NEARLY a decade ago, while staying with a nomad
family in the remote grasslands of northeastern
Tibet, I asked Namdrub, a man who fought in the
anti-Communist resistance in the 1950s, what he
thought about the exiled Tibetans who campaigned
for his freedom. "It may make them feel good, but
for us, it makes life worse,“he replied.”It
makes the Chinese create more controls over us.
Tibet is too important to the Communists for them
even to discuss independence."
Protests have spread across the Tibetan plateau
over the last two weeks, and at least 100 people
have died. Anyone who finds it odd that Speaker
Nancy Pelosi has rushed to Dharamsala, India, to
stand by the Dalai Lama’s side fails to realize
that American politics provided an important
spark for the demonstrations. Last October, when
the Congressional Gold Medal was awarded to the
Dalai Lama, monks in Tibet watched over the
Internet and celebrated by setting off fireworks
and throwing barley flour. They were quickly
arrested.
It was for the release of these monks that
demonstrators initially turned out this month.
Their brave stand quickly metamorphosed into a
protest by Lhasa residents who were angry that
many economic advantages of the last 10 or 15
years had gone to Han Chinese and Hui Muslims. A
young refugee whose family is still in Tibet told
me this week of the medal, "People believed that
the American government was genuinely considering
the Tibet issue as a priority." In fact, the
award was a symbolic gesture, arranged mostly to
make American lawmakers feel good.
A similar misunderstanding occurred in 1987 when
the Dalai Lama was denounced by the Chinese state
media for putting forward a peace proposal on
Capitol Hill. To Tibetans brought up in the
Communist system - where a politician’s physical
proximity to the leadership on the evening news
indicates to the public that he is in favor - it
appeared that the world’s most powerful
government was offering substantive political
backing to the Dalai Lama. Protests began in
Lhasa, and martial law was declared. The brutal
suppression that followed was orchestrated by the
party secretary in Tibet, Hu Jintao, who is now
the Chinese president. His response to the
current unrest is likely to be equally
uncompromising.
The Dalai Lama is a great and charismatic
spiritual figure, but a poor and poorly advised
political strategist. When he escaped into exile
in India in 1959, he declared himself an admirer
of Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance. But
Gandhi took huge gambles, starting the Salt March
and starving himself nearly to death - a very
different approach from the Dalai Lama’s "middle
way," which concentrates on nonviolence rather
than resistance. The Dalai Lama has never really
tried to use direct action to leverage his
authority.
At the end of the 1980s, he joined forces with
Hollywood and generated huge popular support for
the Tibetan cause in America and Western Europe.
This approach made some sense at the time. The
Soviet Union was falling apart, and many people
thought China might do the same. In practice,
however, the campaign outraged the nationalist
and xenophobic Chinese leadership.
It has been clear since the mid-1990s that the
popular internationalization of the Tibet issue
has had no positive effect on the Beijing
government. The leadership is not amenable to
“moral pressure,” over the Olympics or anything
else, particularly by the nations that invaded
Iraq.
The Dalai Lama should have closed down the
Hollywood strategy a decade ago and focused on
back-channel diplomacy with Beijing. He should
have publicly renounced the claim to a so-called
Greater Tibet, which demands territory that was
never under the control of the Lhasa government.
Sending his envoys to talk about talks with the
Chinese while simultaneously encouraging the
global pro-Tibet lobby has achieved nothing.
When Beijing attacks the “Dalai clique,” it is
referring to the various groups that make Chinese
leaders lose face each time they visit a Western
country. The International Campaign for Tibet,
based in Washington, is now a more powerful and
effective force on global opinion than the Dalai
Lama’s outfit in northern India. The European and
American pro-Tibet organizations are the tail
that wags the dog of the Tibetan
government-in-exile.
These groups hate criticism almost as much as the
Chinese government does. Some use questionable
information. For example, the Free Tibet Campaign
in London (of which I am a former director) and
other groups have long claimed that 1.2 million
Tibetans have been killed by the Chinese since
they invaded in 1950. However, after scouring the
archives in Dharamsala while researching my book
on Tibet, I found that there was no evidence to
support that figure. The question that Nancy
Pelosi and celebrity advocates like Richard Gere
ought to answer is this: Have the actions of the
Western pro-Tibet lobby over the last 20 years
brought a single benefit to the Tibetans who live
inside Tibet, and if not, why continue with a
failed strategy?
I first visited Tibet in 1986. The economic
plight of ordinary people is slightly better now,
but they have as little political freedom as they
did two decades ago. Tibet lacks genuine
autonomy, and ethnic Tibetans are excluded from
positions of real power within the bureaucracy or
the army. Tibet was effectively a sovereign
nation at the time of the Communist invasion and
was in full control of its own affairs. But the
battle for Tibetan independence was lost 49 years
ago when the Dalai Lama escaped into exile. His
goal, and that of those who want to help the
Tibetan people, should be to negotiate
realistically with the Chinese state. The present
protests, supported from overseas, will bring
only more suffering. China is not a democracy,
and it will not budge.