03-28-2008, 03:57 PM
(This post was last modified: 03-28-2008, 04:14 PM by Bodhi.)
What Rajeev has not mentioned in the above superb article are a few facts of history.
RC Majumdar in Ancient India describes how the boundaries of Lalitaditya Karkota of Kashmir included Tibet.
Oft forgotten and ignored fact remains the immensely significant contribution of Lalitaditya in checking the Islamic expansion. For more than five decades in mid 700s, Lalitaditya had effective control over all the western passes of Himalayas - all the way from Afghanistan, Northern Iran, Turkey, baltistan, dardistan, other central Asian procinces in west and with tibet in the east.
His control over these routes is what must have effectively stopped the arabic/islamic expansion towards North, and even china. Rajtarangiri pays tributes to him, and describes in detail how the center of power in India shifted with Lalitaditya gaining control over a vast kingdom - from central asia in west and tibet-bhutan-assam in east and most of aryavarta till Vindhya in south.
But for this great warrior of India, who knows, chinese would be a muslim group of countries today. chinese were very weak and disunited at that very time. All Islam needed was physical access to them.
Imagine how Lalitaditya aborted a Chairman Mao-hammad-ze-dong before he was conceived!
---
Centuries later, Mugals (esp Shahajahan), with claims of Mongol bloodline in them, had sent armies towards Tibet and at least conquered the mountains of Leh/Laddakh from Tibetan control.
Buddhism destroyed Vedic culture and Islamic invasion made it permanent.
There is some claim that lost Vedas scriptures were safely hidden inside walls of Tibetan monasteries in Tibet.
Loisa Lim again reports for NPR:
A tibetian monk spoke to her, afraid for his life but wanting to tell the world. He said PRC is putting agents in midst of monks. Monks are not allowed to leave monastery. They even have to eat with the PRC guys. PRC guys tell them taht DL is now isolated. They make them say that DL is a terrorist. Monks are in fear of Han and Han shopkeepers etc are afraid of monks turning violent. Already han shopkeeps are losing business. Like losing 100% of their business. Han say "this is tibetian's kingdom".
03-29-2008, 10:55 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-29-2008, 11:00 AM by dhu.)
These are effects of unbridled communist party influence in China and racialization of the polity. Traditional Chinese Empires had created safe havens for native Taiwanese cultures; at any rate, the conflicts were noncultural, just as in India. Westerners always have excuse that it is communism's fault or ruski's fault; ignored is the western framework in which all these anti-cultural movements have taken shape. Today they are atively supporting communists in India, tomorrow they will declare their anti-communist stance, and say India is to blame for destruction of Hindu culture, if it is even acknowledged. or else they will divide Hindu (ie Chinese) culture versus Dalit-Buddhist (ie tibetan) culture and we will be arguing along these lines after having internalized.
03-30-2008, 05:43 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-30-2008, 05:43 AM by Shambhu.)
Err....um some erratum
Sarkozy is not going to boycott the games as had I said earlier. Just saw him on CNN. He may boycott the opening ceremony. Sorreekozy!
What I can say 100% is that groups in SanFransisco are planning to protest the passing of the torch thru their city.
<!--emo&:bhappy--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/b_woot.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='b_woot.gif' /><!--endemo--> Free Tibbat! Down with China!:bcow
<!--QuoteBegin-Shambhu+Mar 30 2008, 05:43 AM-->QUOTE(Shambhu @ Mar 30 2008, 05:43 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->Sarkozy is not going to boycott the games as had I said earlier. Just saw him on CNN. He may boycott the opening ceremony. Sorreekozy![right][snapback]80156[/snapback][/right]<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Depressing.
Don't you wish you were an entire country so you could boycott the games and make some kind of noise.
03-31-2008, 12:53 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-31-2008, 12:54 AM by rhytha.)
Nationalism at core of China's angry reaction to Tibetan protests
BEIJING: Like so many Chinese, Meng Huizhong was horrified by the violent Tibetan protests in Lhasa. She cringed at videos of Tibetan rioters attacking a Chinese motorcyclist. Her anger deepened as Tibet dominated her online conversation groups, until it settled on what might seem like an unlikely target: the Communist Party.
"We couldn't believe our government was being so weak and cowardly," said Meng, 52, a mother and office worker, who was appalled that the authorities failed to initially douse the violence. "The Dalai Lama is trying to separate China, and it is not acceptable at all. We must crack down on the rioters."
For two weeks, as Chinese security forces have tried to extinguish ongoing Tibetan protests, Chinese officials have tried to demonstrate the party's resolve to people like Meng. They have blasted the foreign media as biased against China, castigated the Dalai Lama as a terrorist "jackal" and called for a "People's War" to fight separatism in Tibet.
If the tough tactics have startled the outside world, the Communist Party for now seems more concerned with rallying domestic opinion by using and responding to the deep strains of nationalism in Chinese society. Playing to national pride, and national insecurities, the party has used censorship and propaganda to position itself as defender of the motherland - and block any examination of Tibetan grievances or its own performance in the crisis.
