Politwix

 There is terror once more in the Land of Snows which has been under Chinese occupation by force of arms for close to 50 years.  New rioting by thousands of monks and angry crowds in Tibet has swept out of Lhasa across the nation and the region. Nepal has closed climbing on Mt. Everest.

For more than three days since the March 10 Remembrance of the Tibetan’s 49-year-old Fight For Freedom, thousands of protests have sprung up everywhere. This includes the Potala Palace and the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa where protesters burned shops and vehicles and yelled for Independence.

As in Burma, the revolt began with peaceful street marches by Tibetan Buddhist monks over the past several days. These gave way to angry crowds of hundreds who confronted anti-riot police. US funded Radio Free Asia said Chinese police have fired on rioting Tibetan protesters killing at least two and four police have been injured.  

According to Reuters the protest is the biggest in two decades and the Dalai Lama has warned Beijing against using “brute force.”

Update from the AP:

BEIJING, March 14 (AP) Radio Free Asia’s Tibetan service quoted witnesses as saying that two bodies were seen in the center of the city after clashes earlier in the day. A witness in Lhasa, who asked not to be named, also told Kyodo News that he had seen six or seven people shot dead, but his account could not be confirmed.

A British journalist in Lhasa said late Friday that rioters are in control of the entire old part of the city. Hundreds of rioters and other members of the public were gathered in the center of Lhasa as night fell, with security forces apparently forming a cordon around the historic center of the Tibetan capital, Economist correspondent James Miles told Kyodo News. Miles said he could see dozens of fires in the old section of the city after rioters sacked and looted ethnic-Chinese shops and businesses. He said he also saw stones thrown at one Chinese child and he understands that most ethnic-Chinese have left the area for fear of further violence.

In one demonstration, security forces used tear gas to disperse about 400 protestors near the Jokhang Temple in the center of the city, he said. In another, about 500 Tibetans burned a shop and set fire to police cars after holding a demonstration near the Potala Palace.

“I am deeply concerned over the situation that has been developing in Tibet following peaceful protests in many parts of Tibet, including Lhasa, in recent days. These protests are a manifestation of the deep- rooted resentment of the Tibetan people under the present governance,” he said.

My heart cries for Tibet once again, and I am reminded of a day still vivid in my mind when I tried to fight for a free Tibet. Twenty years ago I looked out the window of a creaky old bus jerking down a dirt road into Nepal. We had just crossed the border from Tibet. Suddenly, the bus driver steered the bus over to the side of the road. When it stopped I looked around as confused as everyone else. Then someone said, “He is crying. The bus driver is crying.” And then another voice shouted, “They are rioting in Lhasa. The uprising has begun.”

I was a young buddhist and in my weeks in Tibet visiting Kagyu monasteries destroyed by the Chinese, I had listened heartbroken to the Tibetans who everywhere out of sight of the Chinese would hold out their hands, fingers inviting “Dalai Lama. You have picture. Dalai lama.

In Tibet spiritual practice is not separate because it is the way you are– it is your life. Never was this more clear than one day on another bus traveling across the great Tibetan plateau, we suffered a breakdown. Everyone piled off the bus, and after attending to bathroom visits out in the brush we wandered about in the great vastness of sky and dirt that is this incredibly desolate wildness.

I settled down with my travel notebook to write. At some point I looked up. To my right the Chinese were huddled around the engine gesturing and shouting instructions of how to fix the machine. To my left a young Tibetan man was lying prone, his face inches from a flower that was growing in the stubble on the plateau. Could there be a clearer picture of how different these two peoples are, I wondered. But my sympathies were all with the flower watcher.

In our early days in our room in Lhasa, as we adjusted to the altitude, we lay about for hours which is about all you can do  to acclimate. And we grew friendly with the Tibetan woman who ran our guest house. One night as we dropped off some things we had found in the market for her she motioned us inside. And then she told us about her life in the “New” Tibet.

Her husband was in prison. Her daughter had been taken forcibly from her and sent to Beijing to go to school to be a ‘good’ Chinese. She could not practice her religion, it was banned. All meetings of Tibetans were suspect. Spys were everywhere. And she had been forced to sell all her family heirloons in the Jokhang to tourists in order to live. Before the Chinese, the Tibetans lived by a centuries old method of barter. The Chinese had forbidden bartering, and if one had no money, you could not ‘buy’ the necesssities of life.

No one will ever know how many Tibetan monks were slaughtered and how many monasteries were destroyed in the early Chinese occupation of Tibet. But thousands and thousands of monks were cut down by machine gun, freedom fighters too were massacred by Chinese army units and thousands of monasteries were destroyed by mortar fire and bombs. Some monasteries at the time I was there were being rebuilt, but it was mostly for show and to bring in tourist dollars. The persecution of Buddhists went forward relentlessly.

One night my friend and I brought a Buddhist monk with us to our favorite noodle shop. I realized when we walked inside that something seemed not right, but I dismissed it. However, our monk guest said, “They are Muslim, you know. They will never forgive you for bringing me.” We bade him to enjoy his meal which was on us, as is the custom with monks because they have no money. But the hatred from the other patrons was palpable and enjoying the food was difficult. Before the Chinese occupation there had been no Muslims in Tibet.

This was in 1987 and it was the last great Tibetan uprising. When I traveled back to the border, intending to stand with the Tibetan people believing that westerners who did so would bring attention to the horror, I was turned back. The border was sealed.

It has been decades since calls for independence in Tibet have been so vocal. Red-robed Tibetan Buddhist monks have once more taken to the streets of the capital Lhasa. It has been 49 years since the People’s Liberation Army over ran Tibet and forced the Dalai Lama into exile. But what is happening now appears to be the largest open protest in Lhasa since the demonstrations I remember in the late 1980s. That uprising led to an imposition of martial law in Tibet in 1989.

Still, scores of Tibetan activists have begun the perilous journey on foot from Dharamsala, home of the exiled Dalai Lama, to Tibet. The veteran Tibetan activist Tenzin Tsundue said: “I am walking to Tibet again… I am returning home; why should I bother about papers from the Chinese colonial regime who have not only occupied Tibet, but are also running a military rule there; making our people in Tibet live in tyranny and brutal suppression day after day, every day for 50 years.”

If you would like to do something for Tibet please consider helping The Tibet Oral History Project. It is helping to preserve the true history of the Tibetan people and to record Tibet’s unique spiritual contribution to the world. http://www.tibetoralhistory.org/

“This project is being done at the request of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. His Holiness spoke of the urgency of conducting these interviews because these elders will soon pass away and their stories with them.”

We completed videotaping the extraordinary oral histories of 82 Tibetan elders living in exile. The oral history teams conducted interviews in Bylakuppe, the oldest Tibetan refugee settlement in India. The participants, who related incredible stories, ranged in age from 60 to 95 and came from the Amdo, Kham and U-Tsang regions of Tibet. Donations to the project help us:

• Organize interviews for world-wide Internet access in both edited and complete versions

• Provide DVD copies of the interviews to Tibetan and other library archives.

• Send DVD copies back to Bylakuppe for the elders and the Tibetan community.

How to contribute:  

Please send donations to:

Tibet Oral History Project http://tibetoralhistory.org/

P.O. Box 6464

Moraga, CA 94570-6464

Phone: 415-292-3202
Fax: 925-376-1640

Email: info@tibetoralhistory.org

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