Day four

On the plane out of Lhasa, I sit next to a Nepali businessman who frequently visits Lhasa to buy shoes. He puts them in containers to be taken by lorry to Nepal, where most of them are re-exported to India. He has his complaints: about the duties he has to pay at the border, and the snow that sometimes blocks traffic. But of the road from Lhasa to Nepal, he is full of praise. It once took three days by lorry, he says. Now it is a day and a half. “China is so developed,” he says wistfully, looking out of the window at the ribbons of light marking highways and city streets below. He has little positive to say about Nepal and its roads.

China has been pouring money into its infrastructure in the past few years, and—from a business perspective at any rate—Tibet has been a big beneficiary. On my last visit to Lhasa, in 2008, I went by train. The railway line, Tibet’s first such link with the Chinese interior, had been opened just two years earlier and is one of the country’s most spectacular engineering accomplishments. Critics of Chinese rule in Tibet condemn its impact on the environment and the encouragement it gives to a flood of immigrants from the rest of China. But as a feat, it amazes: the $4.2 billion line crosses higher terrain than any other in the world, including permafrost—which requires elaborate ground-cooling measures to protect the rails from changes in temperature. More:

The world’s most remote place is on the Tibetan plateau (34.7°N, 85.7°E).

From here, it is a three-week trip to the cities of Lhasa or Korla – one day by car and the remaining 20 on foot.

Researchers at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, and the World Bank, have created a model – and a series of maps — to calculate how long it would take to travel from a given point, to the nearest city of 50,000 people or more by rail, road or river.

The brighter an area, the closer it is to a big city; the darker it is, the further out it is.

Check out the New Scientist‘s gallery of 11 maps. [via Fast Company]

Urgelling Monastery, Arunachal Pradesh, India, the birthplace of the Sixth Dalai Lama

Urgelling, India – He drank wine, cavorted with women and wrote poetry that spoke of life’s earthly pleasures.

He was the Sixth Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetans and reincarnation of Chenrezig, a deity embodying compassion.

He would sneak out of the Potala Palace in the heart of Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, for midnight trysts. He renounced his monastic vows in the middle of his stewardship of Tibet. He was later kidnapped by Mongolian warriors allied to the Manchu Chinese court and died in captivity about three centuries ago at the age of 33 – or so one story goes. Another tells of his winning his freedom and wandering the Tibetan lands as an ascetic.

So goes the legend of Tsangyang Gyamtso, one of the most popular historical figures among Tibetans and the most colorful of the long line of Dalai Lamas. His poetry is among the most iconic in Tibetan literature. More:

[Image: Map / NYT; Monastery: Brahmaputra Tours]

In 1976 the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, tripping on a strong dose of yajé, wrote about the ‘Tibet of his imagination’ — a psychedelic account of a secret, shadowy, white paradise up in the Himalayas. Like Ginsberg, the Tibet of my own imagination, spurred by writers from Hedin to Harrer to Hopkirk, had always conjured up a powerful image of Eastern mysticism set against the great brooding mass of the Potala — a place of pure spirit, unsullied by greed or personal ambition.

Five minutes into Lhasa, that illusion lay shattered.

As our van rolled onto a smooth-as-silk eight-lane-wide boulevard, my Chinese interpreter excitedly gushed: “This is our Lhasa.” Outside, glistening glass-and-chrome buildings, plush hotels and supermarkets with bright neon signage floated by. Bulky Prados purred down the uniform grid of roads that go off in all directions and chic women and strutting businessmen dotted the sidewalks and street corners. It was a new landscape where Lhasa meets Las Vegas — minus the buzz and with an unmistakable touch of Chinese kitsch.

more

The first part of our high speed – even more highly managed – tour of Tibet is nearing its end. Everest is at last in sight, and we should reach it sometime on Monday.

The smiles on the faces of the Beijing Olympic Committee representatives say it all.

Despite the best efforts of us international journalists to find someone to express a slightly pro-Tibetan thought, we have not found anybody.

Having been blocked from going to the capital Lhasa, we have been forced into a strict routine of brisk starts in the morning followed by a long day of driving, with pauses for “attractions” en route.

More:

Click here for the second instalment of the diary:

China’s Communist Party has launched a political education drive in Tibet’s restive capital, Lhasa, vowing a long campaign to attack pro-independence sentiment and support for the Dalai Lama.

China has blamed recent unrest in Tibetan areas on a “clique” of the Dalai’s followers pressing for independence and seeking to upset Beijing’s preparations for the August Olympics. Over a month has passed since monk-led protests against government control gave way to deadly anti-Chinese rioting in Lhasa on March 14, but security forces have wrestled with continued unrest there and across other Tibetan areas. 

In a bid to reinforce control in Lhasa, Party authorities have launched an education drive focused on officials and Party members, the official Tibet Daily reported on Monday.

more

The Chinese men in blue tracksuits were horribly familiar. Although they were dressed like athletes, their robotic movements, blank faces, swivel eyes and rough, menacing style reminded me of the secret policemen I had to avoid when I was in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, some years ago.