But the heavy emphasis on nationalism is not without risks. With less than five months before the opening of the Beijing Olympics, China's sharp criticism of the foreign media comes precisely when it wants to present a welcoming impression to the outside world. Instead, Chinese citizens, including many overseas, are posting thousands of angry messages on Web sites and making crank calls to some foreign media offices in Beijing.
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Chinese state media have also inundated the public with so many reports from Lhasa about the suffering of Han Chinese merchants and the brutal deaths of Chinese victims - but with no coverage of Tibetan grievances - that critics have accused the government of "fanning racial hatred." In the recent past, nationalist upsurges have focused on outsiders, especially the Japanese, but Tibet is part of China, so the effect is to sharpen domestic ethnic tensions.
"When a big crisis happens here, they show their true nature," said Liu Xiaobo, a liberal dissident and government critic. "I am really shocked by the language they used concerning the Dalai Lama. They are talking about a 'People's War.' That is a phrase from the Cultural Revolution."
Analysts have long debated how often the Communist Party steers and inflames nationalism versus how often nationalist public attitudes are beyond the party's control. In the run-up to the Summer Games, the steady attacks against China on issues like Darfur, global warming, air pollution and human rights abuses have increasingly been interpreted by many Chinese, including those overseas, as an unfair attempt to undermine China's Olympic moment.
But the Tibet crisis has touched directly on the raw nerve of separatism at the core of Chinese nationalism. Tibet is usually a low-profile issue within China, especially compared with Taiwan. But most Chinese, influenced by the government, are interpreting the Tibetan crisis as an attempt to split China.
On Sunday, Xinhua, the official news agency, released an article titled "Dalai Clique's Masterminding of Lhasa Violence Exposed." It cited an "unnamed suspect" who confessed that the "Dalai clique" had organized and incited the protests to force China to allow the Dalai Lama to return and achieve more autonomy for "Greater Tibet."
The statement came on the same day that activists disrupted the ceremony in Athens in which Greek officials handed over the Olympic flame to organizers of the Games.
Evading massive security to unfurl protest banners, the demonstrators shouted "Free Tibet!" and charged into a police cordon, trying to block the flame from making its final 100-meter, or 330-foot, run into Panathinaiko Stadium.
Backed by riot squads, scores of police officers detained 10 of an estimated 15 demonstrators, whisking them off to Greece's national police headquarters minutes after the ceremony kicked off.
The torch is scheduled to arrive in Beijing on Monday before taking off on the longest, most ambitious round-the-world relay in Olympic history: a 137,000-kilometer, or 85,100-mile, 130-day route that will cross five continents and climb to the summit of Mount Everest before finally arriving at the National Stadium in Beijing for the Aug. 8 opening ceremony.
In Beijing on Sunday, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao reiterated China's position that it was open to talks with the Dalai Lama if he gave up his desire for independence and acknowledged that Tibet and Taiwan were inseparable from China, The Associated Press reported.
For now, Chinese public anger about the Tibetan protests is mostly confined to the Internet, but the enormous domestic media attention on Tibet has also focused the public on how the issue is being treated abroad.
"If Bush meets the Dalai Lama right now, or if the Congress does anything, the Chinese people might do something," said Tong Zeng, who helped organize anti-Japanese protests in the last major nationalism campaign in 2005. Tong said the Internet was filled with angry comments about the recent meeting between the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, and the Dalai Lama.
"My thinking is that if there is anything passed in the House, the Chinese people will take to the streets," he predicted.
Communist Party leaders have hoped the Olympics would showcase China as a modern, confident and nonthreatening emerging world power, while also validating the party's hold on power. President Hu Jintao has advocated a "harmonious society" to signal a new government effort at addressing inequality in society. At the same time, China's soft power abroad is rising with its bulging foreign-exchange reserves and its increasingly active diplomatic role on issues like the North Korea nuclear problem.
But the Tibet crisis has shown a leadership that has seemingly stepped back into the party's harsher past. Buddhist monks in Tibet are now being subjected to punitive "patriotic education" campaigns. Paramilitary police officers and soldiers have swept across huge areas of western China as part of a broad crackdown. Party leaders, including the prime minister, have vilified the Dalai Lama and blamed the "Dalai clique" for trying to sabotage China's Olympic moment.
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"The language they are using about everything has been Cultural Revolution hyperbole," said Susan Shirk, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs and the author of "China: Fragile Superpower." "This does not look like the reaction of a strong, confident leadership."
Last week, a group of prominent Chinese intellectuals offered a rare contrary voice by issuing a petition that called on the government to allow Tibetans to express their grievances and to respect freedom of religion and freedom of speech.
Liu, the government critic, who helped draft the petition, said the government's attacks on the Dalai Lama and its censorship of state media coverage was the same strategy it used during the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations when it jailed pro-democracy leaders as "black hands" and did not televise footage of soldiers firing on students.
"You can see the propaganda machine operating in full gear," Liu said. "That shows the true nature of the government. It hasn't changed at all."
