TIBETSPACE

TYC TO LAUNCH 2ND PHASE OF TIBETAN PEOPLE'S MASS MOVEMENT

Mr. Tsewang Rigzin, President of the Tibetan Youth Congress, today announced in Dharamsala, the second phase of "The Tibetan People's Mass Movement."  On July 28, Tibetan protestors will begin an "Indefinite Fast for Tibet--Without Food and Water," as a kind of preliminary action to a full-scale demonstration, based on Gandhian principles of satyagraha.  The demonstration will begin on August 7, 2008, the day before the Olympics open in Beijing.

The TYC is the largest Tibetan NGO outside of Tibet, and has long advocated independence for Tibet.  While they differ with His Holiness on his bid for autonomy, the TYC has always respected His Holiness's opinions and recognized him as the greatest living benefactor of the Tibetan people.  This recent announcement is extremely important as it represents the final initiative before the Olympics begin.  It is important that the world's attention be turned toward the Tibetan community during this time.  In the months following the March 10 demonstrations in Tibet, the Chinese were visibly surprised by the general outrage shown around the world, and it is time to rekindle this response.

And remember:  the Olympics in Beijing bring up several instances of racial and cultural suppression at the hands of the Chinese empire, and it's incumbent upon all of us to recognize that awareness of this widespread oppression provides us with more leverage in bringing awareness to the Tibetan situation.  So we should all applaud Luis Moreno Ocampo, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, for seeking an arrest warrant for Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the President of Sudan on charges of genocide.  This is a brave and necessary step, and even if it has little immediate effect on Darfur, it serves notice to the world that the ICC has taken its role seriously.  China of course is directly implicated in the slaughter in Darfur, and while this action will have little impact on the Tibetan situation, it brings China's brutal foreign policy schemes into the light of day.  This can only benefit all those who suffer under the Chinese yoke.

Also, thanks to Agam's Gecko for alerting us to another racist policy well under way in Beijing as that city buckles down for the Olympics.  Here's an excerpt:

Bar owners in Beijing are now being forced to sign pledges to ban black people and Mongolians from their establishments. Question: Wasn't it the apartheid laws which disqualified South Africa from Olympic participation not so many years ago? Can we now disqualify China, or is there a double standard somewhere?

Excellent question, vital information.  With approximately three to go before the Olympics begin, it's important that our thoughts and prayers--and actions--take notice of the larger arena of human oppression.   Shaping the proper consciousness  doesn't require us to be on the front lines, and without the proper consciousness, nothing of  lasting importance will be accomplished.
 

WATCH THIS VIDEO: TIBETAN (MIS)REPRESENTATIONS

As the Tibetan cause becomes more visible around the world, so too do those commentators who are vying for authority and respect.  As a result of these growing numbers, however, misinformation, disinformation, and progaganda have increased as well, and in the following video you will see Jamyang Norbu announcing the new journal, High Asia, which is devoted to correcting those misperceptions about Tibet and Tibetans that are becoming more and more prevalent online, in books, and on the air waves.  Propaganda does not come simply from Beijing anymore.  It's everywhere, in the most unlikely locations and streaming from the most unpredictable podiums. 

WATCH THIS VIDEO: KESANG YANGKYI TAKLA SPEAKS OUT

Part of the modern neurosis derives from our ability to be a spectator of calamities, atrocities, and abuses that occur in other countries, other cultures, other neighborhoods.  For the past 150 years, journalists have served up the fare that now crowds our living rooms, spilling out of the TV, leaping off the newspapers . . . bodies in varying degrees of dismemberment, exploded cars, decapitated buildings, and all the while many of us safely viewing the carnage with every imaginable human reaction.  Mostly we look away, make a resolution or two, and fear for the future.  Or rather, our future. 

Because the pain of others most often isn't personal.

Except when it is.  And for one reason or another, the pain of the Tibetan people has become deeply personal to many around the world.  Yet at times, one senses a weariness, a nagging notion that the images of atrocity won't stop, that resolutions will not be reached, and that a kind of incipient apathy is seeping into the dialogue of even the most committed.  These images work on us invisibly, they fly into our psyches well below our daily radar, and they have their effects.  They have their way with us.

I suspect that at times like these when the resistive energies are low--and failed boycotts suggest such times are upon us--it is a good thing to learn how to listen all over again.  The video below is a good place to start.  The woman speaking is Kesang Yankgyi Takla, Minister of Information & International Relations of the Central Tibetan Administration; she was in Tokyo in early July when this was recorded.

