World Tibet Network News Monday, June 29, 1998

By JOHN F. BURNSLEH, Kashmir, June 29, 1998 (The New York Times)

Only 125 miles east ofthis Himalayan outpost in the northern most corner of India lie the western ramparts of Tibet. Beyond their snow-capped peaks lie all the travails that a half century of Chinese Communist rule have brought to 6 million native Tibetans, to their ancient Buddhist culture, and to the Dalai Lama, the 63-year-old exiled spiritual leader many Tibetans revere as a living god. But for the Dalai Lama, visiting Tibetan refugees here in the Ladakh region of Kashmir, Sunday was no time for gazing wist fully toward the land he fled after a popular uprising was put down by Chinese troops in 1959. Rather, it was a day for boisterous good humor and, on the Dalai Lama's part, for happy foretellings of a time, not many years hence as he tells it, when Tibet will have the self-rule within China that has been the Dalai Lama's political goal for the last decade.

The reason for his enthusiasm lay more than 2,000 miles to the east, in Beijing, where President Clinton and President Jiang Zemin of China held an unprecedented debate about Tibet at a joint news conference on Saturday. Against some expectations, China allowed the news conference to be broadcast live, thus providing what was probably the most candid exchange on Tibet everheard by a mass audience in China. To the Dalai Lama, who has had little to fall back on in nearly 40 years of exile but his ability to use the power of words in support of Tibet, those televised moments were, he said in an interview Sunday, one of the best things that ever happened for the Tibetan cause. They sent signals not only to a watching world, he said, but more importantly across China, that Tibet is an issue whose time has come.

"Millions of Chinese, especially intellectuals, opinion formers and those who are politically conscious, will certainly have taken notice," the 1989 Nobel Peace laureate said, speaking in a torrent of English honed over years of traveling and lecturing on Tibet in the West. He added, "Through this live show, many, many Chinese will have gained a better awareness of President Clinton's feelings about Tibet, and also President Jiang's feelings, and I think that can be enormously helpful in the long run. "Because Jiang avoided words like "separatist" and "traitor" that China has used in the past when speaking of the Dalai Lama, and because he said the "door to negotiation" was open if the Tibetan leader accepts Chinese sovereignty over Tibet and Taiwan, the Dalai Lama said he thought the exchange in Beijing could have a more immediate political effect, especiallyon Chinese officials in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.

The Tibetan leader said he hoped that the Chinese officials might pause before continuing with some of the worst aspects of their rule, including arenewed crackdown in recent years in which hundreds of Buddhist monks and nuns have been forced out of monasteries, and scores arrested, for political offenses that have included keeping secret portraits of the Dalai Lama. The crackdown has sent a new wave of exiles into India and Nepal, joining more than 100,000 already here. The Dalai Lama said he was enthusiastic about Clinton's role in raising the Tibet issue publicly, and more forcefully than any previous American leader on visits to China. In his remarks, Clinton urged Jiang to "assume a dialogue with the Dalai Lama in return for the recognition that Tibet is part of China," referred to the Dalai Lama from his own acquaintance as "an honestman," and said he was sure that Jiang and the Dalai Lama would "like each other very much" if they had a conversation.

By endorsing Clinton's actions, the Dalai Lama, symbol of one of the most enduring of the world's human rights causes, in effect took the American leader's side in the debate in the United States over whether it is better to engage China in the hope of changing it -- Clinton's policy -- or to seek to contain and punish China, with trade and other sanctions, for its record on Tibet, the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, labor camps and other forms of repression. Among some exiled Tibetans, especially members of the Tibetan Youth Congress, an increasingly radical group that has criticized the Dalai Lama for his insistence on nonviolence and for backing away from earlier demands for Tibet's independence, the Dalai Lama is viewed as an accommodationist whose legacy could be a Tibet frozen forever in an icy Chinese embrace. But buoyed by enthusiasm over events in Beijing, the Dalai Lama said Sunday that the mood of openness struck by Clinton and Jiang was part of a broader movement that had advanced the Tibet cause in rec

ent years.

Among other things, he cited two recent American films about Tibet, "Kundun" and "Seven Years in Tibet," which he said had brought the issue to a wider audience than ever before. But more important than events outside China, the Dalai Lama said, was a little-noticed evolution inside China. Chinese intellectuals, he said, have published a series of articles in recent months appealing for an end to Chinese heavy-handedness and a move toward autonomy for Tibet. He said those articles followed a proposal by Chinese constitutional scholars in 1994 for China to be reconstituted on federal lines, with "full autonomy" for Tibet and other areas with large populations of non-Han Chinese.

Furthermore, he said, Chinese leaders had moved quietly in the last 18 months to revive contacts with the exiled Tibetan leadership that were cut off in 1993, after a dialogue of nearly 15 years that had seen delegations appointed by the Dalai Lama visiting Beijing and Lhasa. The Dalai Lama said it was those contacts, mostly through what he called "private channels" and businessmen, but also through some contacts with Chinese officials, that Jiang referred to when he said on Saturday that China had "several channels of communication" with the Dalai Lama. In these contacts, the Dalai Lama said, an important change had taken place, with the Chinese now listening to the case put by the Dalai Lama's emissaries instead of lecturing them as they had during the previous period of more formal contacts, authorized when Deng Xiaoping, the late Chinese leader, was starting his economic reforms in the late 1970s.

"In recent months, it is no longer a question of one side lecturing and the other side listening," the Dalai Lama said. "They are listening to our criticisms, too." The Tibetan leader said the changes in China were part of the case for moderation he has made with Tibetan radicals, who staged a hunger strike in New Delhi this spring that ended with a Tibetan exile burning himself to death when the Indian police forcibly removed the hunger-strikers to hospital. "I tell them that if you only look at events in Tibet, there is cause for frustration," he said. "But if you look wide enough, there is great hope. Today's China, compared to 15, 20 years ago, is a much changed China compared with the 1960s and 1970s, when, to be frank, things really looked hopeless."

He added: "I think the Chinese government, or at least some concerned officials, have begun to realize that they have to find some way to solve the Tibet problem. For more than 40 years now, they have been utilizing force to solve the Tibet issue, and it has not worked. I think they have realized that they will have to find some other way to solve the matter." On Jiang's demands for the Dalai Lama's recognition of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet and Taiwan, the Tibetan leader said he needed to return to his home-in-exile, in the Indian town of Dharmsala, 300 miles south of Leh, to consult with senior aides before giving a formal response. But he noted that under what he has called his middle-way policy, announced in a speech in France in 1988, "I've made it very clear that I'm not seeking independence for Tibet, I'm seeking genuine autonomy, and this indirectly recognizes Chinese sovereignty." The Dalai Lama said Chinese leaders should see him as their best negotiating partner, one who would not be around for

ever.

"In 20 years' time, I'll be 83, just an old man with a stick, moving like as loth bear," he said, chuckling. "While I'm alive, I am fully committed to autonomy, and I am the person who can persuade the Tibetan people to accept it. In 10, 20 years' time, the Dalai Lama will die, and then who can persuade these radicals? Then, who will be in a position to cool them down? If the Dalai Lama is not there, the Tibetan issue can go completely out of control."