For decades, