EXILED UIGHUR LEADER SPEAKS OUT AGAINST HAN CHINESE
As tensions in Xinjiang escalate, Uighur leader, Rabiya Kadeer, speaks out from Washington, D.C.
As tensions in Xinjiang escalate, Uighur leader, Rabiya Kadeer, speaks out from Washington, D.C.
Below, I've listed the last three of my Ten Ways to Free Tibet. For the other seven, see the previous two postings.
In my next posting, I’ll offer an overview of the logic behind these “Ten Ways to Free Tibet.”
Before I list the next four ways you can free Tibet, let me say something about the first three that I included in my last posting.
And now, the next four ways that you can save Tibet.
4. Come to terms with Jamyang Norbu. One of Tibet’s leading intellectuals and writers, Norbu has stood defiantly for Tibetan independence in ways that are learned, well conceived, and passionate. He is, as T.S. Eliot once said of Samuel Johnson, a dangerous person to disagree with. Read him—start with his blog, perhaps, look at the archives for interesting topics, and pay close attention to the comments. But most importantly, you need to read the following excerpt from the Introduction to his collection of essays, Shadow Tibet (the book I’d most recommend):
Like alternate worlds in science fiction, two distinct Tibets appear to co-exist these days. One flourishes in the light of celebrity patronage, museum openings, career ad academic opportunities, pop spirituality and New Age Fashions. This is the Tibet that has captured the romantic fantasy of the West and which has drawn much of the attention that Tibet receives at the moment. Here, Tibet is far more than the issue of Tibetan freedom and represents the unrealized aspirations of the affluent and the established for spiritual solace, ecological harmony and world peace.
And this from the first essay in the collection, “Opening of the Political Eye:”
I am on no account putting the entire blame for Tibetan political regression on our Western friends, but they did substantially contribute to it. Usually the presence of such tourists and visitors have only a marginal effect on the society they are passing through, especially in such large countries as India. But Tibetan society in exile was very small, poor, and because of the tremendous dislocation it had experienced, extremely impressionable. Through their constant disdain of Western rationalism, democracy, and science, Western travelers effectively discouraged Tibetan curiosity about the West, and encouraged Tibetans to revert to their old and fatal way of dealing with reality by burying their heads in the sands of magic, ritual, and superstition.
5. Set aside eight minutes and watch this video, although at 3 ½ minutes you’ll get the point. What you’ll see is a film, taken 12 years ago at Harvard, of a young Tibetan attempting to tell a young Chinese what has happened in Tibet. Standing behind and to the left of the Tibetan is an American, concerned, wanting to help, but plainly irrelevant to the important dialogue that is occurring between the two principals, the Tibetan and the Chinese. Remember this image of the Tibetan, the Chinese, and the sidelined American.
7. Memorize this fact: At least 80% of the human population lives on less than $10 a day. My guess is that many of you who are reading this blog live on more than $10 a day. I do. Materialism in America seems to have hit epidemic proportions, which is one of the reasons the gap between the rich and the poor is widening and devastating the culture. But it is important that we remember this fact for two reasons:
In my next posting, I'll finish the 10 ways you can free Tibet, and follow that with a general discussion of the list.
I continually meet people who want to “do something” about Tibet and the Tibetans. And who wouldn’t? An entire people committed, particularly over the last 700 years, to the principles of non-violence, whose homeland has been occupied with varying degrees of brutality over the last half century, and whose leader has become not only an adroit ambassador for his country, but one of the most revered spiritual figures in the world . . . What’s not to like? And don’t forget: George Lucas, in Return of the Jedi (1983) had those cute little Ewoks speaking Tibetan.
So if you google the phrase, “help Tibet,” you’ll get over 8.5 million hits.
Take your pick. Many of these organizations have made substantial contributions to the Tibetan cause, and there’s a lot you can do that will make a difference.
But having been involved over several decades now, and with dramatically varying degrees of commitment, to understanding what Tibetan culture might reasonably offer Americans, I wanted to offer my own Ten Ways to Free Tibet, and then be done with it. It’s not a manifesto; it’s not a declaration. It’s just a list of suggestions that are offered here as tentative answers to persistent questions.
My working plan: In this posting I’ll list three suggestions; in the next posting, four; and in the third posting, three, making for a total of ten. I’ll eventually offer a bit of commentary, a very little commentary, on each item, hoping to provide a picture of the overall conceptual structure that stands behind the entire set of ten. But for now, here are the first three ways to free Tibet.
So, the first three ways to save Tibet. Four more in the next posting. Stay tuned.