Scholars often describe nationalism as China's state religion now that the Communist Party has shrugged off socialist ideology and made economic development the country's priority. Dibyesh Anand, a Tibet specialist, said modern Chinese nationalism could be traced to Sun Yat-sen, the Chinese revolutionary who described the country's main ethnic groups - the Han, Manchu, Hui, Mongolian and Tibetan peoples - as the "five fingers" of China.
Today, Han Chinese constitute more than 92 percent of the population, but without one of those five fingers, China's leaders do not consider the country whole.
"The Communist Party has used nationalism as an ideology to keep China together," said Anand, a reader in international relations at Westminster University in London. He said many Chinese regard the Tibetan protests "as an attack on their core identity."
"It's not only an attack on the state," he said, "but an attack on what it means to be Chinese. Even if minorities don't feel like part of China, they are part of China's nationality."
This logic helps explain why Chinese nationalist sentiment has been inflamed by perceived Western sympathy for the Tibetan protests - an anger that has mostly focused on the foreign media.
Chinese media commentators have accused foreign news coverage of being more sympathetic to Tibetans in Lhasa than to Chinese who lost their lives and property in the riots. Meanwhile, Chinese from around the world were infuriated when several Western news organizations mislabeled photographs of the police beating pro-Tibet protesters in Nepal as being from China.
Last week, Qin Gang, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, described the foreign coverage of Tibet as a "textbook of bad examples" - even as the government refused to allow journalists free access to Tibet or other restive regions in western China to investigate the crackdown
Party leaders know the volatility of nationalism from 2005. The government tried to control - some would say manipulate - the anti-Japanese protests that escalated during a tense diplomatic tussle between China against Japan. But the protests became violent and grew so rapidly that the government finally forced them to end.
Tong, the organizer, said the anti-Japanese movement was continuing today - if modestly, at a time when the government is trying to improve relations with Japan. But he said the nationalism that infused the anti-Japanese movement was deeply rooted and transcended divisions that can separate people in China.
"In our group, we have the right, we have the middle and we have the left," Tong said. "It is similar to the Tibet issue. For most Chinese people, the bottom line is you should never divide China."
Many Chinese people know little about Tibet's different interpretation of its history and regard Tibetans as having been granted special subsidies and benefits from the government because of their ethnic status. For many Chinese, the protests come across as ingratitude after years in which China has built roads, a high-altitude railroad and other infrastructure for Tibet.
"Our country is very tolerant to all kinds of religions," said Meng, the office worker. "And the Tibetans are taking advantage of this."
Meng said she got her information about Tibet from state media and various postings on the Internet. After the Lhasa riots, she was infuriated when she saw a photograph of policemen cowering behind riot shields without fighting back. But she said her attitude toward the government's response began to change when she saw Qin, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, take a tough line on Tibet and also accuse the foreign media of distorted coverage.
She said she was also pleased to see that President Hu Jintao had rejected a request from President George W. Bush to open a new dialogue with the Dalai Lama. Still, she said she wanted even tougher action.
"I want the killers to be executed," she said. "Well, I know it is just my wish, because the government will not go that far because of the ethnic issue."
Anthee Carassava contributed reporting from Athens. Zhang Jing contributed research from Beijing.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/30/asia/china.php
<b>Repression may unravel chinaâs monocracy</b>
Stagecraft & Statecraft / Brahma Chellaney
Growing authoritarianism more often than not rebounds. The monk-led Tibetan uprising, which has spread across Tibet and beyond to the traditional Tibetan areas forcibly incorporated in Han provinces, marks a turning point in Communist China's history. It comes as a rude jolt to the world's biggest and longest-surviving autocracy, highlighting the signal failure of state-driven efforts to pacify Tibet through more than half-a-century of ruthless repression, in which as many as a million Tibetans reportedly have lost their lives.
The open backlash against the Tibetans' economic marginalisation, the rising Han influx and the state assault on Tibetan religion and ecology constitutes, in terms of its spread, the largest rebellion in Tibet since 1959, when the Dalai Lama and his followers were forced to flee to India. Even in 1989, when the last major Tibetan uprising was suppressed through brute force, the unrest had not spread beyond the central plateau, or what Beijing since 1965 calls the Tibet Autonomous Region. Now, the state's intensifying brutal crackdown across the Tibetan plateau - an area more than two-thirds the size of Western Europe - dwarfs other international human rights problems like Burma and Darfur, Sudan.
Indeed, the latest revolt is a challenge to China's totalitarian system in a year when the Beijing Olympics are supposed to showcase the autocracy's remarkable economic achievements. It is a defining moment for a system that has managed to entrench itself for 59 long years and yet faces gnawing questions about its ability to survive by reconciling China's contradictory paths of market capitalism and political monocracy. The longest any autocratic system has survived in modern history was 74 years in the Soviet Union.
The recent events have laid bare the strength of the Tibetan grassroots resistance despite decades of oppression, including the demolition of monasteries, the jailing of independent-minded monks and nuns, the state's wanton interference in the mechanics of Tibetan Buddhism, and the forced political re-education of Tibetan youth and monks. Tibet's rapid Sinicization today threatens to obliterate the Tibetan culture in ways the previous decades of repression could not. That threat has only sharpened the Tibetan sense of identity and yearning for freedom.