CRACKDOWN IN TIBET, SEVEN PEACEKEEPERS DEAD IN DARFUR & BUSH IS OFF TO BEIJING

Kudos to the Los Angeles Times for reminding their readers, as the outcry for the Beijing boycott has faded to a whimper, of the unique opportunity our leaders have missed, an opportunity that might have aligned us, however fleetingly, with the global struggle for human rights.  It should be noted, however, that the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, have made it abundantly clear that their absence from the Opening Ceremony has nothing to do with a boycott.  And while the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whose country has a substantial Tibetan population, has declared his intention to boycott, one Canadian newspaper has called his gesture empty and meaningless, and implored him to attend.  As the Times points out, boycotting the Opening Ceremony would seem the perfect compromise, making a clear statement to China, while allowing the athletes to perform their appointed tasks.  To walk away from such a humanitarian opportunity this rare, to turn a blind eye to these blatant, long-term, and highly organized programs of human oppression, seems inexplicable and indefensible to me.

At the very least, this should be pointed out with mechanical regularity. 

AFTER THE BUSTED BOYCOTT, WHAT NEXT?

Most Americans had to be disappointed today when they read Lodi Gyari's report on the Tibetan delegation's recent meeting with the Chinese.  Disappointed, but not surprised.

"There is a growing perception among the Tibetans and my friends that the whole tactic of the Chinese government is to engage us to stall for time," said Lodi Gyari, who led the two-man team which met Chinese officials in Beijing.  While commentators like Jamyang Norbu have long embraced a far more impatient version of this opinion, even the most conservative of us realized early on that these talks seemed nothing more than empty exercises, designed to quiet the international community until the Olymics were done. 

Of course, it's sometimes difficult for Americans to read between the lines of Gyari's carefully considered prose, but one sentence in today's statement concerning China's stall tactics seemed to verge on the comical:  "My colleague and I told our Chinese counterpart candidly that we ourselves are beginning to inch towards this school of thought."  Inch?  How about leap?  Pounce?  While the Tibetan delegation expressed its disappointment with the talks, the Chinese had another perspective:  "The Chinese side expressed the view that the dialogue process has been productive," Gyari reported, "and that we need to keep in mind that a half-a-century-old issue of great complexity, cannot be resolved in a matter of years."  These are the kinds of comments that simply defy a rational response . . .

I still cannot help but feel that a boycott of the Opening Ceremony would have been an effective means of maintaining the kind of international pressure that was brought to bear on the Chinese in the wake of the March protests.  But that's a dream, as the Globe and Mail reports: 

The boycott movement is now in tatters, with no major Western leaders still on board. Only a few smaller countries - Estonia, Poland, Austria and the Czech Republic - have announced that they will not send any representatives to the opening ceremony in Beijing.  Several other leaders, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, are not planning to attend the opening ceremony, but they have made it clear that that they are not participating in a boycott.

Even our state newspaper here in Arkansas ran an editorial a couple of days ago protesting China's involvement in the genocide in Darfur and pronounced these the genocidal games.

If our world leaders are unable to respond forcefully to the Chinese, we can.  Watch the Olympic Trials, then cut the television off.  Don't watch the Olympics. 

Besides, the Tour de France has started, and they're trying to clean up their act this year, which is more than I can say for the rogue's gallery that will soon be packing for Beijing.

THE BOYCOTT BROUHAHA

Having just returned from an extensive 3-week trip to India, I was disheartened, angered, dismayed, confused, but unsurprised, I guess, to see that Bush has announced that he will, in fact, attend the Opening Ceremony in Beijing.  "He believes he's going to China to support first and foremost our athletes. He sees this as a sporting competition," said spokeswoman Dana Perino.  It doesn't matter whether Bush sees the Olympics as a "sporting event" or not--it's entirely typical of the man to resort to simplistic, literal-minded language when confronted with complexity of any sort--but it does matter that his advisors have decided to side with China on this issue.  We all, of course, know why they have done so, and the reasons are unflattering:  money & power, both of which China has far more abundantly than Tibet.

