Seeds of a resistance remain in Tibet

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/03/18/seeds_of_a_resistance_remain_in_tibet/

By H.D.S. Greenway

March 18, 2008
FIRES RISING from burning shops, red-robed monks beaten, the dead lying in the streets, and burned-out cars in the stone square outside the Jokhang, Tibet's most sacred shrine; thus did unrest come to Lhasa, not as a stranger. In other decades, violence has flowed as a protest against Chinese rule following China's brutal invasion of more than half a century ago - a takeover to which Tibetans remain unreconciled.

more stories like thisWhat an embarrassment for China, trying so hard to organize an Olympic Games intended to symbolize China's emergence as a modern, great power among nations. What an embarrassment for President Hu Jintao, who, while boss of Tibet, wet his hands in repression.

Recently I visited the Jokhang, the circulation of which - always clockwise - is obligatory for many devout Tibetans. As folk from the countryside poured into Lhasa, and to other shrines in the post-harvest pilgrimage season, one sensed that all China's attempts to crush Tibet's Tantric-Buddhist traditions, the destruction of its monasteries, the dispersal and imprisonment of its monks, the exile of its Dalai Lama, had failed. Buddhism remains undaunted in Tibet, and with it, as the Chinese always feared, the seeds of a resistance.

To be fair, China has tried to make amends, rebuilding the temples it destroyed, allowing more freedoms, many of which Hu Jintao initiated. But it is still illegal to display a photograph of the Dalai Lama, and one feels a sense of occupation and resentment, as one does in the West Bank. Like the West Bank, the occupying power has tried to create new demographic realities on the ground. But instead of surrounding cities with settlements, China has simply turned Tibet's towns into Chinese cities. Lhasa has now twice as many Han Chinese as Tibetans. But whereas Israel has come to contemplate, and even accept, the notion of losing its occupied lands, China decidedly has not.

Butchers in Lhasa are traditionally non-Buddhists, and even fishing is frowned upon. Yet it is sad to contemplate that the most pacific of religions is beset by violence in so many lands. Sri Lanka's Theravada-Buddhist majority is embroiled in a bloody, decades-long civil war with its Hindu-Tamil minority.

In Burma, as in Tibet today, Buddhist monks, shot, flogged, and beaten, were recently in the forefront of political protests, not against a foreign occupation but against Burma's own repressive generals. Hindu-Buddhist Nepal has been riven by the violence of a so-called Maoist revolt, and a self-destructive monarchy that now seems on the way out. In Laos, where Communists have abolished the monarchy, the land languishes in obscurity and poverty, lifted only a little by the budding blight of mass tourism. In the Kingdom of Cambodia, the scene of one of the most hateful holocausts in recent history, the Khmer Rouge have been defeated but their long shadow still lies over their death-haunted land.

China has some reason to claim that Tibet was never really independent, that it always belonged to China, acting independently only when China was weak. China claims, again with some truth, that Tibet was a medieval theocracy before the invasion, and that China sought to bring Tibet into the 20th century. Certainly it can be said that the brutality and cultural genocide with which China went about it lived up to the standards of the world's most violent century.

What Tibet might have been, if Tibetans had been allowed to conduct their own reforms, can be seen in neighboring Bhutan, sandwiched between India and Tibet, where Tibetan-style Buddhism flourishes. Next week Bhutan is holding elections for the first time in history to transform itself into a constitutional monarchy. This is being done from the top down, with no revolt or pressure from its citizens, who, frankly, would probably wish Bhutan to remain an absolutist monarchy if their king would let them.

Yet, the snake of political violence, previously unknown in this Himalayan Eden, is slithering in. Bombs, allegedly set off by infiltrating Maoists from Nepal, have done little physical damage, but are intended to destabilize the tranquility of a nonviolent land that threatens no one, and is about to become the world's newest democracy. Buddha deserves better.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.