For President Hu Jintao, who owes his swift rise to the top of the party hierarchy to his martial law crackdown in Tibet in 1989, the chickens have come home to roost. The fresh uprising, coinciding with Hu's re-election as President, epitomises the counterproductive nature of the Hu-backed policies - from seeking to change the demographic realities on the ground through the "Go West" Han-migration campaign, to draconian curbs on Tibetan farmland and monastic life. The Tibetans' feelings of subjugation and loss have been deepened as they have been pushed to the margins of society, with their distinct culture being reduced to a mere showpiece to draw tourists and boost the Han-benefiting local economy.
Tibetans also have been incensed by atheistic China's growing intrusion into their religious affairs, as exemplified by Beijing's 2007 proclamation making itself the sole authority to anoint lamas - traditionally a divine process to select a young boy as a Buddha incarnation. Having captured the institution of the Panchen Lama, the second-ranking figure in Tibetan Buddhism, Beijing is preparing the ground to install its own puppet Dalai Lama after the present ageing incumbent passes away. So shortsighted is this approach that the rulers in Beijing don't realise that such a scenario will surely radicalise Tibetan youth and kill prospect of a peaceful settlement of the Tibet issue, thereby spawning an enduring violent campaign.
The ongoing Chinese crackdown, behind the cover of a Tibet that has been cut off from the outside world, symbolises what the Communist leadership itself admits is a "life and death struggle" over Tibet. The likely further hardening of the leadership's stance on Tibet, as a consequence of the uprising, will only help mask a serious challenge that carries wider political implications for the Chinese state. In the Tibetan plateau - about half of which has been hived off from Tibet and merged with Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces - the crackdown by a regime wedded to the unbridled exercise of state power promises to exacerbate the situation on the ground.
The tepid global response thus far to the bloodletting and arbitrary arrests in Tibet is a reflection of China's growing international clout, underscored by its burgeoning external trade, rising military power and unrivalled $1.5 trillion foreign-exchange reserves, largely invested in US dollar-denominated assets. Given that even the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre did not trigger lasting international trade sanctions, the lack of any attempt to penalise China for its continuing human rights violations in Tibet should not come as a surprise.
But Tibet's future will be determined not so much by the international response as by developments within China. After all, the only occasions in history when Tibet was clearly part of China was under non-Han dynasties - that is, when China itself had been conquered by outsiders: the Mongol Yuan dynasty, from 1279 to 1368, and the Manchu Qing dynasty, from 1644 to 1912. It was only when the Qing dynasty began to unravel that Tibet once again became an independent political entity.
What Beijing today asserts are regions "integral" to its territorial integrity are really imperial spoils of earlier foreign dynastic rule in China. Yet, revisionist history under Communist rule has helped indoctrinate the Chinese to think of the Yang and Qing empires as Han, with the result that educated Chinese have come to feel a false sense of ownership about every territory that was part of those dynasties.
The truth is that the once-idyllic Tibet came under direct Han rule for the first time in history following the 1949 Communist takeover in China. Just as the politically cataclysmic developments of 1949 led to Tibet's loss of its independent status, it is likely to take another momentous event in Chinese history for Tibet to regain its sovereignty. That event could be the unravelling of the present xenophobic dictatorship and the synthetic homogeneity it has implanted, not just in institutional structures but also in the national thought process. The Chinese autocrats are able to fan ultra-nationalism as a substitute to their waning Communist ideology because the central tenet of the Communists' political philosophy is uniformity, with Hu's slogan of a "harmonious society" designed to underline the theme of conformity with the republic. The Manchu assimilation into Han society and the swamping of the natives in Inner Mongolia have left only the Tibetans and Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang as the holdouts.
With 60 per cent of its present landmass comprising homelands of ethnic minorities, modern China has come a long way in history since the time the Great Wall represented the Han empire's outer security perimeter. Territorially, Han power is at its pinnacle today. Yet, driven by self-cultivated myths, the state fuels territorial nationalism, centred on issues like Tibet and Taiwan, and its claims in the East and South China Seas and on India's Arunachal Pradesh state - nearly thrice the size of Taiwan. Few realise that China occupies one-fifth of the original state of Jammu and Kashmir.
Tibet, however, is a reminder that attempts at forcible assimilation can backfire. That was also the lesson from Yugoslavia, a model of forced integration of nationalities. But once its central autocratic structure corroded, Yugoslavia violently fell apart. It will require a similar collapse or loosening of the central political authority in China for Tibet to reclaim independence. Until then, the Tibetans' best hope is to strive for the kind of autonomy Beijing has granted Hong Kong and Macao.