Last Sunday, they surrounded Konnie Huq as she ran with the Olympic flame through the streets of London, ordering her to hold the torch higher and shoving protesters and British policemen out of the way.

Lord Coe, the London Olympics chief, was overheard describing the so-called “torch attendants” as “thugs”.

He said: “They tried to push me out of the way three times. They are horrible.”

more

[Pic: Konnie Huq is surrounded by 'thugs' as she carries the Olympic Torch in London last week]

Shanghai: In life, the five young women who burned to death in a Chinese clothing store during rioting in Tibet on March 14 were not the types who would make headlines.

One received permission from her family to follow her fiancé to Lhasa; another sent home most of her wages to support 13 relatives; several sent text messages in the minutes before they died warning loved ones to stay indoors as violence erupted.

In death, though, the women are being treated as martyrs. The Chinese government has been using their deaths to support its version of what happened on “3/14,” when Tibet saw its worst day of violence in 20 years. In that version, broadcast by state-controlled media, ethnic Tibetans took to Lhasa’s streets, unprovoked, burning and looting shops that were owned by Han Chinese.

More:

Human Rights Watch speaks up for Tibet

Human Rights Watch has asked the government of Nepal to stop its arbitrary detention and ‘intimidation tactics’ against peaceful Tibetan protestors, including threats to deport them to China. Read that report here.

Meanwhile, a note circulated by ‘some Chinese intellectuals’, including dissidents and writers, has called for an independent United Nations investigation into Tibet. The note supports the Dalai Lama’s appeal for peace and includes 11 other suggestions for solving the Tibet situation.

Finally, HRW has called upon China to investigate its crackdown before the Olympic torch passes through Tibet. It has asked the government to account for those dead or missing and it wants Lhasa to be reopened to media and to monitors.

The Olympic torch, which was lit today in Olympia, Greece, should not go through Tibet unless the Chinese government agrees to an independent investigation into the recent unrest in Tibetan areas, Human Rights Watch said today.

The Olympic torch is set to pass through the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, on June 20-21. Chinese government officials have confirmed their plans to continue despite the ongoing protests and crackdown across ethnic Tibetan areas.

more

For a backgrounder and a complete HRW list of Tibet reports, go here.

[PIC: Monks and protestors rally on a street in Labrang, Gansu province, March 14. Reuters]

Last November, a couple of weeks after the Dalai Lama received a Congressional Gold Medal from President Bush, his old Land Rover went on sale on eBay. Sharon Stone, who once introduced the Tibetan leader at a fundraiser as “Mr. Please, Please, Please Let Me Back Into China!” (she meant Tibet), announced the auction on YouTube, promising the prospective winner of the 1966 station wagon, “You’ll just laugh the whole time that you’re in it!” The bidding closed at more than eighty thousand dollars. The Dalai Lama, whom Larry King, on CNN, once referred to as a Muslim, has also received the Lifetime Achievement award of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. He is the only Nobel laureate to appear in an advertisement for Apple and guest-edit French Vogue. Martin Scorsese and Brad Pitt have helped commemorate his Lhasa childhood on film. He gave a lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, in Washington, D.C., in 2005. This spring, in Germany, he will speak on human rights and globalization. For someone who claims to be “a simple Buddhist monk,” the Dalai Lama has a large carbon footprint and often seems as ubiquitous as Britney Spears.

more

A Monk’s Struggle

In Time magazine, Pico Iyer’s startlingly intimate account of the Dalai Lama and what he stands for

“Since China wants to join the world community,” the 14th Dalai Lama said as I was traveling across Japan with him for a week last November, “the world community has a real responsibility to bring China into the mainstream.” The whole world stands to gain, he pointed out, from a peaceful and unified China—not least the 6 million Tibetans in China and Chinese-occupied Tibet. “But,” he added, “genuine harmony must come from the heart. It cannot come from the barrel of a gun.”

I thought of those measured and forgiving words—the Dalai Lama still prays for his “Chinese brothers and sisters” every morning and urges Tibetans to learn Chinese so they can talk with their new rulers, not fight with them—as reports trickled out of Tibet of freedom demonstrations that have led to some of the bloodiest confrontations in the region since similar protests preceded a brutal crackdown in the late 1980s. The violence has left 99 people dead, according to Tibetan exile groups; the Chinese government says 13 “innocents” were killed in the riots. Soon after monks began demonstrating in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, Chinese forces moved to contain the marchers, but the disturbances spread to other Tibetan cities, and their causes clearly remain unresolved. Working out how best to avoid further embarrassment as they prepare for the start of the Olympic-torch relay on March 25 will be a tricky challenge for China’s rulers. As a diplomat told TIME, “They need to get this under control, but to do so without a lot of brutality.”

more

In the chaotic hours after Lhasa erupted March 14, Tibetans rampaged through the city’s old quarter, waving steel scabbards and burning or looting Chinese shops. Clothes, souvenirs and other tourist trinkets were dumped outside and set afire as thick gray smoke darkened the midday sky. Tibetan fury, uncorked, boiled over.