You can do a lot of things with water, and recently China and the Bush administration have become the connoisseurs of the pain and suffering that water, or the lack of it, can bring. China is moving along with its plans to build a hydro-electric dam across the Brahmaputra River in Tibet, potentially wreaking havoc on the Indian province of Arunachal Pradesh , and since the Justice Department was forced today to release its Top Secret CIA documents on water-boarding and other forms of torture, the Bush administration seemed equally fascinated with the destructive capacity of water. (China's plan has been in the works for several years. Read a fuller account here.)
Two modern imperial powers, equally intent on maintaining their empires through coercive means. And with Obama's decision today not to prosecute CIA officials who were responsible for this brutality, the United States gives up much of its credibility in negotiating with nations like China whom we accuse not only of tolerating, but actively indulging, conduct that violates our fundamental human rights.
I wrote earlier about China and America belonging to the small group of barbarous nations who still practice capital punishment and carry it out in some places with a kind of righteous gusto. Now I write about China and America belonging to that same group of barbarous nations who have been caught red-handed in violation of fundamental human rights and who decide to do little about it.
Whether we prosecute or not, though, the fact remains that our country is guilty of human rights violations; and that our administration's disapproval of the Chinese torture of Tibetans is hypocritical, at best, and feigned, at worst.
As a country, we argue now against human rights violations from a weakened position.
But there is another side to this issue that indicates some real progress in our country's support of human rights. It is important that President Obama allowed the release of these sensitive documents; he did not extend Bush's rampant abuses of executive privilege. He decided, in fact, not to fight the ACLU in their FOIA filing, and in doing so, he allowed the working manual for our little shop of horrors to become part of the public domain. Surely, he felt that a simple revelation of these documents was enough, that if the goal is to stop such abuses in the future, and not to punish those who formulated and implemented these horrors, then such a public revelation will make it much more difficult for this to occur in the future. And so we must read these documents, and make them part of our historical knowledge; we must enter them into the record of our national consciousness, making this inhumane practice less likely to rear its ugly head in the coming century.
It's the least we can do.
The monks from the University of Arkansas are now at the University of Northern Iowa, and the construction of the mandala is in its early stages, as the captured image of my desktop to the left reveals. To get in on the fun, go to UNI mandala. You'll need to download RealPlayer if you don't already have it, but there's a link on the site to do so. The Opening Ceremony went off without a hitch, a fitting prelude to His Holiness's visit to this campus next year. Thanks to the monks for their extraordinary effort and to the hospitality shown them by the University of Northern Iowa.
When the Chinese courts sentenced two Tibetans to the death penalty recently (check out the BBC report here), an outcry arose immediately among the Tibetan community and has now gradually spread around the world. Both the Tibetan Youth Congress and Amnesty International have registered their protests against this unfair, inhuman, and brutal practice.
Amnesty International continues to be one of the agencies that makes public the grim statistics of judicial killing; many countries have their own branch of AI, such as Amnesty International USA. These are all carefully maintained websites that have devoted themselves to humanitarian causes around the globe, and if you haven't bookmarked them yet, you might think about doing so. Reading them on a regular basis will have a direct impact on your humanitarian practice, however you wish to define it.
Have a look at the following video that chronicles the Get on the Bus movement, sponsored by Amnesty International and supporting, among other issues, free speech in Tibet.
Grass-roots movements like Get on the Bus allow, for example, Irene Kahn, Secretary General of Amnesty International, to do her work (see a brief video statement by Kahn here) on a global scale. With these local initiatives in place, the balance between barbarism and humanitarianism (the two sides are always at war because they are two forces warring within the individual human psyche) can begin to shift ever so slightly toward human dignity and a respect for human life. In this campaign, the ongoing fate of capital punishment is a kind of yardstick on how we're faring as a compassionate and caring global village.
Several facts and figures regarding the death penalty that you might want to know (all taken from Amnesty International's report on the death penalty in 2008) are listed below. Call it a kind of statistical autobiography of the world's spirit:
So what can you do? Read the Amnesty International website. That's the first thing. If you're interested in Tibet, then you want to concentrate, for the time being, on human rights violations in China, and AI has a site for that. And if you're an American reading this blog, you need to be aware of the international perspective on America's own reputation in the human rights arena. Click here for more details.
It's a global issue.
The global tech community was shocked recently to learn of Ghostnet, a cyber-snooping operation that orginated in the PRC and whose virus had turned up in over 1200 computers in over 100 countries, not an out-sized number at all, but discretely targeted, and thus harder to detect. You can find a link to the full 53-page report on Scribd (which you'll need to join to download, but it's worth the email address and password you have to give to get it). To summarize, the capabilities of Ghostnet are extensive, and the main computers of the Dalai Lama's office were clearly compromised. David Gelernter, a national fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, recently wrote, concerning the likelihood that China was the culprit in engineering and spreading the virus:
After the Dalai Lama's office sent an e-mail invitation to a foreign diplomat, Beijing diplomats happened to phone the same diplomat and discourage the visit. A China-bound traveler who had used the Internet to help put Tibetan exiles in contact with Chinese dissidents was stopped at the Chinese border, shown transcripts of the online exchanges, and warned to cut it out.
