Tibet Special Assembly Affirms His Holiness, the Dalai Lama's Middle Way

Let's keep our thoughts focused on clarity and truth for the Tibetan cause. The future will support an honest assessment of the issues, and rangzen will prevail!

Tibet Government-in-Exile Breaks Off Talks With China (Update2)

By James Rupert

Nov. 22 (Bloomberg) -- The Tibetan government-in-exile, headed by the Dalai Lama, decided to break off stalled negotiations with China over Tibet’s future, leaders of the exile parliament said today.

Dolma Gyari

The exile government, based in northern India, “will not send envoys for further contacts” with China after eight rounds of talks failed to produce results, said Dolma Gyari, the deputy speaker of the legislature.

Future policy in the Tibetan campaign for greater autonomy from China will be determined by the Dalai Lama and will always be nonviolent, she and other parliament leaders said in the town of Dharamsala.

The Tibetan exiles’ declaration of no confidence in China as a negotiating partner “probably reflects an increasing erosion of faith among Tibetans inside China as well,” said Robbie Barnett, a professor of Tibetan studies at Columbia University in New York. “That will represent a major political challenge for the Chinese government,” he said.

The decision to end talks was made by a “special general meeting” of more than 500 delegates summoned by the Dalai Lama, 73, after China rejected his proposal for “genuine autonomy” in the latest set of talks this month in Beijing.

The meeting endorsed the Dalai Lama’s “Middle Way” policy toward China, which specifies a nonviolent campaign to win autonomy under the Chinese constitution for Tibet, rather than independence.

Karma Choephel

Self-Determination, Autonomy

Gyari and parliament speaker Karma Choephel summarized the decisions for journalists after the close of the week-long meeting, and declined to answer questions.

The meeting reflected growing frustration among Tibetans with their inability to loosen China’s 47-year-long rule of their Central Asian mountain homeland.

“Quite a number” of delegates said Tibetans should sharpen their demand to include self-determination, rather than autonomy, if China does not respond to their aspirations “in the near future,” Choephel said.

A call for self-determination would effectively demand full independence, say Tibetan activists such as Tenzin Tsundue, 33, a delegate to the meeting. “The demand for autonomy is a policy, but eventually, Tibet must become independent.”

[...] The exile Tibetan authorities say more than 200 people died in the [March 2008] protests and the subsequent crackdown by Chinese soldiers and police. The crackdown continues eight months later, with more than 100 people having been sentenced to prison, said Tashi Choephel, a researcher with the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy.

“I have to accept failure, things are not improving in Tibet,” the Dalai Lama told journalists on Nov. 3. Since last year, that sense of failure has spread in the Tibetan exile community, spawning a Tibetan People’s Uprising Movement that calls for “direct action to end China’s illegal and brutal occupation of our country.”

To contact the reporter on this story: James Rupert in Islamabad at jrupert3@bloomberg.net.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601091&sid=aoyBNv5NLCVk&refer=india

Defending Tibet's Identity

The increase of resistance by Tibetans since March can't be simplified into a dialogue only about religion. This report points to the economic and cultural devastation brought to ethnic Tibetans by the Chinese. Of course, reasonable people can understand why any group would not want to become subservient to another by threat of imprisonment or death. So I ask again, where is the left?
Tibetans see 'Han invasion' as spurring violence
By Tim Johnson McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Friday, March 28, 2008
BEIJING — To hear Tibetans tell it, a rising tide of Han Chinese migrants is flooding into their homeland, diluting its character and taking many of the jobs
Authorities offer a different story. They say that Tibetans looking to stir up trouble are exaggerating the magnitude of the Han Chinese migration. They say that ethnic relations in Tibet are harmonious, and that political motives underlie the March 14 rioting. Even if more Han Chinese are moving to Tibet, they say, it's lifting the fortunes of the whole region.
"Their business activities have greatly enriched and promoted Tibet's economic development," said Tanzen Lhundrup, a scholar with the government-financed China Tibetology Research Center in Beijing.
[...] The unrest is now thought to be bigger in scale and more widespread than the late 1980s social strife that led to the declaration of martial law in Tibet.
[...] Han migration into Tibet began early in the decade and speeded up in 2006 with completion of a $4.2 billion railway across permafrost on the Tibetan Plateau that linked the remote "Land of the Snows" with the rest of the nation for the first time.
"It's been accelerating at a dramatic rate since 2000," said Ronald Schwartz, a Tibet scholar at Memorial University in St. John's, Canada. He said that Han Chinese stayed in urban areas. "If you go out to the villages, you won't see Chinese people. You only see them in Lhasa, Shigatse and the cities."
[...] Lhundrup […] said that supporters of the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, had latched on to the migrant issue as one of their banners for independence.
"The issue of migration into Tibet is an excuse by the Dalai clique to serve its own political purposes," Lhundrup charged.
Schwartz noted, though, that the majority of Han settlers and merchants in Tibet retain residences elsewhere, so they aren't tallied in official numbers.
[...] Tibetans in exile say that the flood of migrants dilutes Tibet's distinct cultural identity. They say the ethnic Han bring development but also new lifestyles that weaken — and even defile — values in the Tibetan capital, which brims with monasteries and temples.
"Lhasa is a holy place. You never heard about these brothels, karaoke bars and discotheques before," said Tashi Choephel, a researcher at the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy in Dharamsala, India, the seat of Tibet's government in exile.
[...] While commerce draws Han Chinese to Tibet's cities, Beijing also has pumped billions of dollars into the region, creating new government jobs.
Tibetans say they're strongly disadvantaged in getting those jobs because they don't speak Mandarin Chinese well, and that creates resentment against the Han.
"They are not tied into economic networks. They don't have contacts to get the jobs that have dropped into Lhasa," Schwartz said.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/staff/tim_johnson/story/31913.html