, extending to the western edges of Xinjiang andTibet, are shown on today's maps as China's legitimate frontiers. Officially, their peoples are members of the Chinese "great family" - though in practice Uighurs and Tibetans are often seen as ungrateful, rebellious minorities.

Why is Peking cracking down on Xinjiang and Tibet now? In April, President Jiang agreed with Russia, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan on a policy to crush fundamentalism. Xinjiang's Muslims, who are not fundamentalists, instantly defied this concordat. In China religious defiance, or "splittism", is always a popular target. All religious groups in China have been ordered to submit to tighter central control. The Xinjiang Daily warned that "freedom of religious belief is not freedom of religion", and made clear Peking's unwavering priority: "Only under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and by following the socialist road can the various peoples of Xinjiang have a bright future."

InTibet, where Chinese repression has continued since 1950, there is now a more cosmic dilemma for Peking: there too the Party comes before God. Eventually, the 14th Dalai Lama, born in 1935, will die. A 15th incarnation will need to be discovered and sanctioned. This process, which can take three years, is traditionally overseen by Tibet's second holiest personage, the Panchen Lama. Peking last year kidnapped the Panchen approved by the Dalai Lama; he has since vanished. Peking then "discovered" its own six-year-old "soul child". President Jiang has personally lectured the young impostor on his duty to the Party. Last month, Mr Jiang, with undeliberate irony, inscribed a plaque for the pseudo-Panchen's monastery: "Safeguard the country and benefit the people."