Tibetans' suicidal protest

It is the duty of the state to instruct Tibetans to become civilised, hygienic modern subjects, ready to migrate to distant factories, just like the hundreds of millions of peasants throughout China.

Tibetans have always had broadacre land for their yaks, sheep and goats: a necessity in the coldest habitable climate on earth. They are no keener to be dispossessed of their land than were Australian Aborigines. In my experience, after working as a development policy consultant with Tibetans for many years, they certainly want modern education, health care, new livelihood opportunities, but not at a cost of having to become Chinese, with the Tibetan language having no public uses at all.

That is how it is in China today. It would be impossible to address an envelope for delivery across Tibet, in Tibetan, with any hope that it would ever arrive. The Tibetan language is restricted to the home, and has no economic utility. Tibetan Buddhism and the lamas revered by Tibetans as their wisest and best educated leaders are rigidly excluded from playing any public role. These are facets of what is packed into those two potent words: cultural genocide.

The Dalai Lama, in exile in India for 50 years, meets daily with Tibetans who manage to cross the Himalayas to escape this institutionalised, systematic contempt. Most of them seek a genuine spiritual life as a nun or monk, uninterrupted by endless political campaigns and “thought work”: sessions to rectify minds by forcing young monastics to denounce their most revered Buddhist meditation teachers.

Daily, he hears at first hand the grinding cost of China’s brittle superiority complex, its insistence that it knows at all times what is best for all Tibetans. After pouring out their grief to the Dalai Lama, they leave, to join one of the hundreds of Tibetan monasteries rebuilt in exile in India.

The Dalai Lama is left with the tragedy of an entire people. Tibetans just beg to differ. They prefer to seek happiness within rather than exclusively without. The Dalai Lama’s term, encapsulating myriad insults, is cultural genocide. When he puts those two words together, people around the world are now listening. Tibet may soon fade from the headlines as the apparatus of coercion excludes all cameras. In the absence of news crews, cultural genocide will soon be relaunched as a life or death struggle against Tibetan ways of thinking and being.