World Tibet Network News Thursday, April 09, 1998

BEIJING, (Apr. 7) IPS - Once described by Mao Zedong as a "poisoned arrow" aimed at the Communist Party, a 36-year-old document publicized only recently stands as an unrivalled indictment of Chinese policy in Tibet.

Written by the 10th Panchen Lama, the second most revered leader after the Dalai Lama, the document has been the subject of discussion in human rights and political circles since a copy was recently obtained and published by the London-based Tibet Information Network.

The previously unseen, secret text contains the quintessence of the Tibetan critique of the Chinese regime whose presence in the Himalayan land began in 1951.

It is seen as the most scathing attack of the policies and practices of late Chairman Mao ever written by a senior official in the history of Communist China.

In the introduction to the published report, professor Dawa Norbu from India's Jawaharlal Nehru University concludes the 10th Panchen Lama should be considered the first Tibetan human rights activist in modern Tibetan history.

"What the Panchen Lama had to say in this unique historical document appears much more relevant to the immediate future of Tibet that the volumes coming out of Dharamsala," Norbu wrote.

Dharamsala in India is the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile led by the Dalai Lama, who went into exile after an aborted uprising in 1959.

Mao had called the report, submitted to Beijing by the second living Buddha in Tibet, a "poisoned arrow shot at the Party by reactionary feudal overlords".

The document, which talks of the decimation of Tibetan culture and religion under Chinese rule, cost the late Panchen Lama 14 years of his life sent in prison or under virtual house unrest. He was dismissed as a vice-chairman of the Chinese Political Consultative Conference, a post that had given him the rank of a national leader in Tibet.

But the report is also credible to many because of the Panchen Lama's background: Beijing had named him acting chairman of its government in Tibet after the 1959 failed uprising.

Ngapoi Ngawang Jigme, the controversial Tibetan leader who signed the 17-point agreement with Mao's government in 1951 that laid the foundation for China's annexation of Tibet, recalls he had advised the Panchen Lama not to write the report.

"I suggested to him that if he had any complaints on the work in Tibet, he should go straightforward to the central government leaders and make an oral report," said the 88-year-old Tibetan in a rare interview with Hong Kong-based 'South China Morning Post' last week.

"I told him not to write the report as it could provide grounds for them to attack him. I told him quite frankly but he turned a deaf ear to me,' Jigme said.

But the Panchen Lama's confidence in the relevance of his criticism was unshaken.

Through years of detention, he was from time to time taken out for massive struggle sessions in sports stadia in Beijing and publicly humiliated in front of thousands of people.

But addressing the National People's Congress in 1987, two years before his death, the Panchen Lama said that despite being punished for his petition, "the truth is timeless and it always remains the same".

He was barely 24 years old when he wrote the petition, and was 40 when he was released from custody.

Although more than 20 years have passed since the death of the leaders to whom it was addressed, the report is still considered a highly confidential document and intended only for most senior leaders like Mao and the late Premier Zhou Enlai.

Its significance is determined not only by its value to Tibetans but by the mere subjects it deals with. Many of them, even today, remain taboo or are vehemently denied by officials.

The report was compiled over a three-year period as a result of the Panchen Lama's observations during tours through Xinjiang, Southern China and Tibet between 1959 and 1962, but it is made relevant to the whole of China.

The Panchen Lama wrote about the famine in which millions perished during the Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward (1959- 1961). While China's official history admits the Great Leap period was a catastrophe, is still argues that mass starvation was caused not by mistaken policies but poor weather and deteriorating Sino- Soviet ties that strained bilateral trade.

Exact figures of how many people starved to death due to Mao's utopian policies of communal kitchens remain anyone's guess. Ngapoi Jigme, now vice-chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the mainland's highest advisory body, denies there were any deaths from hunger in Tibet.

"I can tell you for sure that not a single man died of hunger in Tibet,' he told the 'Post'. "That was right after the reform in Tibet and our economy was developing in a sound way."

But the Panchen Lama observed that "there has been an evident and severe reduction in the present-day Tibetan population".

He wrote: "Needless to say, this was not only harmful to the flourishing of the Tibetan nationality, but it was also a great threat to the continued existence of the Tibetan nationality, which was sinking into a state close to death."

He told Chinese leaders that economic conditions in Tibet were far worse under the Communists that under the ancient regime: "In the past although Tibet was a society ruled by dark and savage feudalism, there had never been such as shortage of grain. In particular, because Buddhism was widespread, all people, whether noble or humble, had the good habit of giving help to the poor."

'Democratic reforms' launched by the Communist Party in Tibet in 1959 led to the massive destruction of Buddhist monasteries and executions of thousands of monks and nuns, the Panchen Lama said.

All this happened nearly a decade before the madness of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), with which party historians link the only period of 'leftist errors' marked by cultural vandalism in Tibet. The Panchen Lama's report destroys the official argument that mistakes in Tibet occurred only during the Cultural Revolution.

Before 1959, he recounted, there were more than 2,500 monasteries in what is now called the Tibet Autonomous Region, but only 70 remained after 'democratic reform' -- a reduction of more than 97 percent by 1962. Over the same period, the number of 110,000 monks and nuns fell by 93 percent to only 7,000.

"Those who have religious knowledge will slowly die out, and religious affairs are stagnating," wrote the Panchen Lama, in remarks that activists say could well apply to today's Tibet.

"Knowledge is not being passed on, there is worry about there being no new people to train, and we see the elimination of Buddhism, which was flourishing in Tibet and which transmitted teachings and enlightenment,"

he said.

"This is something which I and more than 90 per cent of Tibetans can not endure," he wrote, giving his secret petition the mandate of 'voice of the people', backed by the largest population on the Tibetan plateau.