Tears Over Tibet
By J. Sri Raman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Saturday 19 April 2008
The title may sound like a callous taunt, but it is not. It is not meant to
mock everyone's tears about Tibet. I am talking only about tears induced by
political glycerin, especially but not solely in India, with the Olympic torch
rally inspiring overblown rhetoric on the subject all along the route.
Far be it from me to hold any special brief for Beijing. I am not asking anyone
to forget about what the Tibetan people have suffered, about the Cultural Revolution
and its cruelties in the remote Himalayan region that lost treasures of heritage
in mob attacks on 6,000 monasteries. And no Indian familiar with the country's
majoritarian fascism can dismiss the Tibetans' fears as a minority.
The torch had an almost trouble-free course through Pakistan despite the supposed
terrorist threat to it. It was bound to have a more eventful journey in India.
The country had given asylum to the Dalai Lama nearly half a century ago, and
now has a Tibetan population of about 125,000, including many born and brought
up here. The furious demonstrations of Tibetan activists against the torch and
China may have really moved many fed on decades of propaganda, stressing their
refugee status and their special bond with the land of Buddhism's origin, but
silent on all other aspects of the issue.
The tears that former minister George Fernandes, in the frontline of the anti-torch
protest, threatened to shed were of a totally different kind. He had also shed
metaphorical tears over India's nuclear explosion 1973, but was a deliriously
happy defense minister when former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's government
declared India a "nuclear-weapon state" after the tests of May 1998.
Fernandes defended it all as a fitting response to China as the "threat
No. 1" to India.
He got so carried away in his rhetoric that his prime minister had to restrain
him. Vajpayee had to rebut the sensational charge of Fernandes that China had
built helipads on Indian soil. Beijing also later denied, without New Delhi
demurring, the other charge of the defense minister about China setting up a
base in Burma in the Coco Islands. The Olympic-Tibet issue has brought a new
opportunity to the old anti-China warrior.
Fernandes, a former Socialist, has the far right with him. Weeks before the
anti-torch rally, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (which played a leading role in
the viciously fascist anti-minority program of 2002 in Gujarat) staged a protest
demanding "autonomy" for Tibet. VHP leader Ashok Singhal charged that
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's government was "shying away from taking
a pro-Tibet stand" because of its left allies.
The political character of the putatively pro-Tibet protests should come as
no surprise. It should certainly not shock anyone aware of the intimate involvement
of the Central Intelligence Agency of the US and its shady sister organizations
in Tibet - a deep and continuing involvement that preceded and paved the way
for the flight of the 14th Dalai Lama to India.
For this part of Tibet's history, let us not go by any Chinese or Communist
description, but by an article by John B. Roberts II in the conservative American
Spectator of December 1997. Recounts Roberts: "By early 1951, Tibet's emissaries
had made contact with American diplomats in neighboring India. A delegation
speaking in the name of the Dalai Lama asked for support for Tibet's independence,
and inquired whether the US would shoulder the costs of the Dalai Lama and several
hundred followers in exile." The story continues: "Tibet's request
was handled at the top levels of the US government. Secretary of State Dean
Acheson sent top-secret cables to embassies in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Thailand
and India, instructing ambassadors to sound out the prospects for asylum for
the Dalai Lama. America's support for Chiang Kai-Shek's Chinese Nationalists
on Formosa complicated matters. Like Communist China, the Nationalists also
viewed Tibet as a historic part of the Chinese empire. Stopping the Communist
conquest o Tibet was attractive to the US, but not if it would alienate Chiang
Kai-Shek, who opposed Tibetan independence."
"But one thing was clear from the beginning," says Roberts. "The
US wanted the Dalai Lama to lead his country's resistance against the Chinese.
A secret cable from 1951 reveals that Washington encouraged the Dalai Lama to
'remain' in (a) country near Tibet for purpose of mounting resistance to Chinese
Communists within Tibet. The more immediate problem was how to support Tibet's
resistance war."
In another cable of July 31, 1951, Acheson confirmed America's standing offer
to the Dalai Lama: "Our original position - full aid and assistance to
you when you come out." Acheson wanted US aid conditioned on the Dalai
Lama's agreement to leave Tibet. The Dalai Lama was told that, while American
planes couldn't fly into Lhasa to take him into exile, the US would do all it
could to aid him in fleeing Tibet. The Tibetan emissaries wanted arms. A secret
cable from November 15, 1951, reports the US reply: "... suggestions for
overt US provision of planes, arms, supplies and leadership are practically
impossible and politically undesirable at this time.... US shd (should) make
at least one final effort by letter or oral messages to encourage DL (Dalai
Lama) to resist in ways best known to Tib (Tibet) Govt (government).... Although
it may not be feasible, DL might for example make pilgrimage to Buddhist shrines
in Tib from one of which he might escape southward to Ind."
Reports Roberts: "The beginning of the end came in March 1959, when a
general uprising known in intelligence annals as the 'Tibetan Rebellion' broke
out ... the sparks that ignited the tinder were rumors that China was about
to kidnap the Dalai Lama. Some 30,000 Tibetans flocked to the gates of the Dalai
Lama's palace to protect him. In response, the Chinese shelled the crowd with
artillery." Roberts continues: "CIA-trained ... fighters were strategically
deployed along a southern route leading from Lhasa across the Himalayas to India.
Their orders were to prevent any Chinese pursuit, blocking key passes along
the southern route, and fighting to hold them as long as necessary while the
Dalai Lama and his entourage made their way to safety on horseback."
