World Tibet Network News Thursday, February 12, 1998

BEIJING, Feb 12 (Reuters) - The most senior Tibetan religious leader to cooperate with China's rule in Tibet sharply attacked Beijing in 1962 for mass jailings, starvation and efforts to wipe out Buddhism in the pious Himalayan region, according to a secret document published on Thursday.

"A Poisoned Arrow," the full text of the Panchen Lama's petition to China's top leadership, shows the late religious leader grappling with problems that still confront Tibet today, said the publisher, the London-based Tibet Information Network.

The plea by Tibet's second holiest monk on behalf of the homeland he helped China rule comes nine years after his death from a heart attack at age 50 and serves as a voice from the grave at a time when Chinese and Tibetans remain sharply divided.

"Had he lived, there can be little doubt that he would have felt that critique to be relevant to conditions in Tibet today," wrote Robbie Barnett of the Tibet Information Network in the preface.

In words now echoed by international human rights groups and by the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the 10th Panchen Lama warned Beijing that it was alienating Tibetans by not keeping its pledge to allow them national autonomy and freedom of religion.

"... And so we see the elimination of Buddhism, which was flourishing in Tibet and which transmitted teachings and enlightenment. This is something which I and more than 90 percent of Tibetans cannot endure," said the petition.

The book, which got its title from Chairman Mao Zedong's dismissal of the petition as "a poisoned arrow shot at the (Communist) Party by reactionary feudal overlords," had long languished as a secret internal document seen by only a few top Chinese leaders, the Tibet Information Network said.

The petition was written after the Panchen Lama toured Tibet and neighbouring Chinese provinces with Tibetan populations between 1959, when China crushed the last of a series of Tibetan uprisings and the Dalai Lama fled to India, and 1962.

Shocked aides pressed the Panchen Lama, then 24, to tone down his criticism and mix Marxist praise for China's efforts to stamp out feudalism in Tibet with his criticism of overzealous political campaigns, mass imprisonment and starvation.

"Many people were imprisoned, no matter whether they had or had not committed a crime or whether their crime was large or small; and, in addition, bad management led to many people suffering abnormal deaths," he said of post-1959 crackdowns.

Heavy-handed confiscation of grain by communist cadres brought death by starvation to a region that had never experienced it, the Panchen Lama wrote.

"In the past, although Tibet was a society ruled by a dark and savage feudalism, there had never been such a shortage of grain... and we have never heard of a situation where people starved to death," he wrote.

Two years after he submitted the petition, the Panchen Lama was declared an enemy of the Communist Party and then spent 14 years either in prison or house detention.

China hails the 10th Panchen Lama as a "great patriot" in contrast to the exiled Dalai Lama, who it denounces regularly as a separatist seeking independence for Tibet. The India-based Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for his peaceful campaign for more autonomy for Tibet.

Some Tibetans lamented the Panchen Lama's 1989 death as a loss of a leader who had stayed among them to defend their religion and culture, while others denounced him as a traitor for cooperating with Beijing.

In 1995, the Dalai Lama announced his recognition of a six-year-old Tibetan boy as the "soul boy" in which the soul of the Panchen Lama was reincarnated.

Beijing was angered by the move and appointed another six-year-old as the reincarnation and jailed Tibetan clergy who had helped the Dalai Lama in its search.

On February 23, three U.S. religious leaders will visit Tibet for three days as part of a tour in China to discuss religious freedom.