The damage done by such a decision will not be immediately apparent to a President who believes that the Olympics are a series of athletic contests because the damage done here concerns the relationship between our national language and our national consciousness.  George Orwell spent a great deal of his time and energy worrying about the kinds of damage that political language inflicts on a country, and what he has to say in "Politics and the English Language" is directly pertinent to the current problem.  Here , Orwell is talking about the typical political speech, the kind that we all have grown to dread and decided largely to ignore whenever we are confronted with it:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.  Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties.  Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.  Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets:  this is called pacification . . . Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

And so the Olympics, to our President, are a "sporting competition."  The mental picture of the Olympics, however, goes something like this:  the state-sponsored crackdown in Tibet, the arrests, the detentions, the torture, the refusal to negotiate in a meaningful way with the Dalai Lama's envoys, the fundamental denial of human rights to the Tibetans, the continual stream of 3000 Tibetans a year down into India, the forced sterilization and abortion programs in Tibet, the denial of education to Tibetans . . . all of these atrocities are bracketed, minimized, and overlooked when the Olympics becomes a "sporting competition," and our heads-of-state arrive in Beijing for the party.  The wink-and-nod between the Chinese and the visiting heads-of-state as they arrive in Beijing in August will simply nauseate.

It might well be, as some have argued, that the Chinese have become too powerful to snub in this fashion.  That the consequences for such a snubbing too grave, too serious.

I, for one, am thankful that such reasoning never held sway with Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr.,  Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela,  Desmond Tutu,  Aung San Suu Kyi, Jimmy Carter, Elie Wiesel, Lech Walesa, and Vaclav Havel, to name a few.

TEXT: TIBETANS IN EXILE TODAY

Tibetans in EXile Today, or TEXT, is an oral history project being run out of the University of Arkansas.  The project begins this month as Professor Sidney Burris and Geshe Thupten Dorjee travel to India with fifteen students, video cameras, tape recorders, and sound equipment to begin taping and archiving interviews with the oldest Tibetan monks, nuns, and lay people who are currently living in India and have vivid memories of Tibet before 1959. The assumption of the project is simple:  as these elderly Tibetans pass away, so too do their personal histories; there is, accordingly, an increasing urgency that this work be undertaken and completed in a timely fashion. The ultimate goal of the project is to build an online archive of these interviews that will be accessible to the general public.  While in India, the students, under the direction of Professor Burris and Geshe Dorjee, will begin interviewing a broad range of Tibetans in the three-week period alloted to them, and upon return, they will begin the process of editing the film and producing a promotional DVD, as well as preparing the interviews themselves for the archive.  Stay tuned for updates, and please keep these intrepid travelers in your hearts and minds.

'GO HOME, FEEL WEAK, TURN UP THE A.C.': ROBERT THURMAN ON WHAT WE CAN--AND SHOULDN'T--DO ABOUT TIBET

Just when you felt a bit wearied, just when you detected that first seed of apathy appearing deep within you, just when you began to suspect that there really is no good way for us to help the Tibetans, just when you felt, in fact, a bit useless . . . here comes Robert Thurman--the most practical idealist on the planet--to the rescue.  Listen to this brief interview, renew yourself, and begin again!

What you'll find, I think, is that Thurman has a very accurate idea of the full ramifications of the term "practice."  It's not about incense and lama-chasing anymore.  It's about embodying the commitments of the practice within your natural environment, within your indigenous spirit-space, engaging American--in this case--culture on its own terms, from fast food to found art.  Thurman understands this, and he shows us how to do so as well.

HIS HOLINESS APPEARS BEFORE BRITISH HOUSE OF COMMONS FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

The Dalai Lama spoke yesterday with a British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee charged with filing its annual human rights report.  The committee was charged with taking personal evidence from His Holiness, and as you might expect, the questions are considered, articulate, and insightful, as indeed are His Holiness's answers.  Perhaps you won't learn a lot of new facts about the problems in Tibet, but you will see a dramatic example of first-class diplomacy . . . the back-and-forth reaches the very heights of civil discourse.  Watch the proceedings here.  Once at the C-Span site, click on the link that reads, "British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee Hearing on Human Rights with The Dalai Lama."

SEVEN QUESTIONS FOR ALL OF US

Thanks to one of my students in the TEXT Program for alerting me to this helpful discussion on the BBC website: seven questions answered on camera by Dr. Steve Tsang, a spokesperson for the Chinese position, and Steve Fischer, explaining the Tibetan angle.  With a lull in the press coverage, it's a good time to consolidate what you know, how you know it, and how you might begin to support your opinion.  Education is a good and necessary option for all of us.