The account goes on: "The Dalai Lama's trek lasted from mid-March until
the beginning of April. During the entire trip through the remote mountains
of Tibet, CIA-trained radio operators sent daily progress reports to Allen Dulles
(then CIA director). Coded radio messages were broadcast from Tibet's peaks
to CIA listening posts on Okinawa, and then relayed to Washington, where Dulles
anxiously monitored the day-by-day movements during the two-week-long trek."
In briefing the National Security Council on March 26, 1959, Dulles confidently
predicted that "we have every reason to hope that the Dalai Lama will get
out of Tibet fairly soon."
The account continues, "Nowhere, perhaps, was the Dalai Lama's progress
more anxiously tracked than at the US Embassy in India. That is where Gyalo
Thondup's (the Dalai Lama's elder brother) CIA control officer and Ambassador
Ellsworth Bunker awaited the Dalai Lama's arrival. The clandestine radio broadcasts,
once relayed to Washington, were then retransmitted to the CIA Station in New
Delhi. By March's end the wait was over."
Concludes Roberts: "On April 1, with confirmation that the Dalai Lama
was safely out of Tibet ... Dulles sent a memo to President Eisenhower summarizing
the Tibetan operation. The memo noted that new plans were being developed for
Tibet's resistance."
The cost of the operation, besides the armed Tibetan insurgency including the
periodic parachuting of insurgents on "the roof of the world," can
be left to the reader's imagination. It is an open secret that, in the more
recent period, CIA conduits like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED),
set up by the Reagan administration in 1984, have provided funds to the "free
Tibet" movement. Through these conduits, the US Congress has reportedly
continued to allocate an annual $2 million to Tibetans in India, with additional
millions for "democracy activities" within the Tibetan exile community.
What was Tibet like in its days of pre-Communist idyll? For an answer, again,
let us rely not on Chinese versions but on the account of Michael Parenti, a
left-winger but none the less a respected American historian and political scientist.
In an "updated and expanded version" in January 2007 of his essay
titled "Friendly Feudalism - A Tibetan Myth," Parenti says: "Until
1959, when the Dalai Lama last presided over Tibet, most of the arable land
was still organized into manorial estates worked by serfs. These estates were
owned by two social groups: the rich secular landlords and the rich theocratic
lamas. Even a writer sympathetic to the old order (Pradyumna P. Karan, 'The
Changing Face of Tibet: The Impact of Chinese Communist Ideology on the Landscape')
allows that 'a great deal of real estate belonged to the monasteries, and most
of them amassed great riches.' Much of the wealth was accumulated 'through active
participation in trade, commerce, and money lending'."
The Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with
its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth
of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas.
Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth.
The Dalai Lama himself lived in the 1,000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.
An oft-heard complaint from Tibetan exiles in India is that the Communists
have stopped the old Tibetan practice of ordaining children as monks. To many
of us, it is the discontinued practice that would seem diabolically oppressive.
This is what Parenti says: "Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from
their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks.
Once there, they were bonded for life." We won't repeat Parenti's finding
about a sordid abuse of such children. It may not, however, be so provocative
to quote him as adding: "The monastic estates also conscripted children
for lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers."
Parenti records the comments of earlier visitors on "the theocratic despotism,"
as he calls it. "In 1895, an Englishman, Dr. A. L. Waddell, wrote that
the populace was under the 'intolerable tyranny of monks' and the devil superstitions
they had fashioned to terrorize the people. In 1904 Perceval Landon described
the Dalai Lama's rule as 'an engine of oppression.' At about that time, another
English traveler, Captain W.F.T. O'Connor, observed that 'the great landowners
and the pries ... exercise each in their own dominion a despotic power from
which there is no appeal,' while the people are 'oppressed by the most monstrous
growth of monasticism and priest-craft.' Tibetan rulers 'invented degrading
legends and stimulated a spirit of superstition' among the common people. In
1937, another visitor, Spencer Chapman, wrote, 'The Lamaist monk does not spend
his time in ministering to the people or educating them.... The beggar beside
the road is nothing to the monk. Knowledge is the jealously guarded prerogative
f the monasteries and is used to increase their influence and wealth'."
Concludes Parenti: "... Tibet was a far cry from the romanticized Shangri
La so enthusiastically nurtured by Buddhism's Western proselytes."
Parenti concedes that many ordinary Tibetans want the Dalai Lama back in their
country, but says that relatively few seem to want "a return to the social
order he represented." The historian cites a 1999 story from the Washington
Post: "... few Tibetans would welcome a return of the corrupt aristocratic
clans that fled with him in 1959 and that comprise the bulk of his advisers.
Many Tibetan farmers, for example, have no interest in surrendering to the clans
the land they gained during China's land reform. Tibet's former slaves say they,
too, don't want their former masters to return to power. 'I've already lived
that life once before,' said Wangchuk, a 67-year-old former slave who was wearing
his best clothes for his yearly pilgrimage to Shigatse, one of the holiest sites
of Tibetan Buddhism. He said he worshipped the Dalai Lama, but added, 'I may
not be free under Chinese communism, but I am better off than when I was a slave'."
The Chinese regime and the Dalai Lama have both changed, of course. The strongest
condemnation of the Cultural Revolution and its savageries comes now from Beijing
and the Communist Party of China. And the Dalai Lama was reported long ago to
have asked his flock to dream of a return to Tibet but not to thc days of "big
landlords." He has also opposed the call for a boycott of the Chinese Olympics
and the slogan of Tibetan separatism, though Beijing does not trust him still.
There may be scope for a dialogue between the two, but the pro-Tibet campaign
we are witnessing today in India and the West would seem designed to keep the
two sides apart. Tears can blur the truth.
A freelance journalist and a peace activist in India, J. Sri Raman is the author of "Flashpoint" (Common Courage Press, USA). He is a regular contributor to Truthout.
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