Published by: World Tibet Network News Wednesday, December 24, 1997

By Conrad Richter

TORONTO, December 24, CTC -- An editorial in a Chinese propaganda magazine has played up Heinrich Harrer's Nazi past in an attempt to smear the Dalai Lama. Harrer, the Austrian mountain climber whose story was recently recounted in the Bertolucci film, "Seven Years in Tibet," has been a controversal figure since the German magazine, Der Stern, reported on Harrer's Nazi past in May of this year.

Observers had expected China to attempt to use the "Nazi card" in its continuing propaganda war over Tibet. The editorial, "Dalai's Former Teacher is a Nazi," by Li Jianhua, published in the Beijing magazine, China's Tibet, revisits points from the Stern article such as Harrer's membership in the Nazi Party and Schutz-Staffel (SS) and suggests that Harrer's friendship with the Dalai Lama after the Second World War had "exerted certain influences" on the young leader who fled Tibet in 1959.

The editorial ridicules Hollywood interest in Harrer's book on which the movie was based, a book read by an estimated 50 million people in more than 40 languages. The editorial claims that Harrer had become something of a "human rights judge" and "superstar". It asks, "Should we regard this follower of those who committed towering crimes against humanity a hero or guardian of human rights? Should Hollywood sing songs in praise of Nazis?"

The editorialist, Li, tries to establish guilt by association, the association between Harrer's Nazi background and his friendship with the young Dalai Lama. Li is unable to produce evidence of Nazi-like policies in the Dalai Lama's leadership or Nazi sympathies held by the Dalai Lama. Li does not mention any possibility that Harrer's story is simply one of a positive, transforming, cross-cultural experience for a young Austrian and a young Dalai Lama.