Quake in China reverses fortunes for dissonant Tibet voices
By Elisabeth Rosenthal
Thursday, May 22, 2008
As the Dalai Lama toured European capitals this week, the British prime minister closed the door to 10 Downing St. and agreed to meet him only as part of an "interfaith dialogue." In Germany, most government officials declined to talk with him at all.
It was a precipitous comedown from just a few weeks ago, when Tibetans and their supporters unexpectedly upstaged Beijing’s elaborate global torch relay and catapulted Tibet’s cause to the forefront of the world’s human rights agenda. The German and British leaders let it be known then that they would skip the opening ceremony of the Olympics.
The shift is, partly, tectonic. An earthquake in Sichuan Province killed more than 51,000 Chinese, evoking an outpouring of global sympathy for China and turning it overnight from victimizer to victim.
Tibetan opponents of Beijing, like advocates of several other leading human rights causes, have been consigned once again to play David to China’s Goliath, struggling to compete with its growing diplomatic and economic clout worldwide.
But the Tibetan movement has also struggled to stay in the limelight because it remains a fractious and informal hodgepodge of cultural, religious and political groups. It is united by deep emotional sympathy rather than by organization or cash. Increasingly, there are even differences over how closely to hew to the Dalai Lama’s vision of nonviolent diplomacy seeking something short of an independent Tibet.
"The protests this spring put Tibet at the forefront of human rights issues - they accomplished a lot - but I think the interest can’t go further right now," said John Kamm, a leading human rights advocate whose Dui Hua Foundation, based in San Francisco, has helped free prominent Chinese political prisoners.
"Now the Chinese people are in a state of mourning," he said.
"I’m not suggesting that we stop putting pressure on China, but we should use judgment in where and when to direct the fire."
That leaves Tibetan exiles and their Western supporters in a quandary. The Olympic torch, now back on Chinese soil, is scheduled to arrive in Tibet in just three weeks, an act that Tibetan activists once considered a potential rallying point against Chinese rule in what Beijing calls the Tibet Autonomous Region.
Instead, Tibetan groups have been forced to lobby quietly. They are asking board members of the International Olympic Committee as well as of corporate Olympic sponsors like Coca-Cola to consider withdrawing support for the torch relay unless China cancels the Tibet segment, a campaign that shows few signs of success.
Eager for allies, some Tibetan groups have joined hands with Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual and exercise movement that Beijing outlawed as a cult. Though Falun Gong does not enjoy the cachet among politicians and celebrities that Tibet does, it has money and a tight, if secret, organization. Tibetan groups have joined in a number of events sponsored by Falun Gong this year as part of its human rights torch relay.
At one time, overseas Tibetans were notable for attracting more high-profile supporters, like the actor Richard Gere, as well as for the widespread appeal of Tibetan Buddhism. The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader in exile, has been an energetic, outgoing public face and spokesman.
The outbreak of riots in Tibet in March - Tibetans say they were spontaneous, and Beijing says they were carefully orchestrated - prompted a heavy Chinese crackdown and set off sympathy demonstrations in London, Paris and San Francisco. At times, the Tibetans appeared to hijack the Olympics for their own cause.
Pro-Tibet groups have become more emboldened, forming new alliances and finding themselves deluged with volunteers and donations. About 200 new chapters of Students for a Free Tibet have been started in the past six months, in places like Estonia, the Czech Republic and the U.S. state of Montana.
But sustaining that momentum has been difficult. "It is a challenge to keep people engaged," said Lhadon Tethong, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet, which operates on a budget of about $400,000 a year from a ramshackle office above a dry cleaners in New York. "There’s no substitute for China bringing the Olympic torch into your neighborhood." The movement is also grossly overmatched. Even in the midst of the quake tragedy, the Chinese government has ramped up attacks on the Dalai Lama as well as international pro-Tibet groups, charging them with collusion. On Wednesday, Chinese officials warned Germany against "conniving" with the Dalai Lama, who they said was promoting anti-China separatist activities on German soil.
Beijing also took steps to defuse the movement by inviting the Dalai Lama to resume talks. The discussions have continued off and on for years without producing any concrete result. But Beijing’s decision to resume them after the Tibetan unrest met the main demand of the United States and European powers, which have since toned down expression of concern about Tibet.
Beijing has not relaxed its attacks, however. In recent weeks, the Chinese state news media have been featuring stories accusing foreign groups like the International Committee for Tibet and the Trace Foundation, based in New York and run by George Soros’s daughter, of organizing global protests and fomenting unrest in Tibet.
Trace, which finances middle-school education and health care projects in Tibet in cooperation with Chinese partners, has protested and says the allegation places its Tibetan staff in danger.
Likewise, Chinese embassies have become far more active in mobilizing Chinese studying in Europe and the United States though Chinese students and scholars associations, which exist at almost every Western university and often receive financing from the Chinese government.
Despite Beijing’s allegations that the Dalai Lama and others have colluded against it, the Tibet movement in the West is not nearly so focused, those with long experience in it say.
"There is a level of organization, but it’s certainly not the type of organization that China portrays it to be," said Mary Beth Markey, of the International Campaign for Tibet in Washington, whose primary function is lobbying governments but does nothing in the way of direct action.
In fact, there is even little consensus on long-term goals. The Dalai Lama, who lives in exile in Dharamsala, India, says he would settle for increased autonomy for Tibet within China and has steadfastly cautioned against confronting the Chinese in Tibet.
While the Dalai Lama is revered, groups like Students for a Free Tibet and Free Tibet Campaign in London now work toward more radical goals, reflecting the coming of age of young Tibetans-in-exile who mix the values of Europe and the United States with those of their ancestral home.
"In ’87 a lot of the talent was still in Dharamsala, but by 1999, most of those people had migrated to Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.," said Patrick French, a former executive of the Free Tibet Campaign and author of "Tibet, Tibet."
"In the West, such people started lobbying and taking action," he said. "They represent an American version of how the Tibet problem should be solved."
With its guerrilla style "actions," Students for a Free Tibet has little in common with the far more established International Campaign for Tibet, which shares a staid Washington townhouse with the Dalai Lama’s representative to the United States.
In reality, even the movement’s most activist organizations seem often to have only tenuous control over the attention surrounding Tibet. Along the torch’s route in Paris, the vast majority of people who gathered to protest had checked the route on the Internet and come on their own. Organized protests by Tibet groups largely missed the mark or were lost in the crowd. That included two Tibetan nuns famous for their protests while in prison in China, who the International Campaign for Tibet had brought to both London and Paris for interviews. They ended up standing silently, lost in the boisterous crowd.
Still, the Chinese are taking no chances, carefully closing all doors to discord.
The government is refusing applications from climbers for the Chinese approach to Everest. Most projects by nongovernmental organizations are now on hold; international meetings for more than 50 people are banned, even in Beijing.
Matt Whitticase, an officer of the Free Tibet Campaign, said there had been a "pretty systematic effort to undermine our work in recent weeks." The group’s server has been deluged with "Trojan" e-mail messages, which spread a virus that allows outsiders to read campaign members’ e-mail messages and to send out further messages in their names.
John Kamm has been negotiating with the Chinese to offer amnesty to some political prisoners in honor of the Olympics, a project that is now on hold "during the relief efforts."
But he hopes that the earthquake may provide a face-saving exit for China from a torch relay that has often been more embarrassment than celebration. Already, the relay has recently been scaled back in response to the disaster.
"The Dalai Lama said he’s praying for the victims," said Kamm, noting that many of the hard-hit areas had large ethnic Tibetan populations. "Maybe this will give the government the opportunity to cancel the relay in Tibet."
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