Exiled parliamentarian says it's time to campaign at home

by Alexander Norris

MONTREAL, Wednesday, April 30, 1997 (The Gazette) -- The speaker of Tibet's parliament-in-exile says he intends to risk his life and return to his homeland next year to wage a campaign of civil disobedience against its Chinese occupiers.

Samdhong Rinpoche, who arrived in Montreal last night for a three-day visit. acknowledged yesterday that the ruthlessness of China's rulers makes such a tactic fraught with danger.

But "the struggle from outside" that exiles have been waging since 1959, when China invaded and annexed Tibet in violation of international law, has yielded such meagre results and Tibetans' situation inside the territory has become so dire - that a dramatic new strategy is needed, the 58-year old monk and professor of Buddhist studies said in an interview.

"The Tibet issue has languished for the last 38 years," he said, stressing that he was expressing his own views, and not those of Tibet's exiled government, and since China's occupation, "the situation has been deteriorating day by day. It has come to the point where the very survival of the Tibetan people - its identity - is now at stake," he added, referring to an influx of ethnic Chinese settlers he portrayed as part of a deliberate strategy by Beijing to "completely wipe out the Tibetan ethnic group."

If things carry on this way, Rinpoche asserted, "in 10 or 15 years, you will not find any trace of the Tibetan way of life" left in Tibet.

Rinpoche whose exiled parliament is based in Dharamsala, India - the country's home to most of the world's 130,000 Tibetan diaspora - said he won't return to Tibet until next year, after exiles have voted in a referendum, expected in October or November, about what stance they want to adopt toward China.

The referendum question is still being debated, he said. But exiles might be asked to vote on whether they want to stick with the present policy of trying to persuade Beijing to grant Tibet greater autonomy - but something short of outright independence - or to give up on that and begin pressing for a complete "restoration of Tibet's sovereignty and independence," Rinpoche said.

Other options, he said, might be to ask exiles whether they want to press the United Nations' committee on decolonization to recognize Tibetans' right to self-determination or to seek their endorsement of a large-scale civil disobedience campaign inside Tibet.

Regardless of the vote's outcome, however, Rinpoche said he and a group of about 15 supporters intend to return to Tibet to engage in civil disobedience. The outcome of the vote will simply influence their demands, he said.

Rinpoche said his group will need at least three months of "physical, mental and emotional training" on "how to suffer and tolerate the torture and humiliation which might be inflicted by the Chinese authorities - how we should remain calm and yet insist on our demands."

Their approach involves "satya graha" - Tibetan for "insistence on truth" - he said, adding that this non-violent tactic was used with great success by Mahatma Gandhi in his struggle against British colonialism in India, and by civil-rights leader Martin Luther King in the United States.

Rinpoche, who is also a monk and professor of Buddhist studies, said he doesn't intend to return to Tibet until he has left his post in Tibet's parliament-in-exile, a body made up mostly of parliamentarians, elected by exiles around the world, and three appointees of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader.

Yesterday, he was in Ottawa to meet with officials from Canada's Foreign Affairs Department. Asked about Canada's recent decision not to co-sponsor a resolution before the UN human-rights commission in Geneva condemning China's human rights abuses, he struck a diplomatic note.

He said the foreign Affairs official told him China gave Ottawa assurances in return that its ambassador in Beijing will be able to travel to Tibet:

"I can't say I'm satisfied but I see some reason behind it, and now we should hope for the best."