Foreigners and Lhasa residents who witnessed the violence were stunned by what they saw, and by what they did not see: the police. Riot police officers fled after an initial skirmish and then were often nowhere to be found. Some Chinese shopkeepers begged for protection.

“The whole day I didn’t see a single police officer or soldier,” said an American woman who spent hours navigating the riot scene. “The Tibetans were just running free.”

More:

And in Nepal…

From Nepali Times:

In scenes not witnessed since April 2006, police brutally put down rallies and candlelit vigils by monks in Kathmandu. This young monk (above) was hit on his head with a bamboo stick wielded by riot police outside the United Nations office in Pulchok on Monday.

The UN’s human rights office in Kathmandu condemned what it said was the “excessive use of force” by Nepal’s police to disperse the demonstrations.

The protests have been part of an international campaign by Tibetans in exile and their supporters to highlight Chinese crackdowns in Lhasa and elsewhere. The rallies came in the run-up to the Olympics in Beijing in August. The unrest in Tibet has already hurt Nepal’s tourism industry since Kathmandu is the jump off point for Lhasa. Hundreds of Sherpas are also employed by expeditions climbing the Himalaya from the north.

More:

This uprising has many uniquely Tibetan characteristics. At street level, a favourite item seized from Chinese shops was toilet-rolls – hardly the usual target of looters. Not that Tibetans, over millennia, have felt much need for the paper rolls, or even for the basics of the Chinese cuisine such as soy sauce. What the Tibetans did with the loo paper was to hurl it over power lines, instantly making Lhasa, and other Tibetan towns, Tibetan again. Right across the 25% of China that is ethnically and culturally Tibetan, the unrolled toilet paper looks like wind horses, the white silken khadag [or kata] scarf with which Tibetans greet and bless each other. As all Tibetans know, they carry their message on the wind: victory to the gods!

That is what this revolt is about: making Tibet Tibetan once more. The white scarves also protected Tibetan shopkeepers from attack as the streets filled, for a short and costly moment of freedom, with Tibetans smashing the businesses of immigrant Chinese traders.

More:

In Tibetan areas, parallel worlds now collide

From International Herald Tribune:

GABU VILLAGE, China: For farmers whose lives in this traditionally Tibetan area revolve around its Buddhist temple, an aluminum smelter that belches gray smoke in the distance is less a symbol of material progress than a daily reminder of Chinese disregard.

“Look at the walls of our temple, they have all gone grimy with the smoke that pollutes our air,” said a 40-year-old Buddhist peasant named Caidan. The big factory, said a man sitting next to him, benefits only members of the Han Chinese majority.

“Tibetans get the low-income and the hard-labor jobs,” the man said. The Han, he said, “are all paid as technicians, even though some of them really don’t know anything.”

More:

The government of Tibet Autonomous Region said Friday there had been enough evidence to prove that the recent sabotage in Lhasa was “organized, premeditated and masterminded” by the Dalai clique.

The violence, involving beating, smashing, looting and burning, has disrupted the public order and jeopardized people’s lives and property, an official with the regional government said.

The sabotage has aroused indignation of and is strongly condemned by the people of all ethnic groups in Tibet, he said in an interview with Xinhua.

Here’s the link, but you’ll have to register for a clearer image of the page.

In India, 100 exiled Tibetans are stopped from marching to Tibet from Dharamsala, home of the Dalai Lama. Undeterred, they say they will continue. In Kathmandu, police lob tear gas shells, baton-charge protestors outside the Chinese embassy and arrest 130 activists. And in Lhasa, dozens of monks are arrested for protesting peacefully. Nirmala Carvalho in Asianews.it reports.

On the Tibetan question, diplomacy is once again winning out over respect for human rights. Peaceful demonstrations organised yesterday by Tibetans in exile and in their home country have been blocked, and have led to the arrest of dozens of monks. The demonstrators wanted, in various ways, to commemorate the anniversary of the repression of the Tibetan revolt against the occupying Chinese army in 1959.

In Dharamsala in northern India, agents blocked hundreds of Tibetans who had set out on a “return march” to Tibet. They intended to arrive in early August, in protest against the Chinese occupation of the Himalayan region and against the holding of the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing.

more

In BBC News, Tim Luard takes a look at Tibet’s political future

Many Tibetans believe that only the Dalai Lama can save Tibet from extinction.

But even a Dalai Lama is mortal. And they are deeply anxious about what will happen when the present one dies. For Tibetans, he is not just a Buddhist monk, a god and a king – the latest in a centuries’-long line of spiritual and temporal rulers – but a larger-than-life symbol of their unique civilisation.

For the past 50 years, from his sanctuary on the other side of the Himalayas, the 14th Dalai Lama has kept alive their dreams of survival as a separate people.

more