Published by: World Tibet Network News Friday - October 10, 1997

Dharamsala, 10 Oct: Just when the Hollywood film, Seven Years in Tibet, threatens to expose China's brutal invasion and its illegal occupation of Tibet, the Chinese propaganda machine has resorted to its customary bout of painting the Tibetan leader with China's own guilt.

The Chinese propaganda has alleged that His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in his childhood, came under the influences of Heinrich Harrer, on whose best-selling memoir this movie is based, and who was recently described as having had Nazi affiliations. It is obvious that, by forging links, however ludicrous, between Harrer's Nazi past and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, China intends to wean away the Jewish community's support to the Tibetan cause and their deep respect for His Holiness the Dalai Lama. But having known and endorsed His Holiness the Dalai Lama's unflinching commitment to freedom, justice and peace for about four decades, the free world, including the Jews, might, at worst, abort this piece of Chinese propaganda for its sheer irrelevance.

Heinrich Harrer and his friend, Peter Aufschneiter, came to Tibet in the wake of World War II. They had come to India before the War to climb one of the Himalayan peaks. When the War broke out, the two were detained by the British Indian government and held in a prison in Dehradun, North India. They escaped from prison and headed towards Tibet where they were given asylum. This was purely on humanitarian ground as the two had suffered great hardship in crossing western Tibet before reaching Lhasa.

When Harrer came to Tibet, His Holiness the Dalai Lama was preoccupied with his spiritual training under the guidance of Tibet's foremost spiritual masters. His Holiness spent only a very limited time with Harrer, learning English and hearing about the outside world. Never during his time in Tibet did Harrer display any sympathy for the cause of Nazism, for if he had, his stay would have been surely made abrupt. Anyone with a simple knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism should know that the causes espoused by Nazism are anathema to Tibet's culture. Moreover, it is a well-known fact that Tibet stayed neutral during the War, although it did permit the Allies to use its airspace to ship medical supplies to China.

Contrary to the Chinese claim, it was Harrer who came under the influence of Buddhist philosophy during his time in Tibet. In a statement issued from his Huttenberg home, Harrer said, "My personal political philosophy grew out of my life in Tibet. ... It is a belief that reflects many tenets of Buddhism and places great emphasis on human life and human dignity. It is this philosophy that has guided my life during my recent visits to Tibet and my explorations in many parts of the world over the past four and a half decades. And it is a philosophy which leads me to condemn as strongly as possible the horrible crimes of the Nazi period."

While admitting to being a ceremonial member of the SS for a brief period in 1938, Harrer explicitly refutes implications that he was a dedicated Nazi supporter or was involved in any way in the heinous crimes of the Hitler period. Harrer has also referred to his Nazi experience as "one of the aberrations in my life, maybe the biggest, and I regret deeply that these events may give rise to false impression."

The Chinese Communist regime, on the other hand, has never shied from practicing the tradition of Nazism. It is well known that this regime has wiped out over 1.2 million Tibetans, one-sixth of Tibet's entire population, in order to facilitate its invasion and occupation of Tibet. Over 30 million of China's own innocent people have died as a result of the Communist regime's technically blunderous and inherently brutal policies. The 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, that shocked the world out of its conscience, was nothing when compared to the mayhem China's Communist masters perpetrated in Tibet and China from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s. If anyone, it is the Communist leaders of China who are the indisputable Nazis of Asia, their actions in Tibet and China evoking a painful reminiscence of Jews' holocaust nightmare.

Bernard Levin writes in The Times of September 7, 1990: "The word "genocide" must be used with care. Our world and our century have seen countless abominable massacres, and it is easy to slip into the use of the word to denote such atrocities. We should, however, restrict it to those crimes before high heaven which are truly designated by it...there are four mass murders which can justifiably carry the brand. They are: the Jewish Holocaust, the Stalin Terror, the bloodthirst of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and what was done to the people and culture of Tibet during the miserable lust for death and torture unleashed by the mad Mao Tse-tung of China." Now one couldn't help asking: Who actually came under the influence of Nazism. Tibet, the victim of China's imperialist tradition, or China, the eager student of Nazi's genocide culture?

Department of Information and International Relations

Gangchen Kyishong

Dharamsala - India