Those who gloomily see the battle for Tibetan independence as irretrievably lost forget that history has a way of wreaking vengeance on artificially created empires. The Central Asian states got independence on a platter, without having to wage a struggle. Who in Central Asia had dreamt of independence in mid-1991? Yet months later, the Soviet empire had unravelled. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania twice lost their independence to an expanding Russian empire, only to regain it each time due to a cataclysmic event - World War I, and the 1991 Soviet collapse. The post-1991 flight of Russians from large parts of Central Asia is a testament that the Sinicization of the Tibetan region is not an unalterable process. The Tibetan struggle, one of the longest and most-powerful resistance movements in modern world history, exposes China's Achilles heel. The reverberations from the latest bloodshed on the land of the pacifist Tibetan Buddhist culture will be felt long after Chinese security forces have snuffed out the last protest. Hu knows that the Tibetan uprising has the potential to embolden Han citizens in China to demand political freedoms - a campaign that would sound the death knell of the single-party rule. The last time he suppressed a Tibetan revolt, his then boss, Deng Xiaoping, had to borrow a leaf from Hu's Tibet book to crush pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square two months later. Hundreds were slain.
This year could prove a watershed in Chinese history. Just as the 1936 Berlin Olympics set the stage for Nazi Germany's collapse, the 2008 Beijing Games - Communist China's coming-out party, already besmirched by the Tibet crackdown - may be a spur to radical change in that country. Given that recurring protests are likely to greet the Olympic torch during its global tour of 135 cities, 2008 promises to be, at a minimum, the year Tibet came back into international spotlight.
interesting read
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Pioneer-Tibet-1April2008
<b>Roof rights of the world</b>
Sandhya Jain
On 26 October 1947, Shri Hari Singh, Maharajadhiraj of Jammu and Kashmir and Naresh Tatha Tibbet adi Deshadhipathi, executed the Instrument of Accession to India, which was accepted the next day by Mountbatten of Burma, Governor-General of India. Its most remarkable â and unspoken â aspect is that it pertains exclusively to Jammu & Kashmir and maintains inexplicable silence on Tibet.
Apparently, when the ruler merged the state with India, he created a âstrategic vacuumâ whereby Louis Mountbatten could help the West regain control of the roof of the world, won by Francis Younghusband with the most brutal massacre of Tibetans four decades before. Strangely, I have never seen any version of Indian history, diplomatic memoir, or strategic analysis that could explain how Hari Singh became âTibet Nareshâ. But it now seems apparent that Pakistan was created, not merely to give the West a foothold to overlook the oil-rich Gulf and Afghanistan, but to provide access to the Tibetan Plateau to checkmate the Soviet Union and Communist China.Â
Like Pakistan, Jammu and Kashmir was also a pawn in this game. It was not given to Jinnah as a large Pakistan would be too independent for British comfort; hence two wings, dependent on the West. The issue of Accession was wrenched from Sardar Patel and deliberately waffled by the omission of Tibet. Some months later, Pakistan invaded Kashmir and India was âpersuadedâ by Lord Mountbatten to take the dispute to the UN; this facilitated Pakistanâs retention of the Northern Areas, vital for control of Tibet. Â
It was only when the UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan was found altering posts along the ceasefire line that Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru realized he had been taken for a ride and ruled out plebiscite in Kashmir. Nehruâs tragic awareness that colonialism had made way â not for freedom, but neo-colonialism â may account for his otherwise inexplicable swerve towards USSR and China.
Western neo-colonialism would have been perceived in other world capitals also; hence Kremlinâs rush to bring the Baltic and Balkan nations under its sway. Non-alignment was the brainwave of Yugoslaviaâs Josip Tito, though he generously shared authorship with President Nasser of Egypt and Prime Minister Nehru to accommodate non-Communist nations in a non-Western orbit. Chairman Mao, possibly prodded by Moscow, probably decided to avert Western presence in Lhasa by occupying Tibet.
It was a wise precaution. Tibet is a large nation, with borders touching Myanmar, Bhutan, Nepal, Sikkim, India; its boundary with China is gigantic. No government in Beijing, regardless of ideology, could risk the presence of troops of hostile civilizations in such close proximity. Beijing built the Karakoram Highway courtesy Pakistan, not merely to outflank India, but to reach out to the West-oppressed Gulf and Afghanistan. Its friendship with Iran is also a reason for the unrest in Lhasa.
I think once Nehru realized that loss of critical Kashmiri territory made it impossible for India to access, let alone protect, Tibet, he acquiesced in a civilizational sister assuming this responsibility. It was realpolitik â the holding of Asian territory by Asian powers. Whatever the demerits of such occupation, the Sons of Heaven are more acceptable than the sons of Abraham.
Analysts say the current violence by Drepung Monastery monks coincided with the regular session of the All-China Assembly of Peopleâs Representatives, embarrassing Beijing and compelling it to use force. Simultaneous eruptions in Tibetan dominated regions of Gansu, Sichuan and Qinghai show the protests were coordinated. Andrei Areshev notes a parallel with the way western media covered Kosovo in 1998, before the NATO aggression âinformation comes from Tibetan émigrés in neighbouring countries and western human rights NGOs.Â
Interestingly, India has permitted two Israelis, Yahel Ben David, a Silicon Valley technocrat with Mossad training, and Michael Ginguld, with a background with international developmental agencies, to settle in Dharamshala and create in 2005 a Wi-Fi network connecting over 2000 computers with broadband internet access, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone services, and video conferencing. News about the unrest was disseminated through Tenzin Norgay, Personnel for UN Affairs at the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy, Dharamshala.