And so it goes. Gelerntner argues, persuasively, that what we're seeing here is the Second Cold War: "China is our new Cold War enemy, and her favorite weapons will also be novel: financial weapons, trade weapons, cyberweapons. Welcome to Cold War II."
It's not news to anybody that technology changes lives, and that it is currently changing our lives here in America, sometimes in ways that seem insufferable. It still isn't clear to me why anyone would want a Twitter update on my choice of an espresso over a latte as I'm standing in line to teach a class that my caffeine addiction will cause me to start a bit late. The problem is, however, that the technology in question reflects the gravitas of the culture that embraces it. So six students in Chisinau, Moldova--the only post-Soviet Union country that elected a communist government--started an anti-government rally recently using Twitter and instantly had summoned 10,000 students to the protest. (Read the NYT account here.) Our own election of Obama marshaled the text-technology in similar ways, and the cell-phone videos from Tibet have left a lasting record of the atrocities inflicted by the Chinese in Tibet throughout 2008.
So the new technology, like all new technologies, mirrors the intention and morality of those who use it. Twitter then, the very same Twitter, can be an agent of narcissism or an advocate for civil liberty. Twitter doesn't come with a user manual, a code of ethics, or even the vaguest guidelines for how the human animal might represent itself through its one-line updates. But all we have to do is read the updates and draw our conclusions: we are both magnanimous and narcissistic.
Recently, the Dalai Lama and his special envoy Lodi Gyari have called on all Tibetans everywhere to record their suffering over the past fifty years, a project that will clearly profit from the video and web technologies available today even to amatuers. (Our very own TEXT Project at Arkansas is an example.) Central to this effort is Harry Wu, the founder and director of the Laogai Research Foundation. If you don't know Mr. Wu's work, you need to become familiar with it. "Laogai" means "reform through labor," and the term generally refers to Chinese labor camps--where Mr. Wu spent 19 years of his life. He is now an American citizen and has taken up the Tibetan cause. He has curated an exhibit in Washington, D.C. on the Tibetan struggle, and he is a significant force in encouraging Sino-Tibetan dialogue. His ideas are in line with Martin Luther King Jr.'s who encouraged the poor whites in the South to understand that they had more in common with the poor blacks than they did with the middle-class white Southerners who were behind racism's corporate and cultural structure. Wu is making a similar argument about the Tibetans and the Chinese, and how they should be looking at what they hold in common. And he might well be right.
The economic problems in both Tibet and China--read about the struggles of one of China's billionaire women in the March 30 issue of The New Yorker--are fertile ground for unification across lines of race and ethnicity, the kind of unification that, if it occurred in China, would have an immediate and long-range global impact. As the Dalai Lama ages, and finally retires to his spiritual practice, and ultimately dies, the transitional period would benefit from this kind of economic revolution. In the meantime, the 17th Karmapa is waiting in line, but that in and of itself is enough for another posting . . . in the meantime, watch the following video for a good introduction to this extraordinary young man, and the problems that he currently confronts.
Follow this link to watch the video.
<a href="http://technorati.com/claim/aprtazbccu" rel="me">Technorati Profile</a>
Have a look at the video below. Orville Schell is a noted expert on China and Tibet, and here you can feel the economic weight of China leaning on Schell's realpolitik perspective. It's maddening, even if accurate.
To all of you who responded to my posting of 24 March, and signed the letter protesting the South African action against the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Tutu has thanked you:
Mary Wald writes further about these issues on The Huffington Post. She includes comments from Archbishop Tutu as well that she recently received in an email correspondence with him.
The letter is still open for signatures at www.thecommunity.com. If you haven't signed yet, and you feel inclined to add your voice to the mix, stop by and do so; also send the link to your friends who might be interested.
As I mentioned in my last posting, these kinds of off-the-radar actions are extremely
important, and even, in my opinion, the driving forces behind political change in the new technological era (witness the Obama campaign). Here's what I said (and pardon the egocentricity of self-quotation):
But we can do something off the radar, something in fact, more powerful, more fundamental, and more effective than many of those who are on the radar, under constant scrutiny, can do. We can transform the fundamental ground of consciousness that in the long run will make the change we envision inevitable.
I mean, we recently signed a letter of protest regarding South Africa's treatment of the Dalai Lama, and within several days, we've got a response in our inboxes from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, thanking us for our commitment.
You're probably thinking what I'm thinking . . . we're having an effect, anonymously, off-the-radar, working the ground of consciousness.
Thanks for your help.