Tibet must be seen in the backdrop of the Dalai Lama accepting the Gold Medal of US Congress in October 2007. This parallels the award of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize to East Timorese Catholic Bishop Carlos Belo and secessionist émigré leader Jose Ramos Horta. The US Catholics Bishops Conference in 1998 asked Bishop Belo to make the promise of the Peace Prize a reality and sent a copy of this missive to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright! A few months later, riots broke out and UN announced a referendum on autonomy for East Timor; riots intensified and the August 1999 UN-sponsored referendum voted for independence.
Now, the Dalai Lama has obliged his American friends by calling for an international inquiry into the âcultural genocideâ and accusing New Delhi, his host for nearly five decades, of timidity towards China! Washingtonâs involvement goes back to CIAâs âsecret warâ after the annexation of Tibet in 1949 and Hamand and Amdo in 1956. In October 1957, Tibetans trained by the CIA were airlifted to Lhasa from Dhaka to make contact with local insurgents. The Lhasa uprising started soon afterwards and the Dalai Lama fled.
Hundreds of Tibetans were trained in Colorado. From 1958, CIA flew in weapons, ordnance and trained militants from a secret base in Thailand. By the early 1960s, CIA annually spent $1.7 million in Tibet, and $180,000 for the Dalai Lamaâs personal needs. If America succeeds in landing troops in Tibet, Moscow expects it to exert further pressure on Chinaâs unity, notably in Xiangyang-Uighur and Inner Mongolia.
Reports suggest the âFriends of Tibetâ met in Delhi in June 2007 and proposed a march of Tibetan exiles in India and Nepal to Lhasa to coincide with the opening of the Olympic Games. US under secretary of state Paula Dobryansky, involved in the coloured revolutions in former Soviet republics, met the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala last November. Recently, US Congress Speaker Nancy Pelosi met him. As he is functioning as a politician and engaging in politics on Indian soil, he should be asked to leave along with his people.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
China Alleges Tibetan 'Suicide Squads'
By AUDRA ANG â 1 hour ago
BEIJING (AP) â China has branded the Dalai Lama a "wolf in monk's robes" and his followers the "scum of Buddhism." It stepped up the rhetoric Tuesday, accusing the Nobel Peace laureate and his supporters of planning suicide attacks.
The Tibetan government-in-exile swiftly denied the charge, and the Bush administration rushed to the Tibetan Buddhist leader's defense, calling him "a man of peace."
"There is absolutely no indication that he wants to do anything other than have a dialogue with China on how to discuss the serious issues there," State Department spokesman Tom Casey said.
Wu Heping, spokesman for China's Ministry of Public Security, claimed searches of monasteries in the Tibetan capital had turned up a large cache of weapons. They included 176 guns, 13,013 bullets, 7,725 pounds of explosives, 19,000 sticks of dynamite and 350 knives, he said.
"To our knowledge, the next plan of the Tibetan independence forces is to organize suicide squads to launch violent attacks," Wu told a news conference. "They claimed that they fear neither bloodshed nor sacrifice."
Wu provided no details or evidence. He used the term "gan si dui," a rarely used phrase directly translated as "dare-to-die corps." The official English version of his remarks translated the term as "suicide squads."
Wu said police had arrested an individual who he claimed was an operative of the "Dalai Lama clique," responsible for gathering intelligence and distributing pamphlets calling for an uprising.
The suspect admitted to using code words to communicate with his contacts, including "uncle" for the Dalai Lama and "skirts" for the banned Tibetan snow lion flag, Wu said.
Beijing has repeatedly accused the Dalai Lama and his supporters of orchestrating violence in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. Protests which began peacefully there on the March 10 anniversary of a 1959 uprising against Chinese rule spiraled out of control four days later.
Chinese officials have put the death toll at 22, most of them Han Chinese; the government-in-exile says 140 Tibetans were killed.
China also says sympathy protests that spread to surrounding provinces are part of a campaign by the Dalai Lama to sabotage the Beijing Olympics and promote Tibetan independence.
The 72-year-old Dalai Lama has condemned the violence and denied any links to it, urging an independent international inquiry into the unrest.
"Tibetan exiles are 100 percent committed to nonviolence. There is no question of suicide attacks," Samdhong Rinpoche, prime minister of the government-in-exile in Dharmsala, India, said Tuesday. "But we fear that Chinese might masquerade as Tibetans and plan such attacks to give bad publicity to Tibetans."
Experts on terrorism and security risks facing Beijing and the Olympics have not cited any Tibet group as a threat.
Scholars said the claim of suicide squads was a calculated move by China allowing it to step up its crackdown in Tibetan areas.
"There is no evidence of support for any kind of violence against China or Chinese," said Dibyesh Anand, a Tibet expert at Westminster University in London.
Instead, Beijing is "portraying to the rest of China and the rest of the world: these people are basically irrational" and that there was no room for compromise, he said.
Tuesday's accusations could also further divide the Tibetan government-in-exile and other groups like the Tibetan Youth Congress, which has challenged the Dalai Lama's policy of nonviolence, Anand said.
"This is a way of pressuring the Dalai Lama to renounce Tibetans who have created violence," he said.
Andrew Fischer, a fellow at the London School of Economics who researches Chinese development policies in Tibetan areas of China, dismissed Wu's warnings as "completely ridiculous."
What China is trying to do "is justify this massive troop deployment, a massive crackdown on Tibetan areas and they're trying to justify intensification of hard-line policies," Fischer said.
Drawing from a deep historical reserve of angry rhetoric, Tibet's tough-talking Chinese Communist Party boss, Zhang Qingli, recently called the Dalai Lama a "wolf in monk's robes, a devil with a human face, but the heart of a beast" and deemed the current conflict a "life-and-death battle." State media has denounced protesting monks as the "scum of Buddhism."
The campaign against the Dalai Lama has been underscored in recent days with showings of decades-old propaganda films on state television portraying Tibetan society as cruel and primitive before the 1950 invasion by communist troops.
The escalation of the rhetoric to include claims of possible suicide attacks may also touch upon another sensitive issue for China's communist leadership â unrest in Xinjiang, a predominantly Muslim region to Tibet's north, and Beijing's tight security measures in the area.
Last month, state media reported that a woman had confessed to attempting to hijack and crash a Chinese passenger plane from Xinjiang in what officials say was part of a terror campaign by a radical Islamic independence group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. The reports said the woman was from China's Turkic Muslim Uighur minority.
While the United States has labeled the East Turkestan Islamic Movement a terrorist organization, the State Department alleges widespread abuses of the legal and educational systems by the communist authorities to suppress Uighur culture and religion.
Fischer said China has tried to change the "nonviolent, compassionate" image of Tibetans into one of violence and brutality to draw parallels to the pro-independence stance in Xinjiang.
"If they succeed in portraying them that way, then they can treat them the same way they treat Muslims in Xinjiang," he said.
Associated Press writers Christopher Bodeen and Anita Chang in Beijing and Ashwini Bhatia in Dharmsala, India, contributed to this report.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h5Z6bJw...f2NkhgD8VP82K03
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32 more die laughing at China's title "People's Republic of China"
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Nehru had recognised Tibet as part of China: Rajnath</b>
SATNA (MP): Giving a new twist to ongoing controversy over India's approach to the Tibet issue, BJP on Tuesday said that New Delhi had accepted Tibet as part of China in 1953 during the government of then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
"The (Atal Bihari) Vajpayee government did not make any mistake on the issue," BJP president Rajnath Singh said, while commenting on former Defence Minister George Fernandes' statement that the previous NDA government had recognised Tibet as part of China, committing an "error".
"It was Nehru who made a mistake on the Tibet issue in 1953... Jawaharlal Nehru had recognised Tibet as part of China in 1953 and the successive governments are following it," Singh told reporters here.
BJP has been critical of the UPA government's response to the recent unrest in Tibet, saying the approach had been "shameful".
"The government has been having a very weak stand on the Tibet issue only because of the pressure from the Left parties. It is an appeasement towards China and the government has no regard for the country's honour," Singh said.
Left parties have, however, said the government's policy on Tibet has been correct.
The BJP chief condemned the Chinese crackdown on the protesters in Tibet and asked Beijing to show "maximum restraint" in handling the situation there.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<b>Protest erupts in China's Muslim-dominated area</b>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Protest-erupts-in-Chinas-Muslimdominated-area/291536/
Wednesday, April 02, 2008 at 01:39:23
New York, April 2: <b>Several hundred ethnic Uyugurs have staged protests in China's restive Muslim-dominated Xinjiang region following the custodial death of a prominent Uyugur businessman and philanthropist, media reported in New York.</b>
Several hundred people were taken into custody after protests were held at two locations in Khotan prefecture in Khotan city on March 23-24 and Qaraqash county on March 23, witnesses were quoted as saying by the US government funded Radio Free Asia (RFA).
<b>Sources reported that the demonstrations followed the death in custody of a wealthy Uyugur jade trader and philanthropist, Mutallip Hajim, 38.
Police returned his body to relatives March 3 after two months in custody, saying he had died in hospital of heart trouble.
The unrest comes two weeks after ethnic Tibetans in neighbouring provinces staged protests against China, prompting a deadly crackdown and countless arrests.</b>
In both areas, RFA said, <b>the protesters were demanding that authorities scrap a bid to ban head scarves, stop using torture to suppress Uyugur demands for greater autonomy, and release all political prisoners.
In Khotan, it said, the crowd of several hundred protesters comprised mainly women.</b>
Hotel employees said police produced lists of alleged protesters, mainly women, and told them to report to police if anyone using tried to register as a guest under any of those names.
It quoted sources as saying that there were six casualties but gave no details. However, it said police in Khotan city and its Chinbagh district, contacted by telephone, denied any protests had taken place.
In Qaraqash, a police officer on duty told it that protesters there "peacefully dispersed."
"There were no injuries or deaths, and we persuaded the people gathered for the protest to leave," the officer was quoted as saying.
<b>Uyugurs, who number more than 16 million, constitute a distinct, Turkic-speaking, Muslim minority in northwestern China and Central Asia.
China, the radio noted, has waged a campaign over the last decade against what it says are violent separatists and Islamic extremists who aim to establish an independent state in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which shares a border with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Mongolia.</b>
In March, Chinese authorities announced that they had foiled a plot by Uyugur terrorists targeting the Beijing Olympics.
In the early 1990s, Uyugurs in Xinjiang launched large-scale riots, attacking and killing Chinese officials.
Chinese authorities alleged that 162 people were killed and 440 injured in the riots that prompted a harsh crackdown.
After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, Beijing took the position that Uyugur groups were connected with al-Qaeda and that one group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), was a "major component of the terrorist network headed by Osama bin Laden." The ETIM has denied that charge.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Came in email:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Enclosed herewith please find the URL for the Petition to President George W. Bush to Boycott 2008 Beijing Olympics.
PETITION TO GEORGE W. BUSH TO BOYCOTT 2008 BEIJING OLYMPICS FOR SIGNATURE PLEASE<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
NPR showed Tibetians in India asking for Indians to speak up for Tibet. Captain of Indian soccer team to olympics was asked to carry torch across part of India (en route to PRC). He said no. <!--emo&:bhappy--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/b_woot.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='b_woot.gif' /><!--endemo-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Anxious China reaches out to India again </b>
Pioneer.com
Shobori Ganguli | New Delhi
Now takes up torch safety matter at ministerial level
With the Chinese going on a diplomatic overdrive with India on Tibet, Wednesday witnessed yet another attempt by Beijing to reach out to New Delhi on the issue. Â
<b>In a telephone conversation, a call which the MEA specified was made at the "request of the Chinese side," Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi reiterated China's appreciation of "the steps taken by the Indian side to ensure safety and security of Chinese diplomatic and consular establishments and Chinese citizens in India." The Minister also expressed the hope that "India will take the necessary measures to ensure that the passage of the Olympic Torch is a success."</b>
The latest communication between New Delhi and Beijing is a firm indicator of China's growing apprehension that the passage of the torch would occasion large-scale protests by irate Tibetans in the Capital, which would naturally be flashed across the international media. That Beijing's worry is increasing by the day is apparent from the fact that after initially communicating its concerns to India's Ambassador to China, the Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo called National Security Adviser MK Narayanan on Sunday and briefed him on the "violent crimes" in Lhasa. The communication has now been upgraded to the Foreign Minister level.
While the Chinese are indeed in an international tight spot over Tibet and human rights issues and their potential to rob the Beijing Olympics of its sheen, India has made it more than apparent that it will not join the global, primarily western, chorus of condemnation of the Chinese.
On his part, therefore, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee has reiterated the Indian Government's position that the "Tibet Autonomous Region is part of the territory of the People's Republic of China." Underlining the Dalai Lama's position as a religious and spiritual leader, Mukherjee told Yang that his Government "does not allow Tibetans to engage in anti-China political activities in India." Yang acknowledged this position with appreciation.
Ever since violence erupted in Lhasa and spread to other parts of China, New Delhi has been extremely cautious in its approach to the issue in order not to allow a "sense of injury" to creep into bilateral relations. With India-China trade expected to cross the $40 billion mark this financial year, China is already India's largest trading partner displacing the United States.
Added to this is the trilateral effort by India, China, and Russia to invest the region with greater strategic strength.
Therefore, even though India is home to the Tibetan Government-in-exile, the Indian Government at various levels has repeatedly said China has a dialogue mechanism in place with the Dalai Lama "which does not require India's mediation." In a nutshell, India has sought to draw a sharp wedge between its support to the Tibetans' right to spiritual and religious freedom and the political, economic, and strategic expedience of conducting seamless diplomacy with China.
To that end the Dalai Lama has been categorically conveyed New Delhi's view that while he is India's "honoured guest with full religious and spiritual freedom," his followers must not indulge in any political activity that will affect India's relations with China. This was once again communicated to Yang by Mukherjee on Wednesday.
Clearly, both China and India are eager to keep sensitive issues out of the way when the two sides meet at the India-Russia-China Foreign Ministers' trilateral in Moscow middle of May. Mukherjee is also slated to visit Beijing for a bilateral meeting early June
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Why China had to make call? Moron Singh will protect torch, he will carry everywhere along with Rahul baba and whole gang of commies.
China should send some change to PMO for channa for energy.
Indians should withdraw from carrying the torch and also try to disrupt proceedings. Moron can protect torch all he wants..But the signal needs to be sent. That Moron does not reflect people.
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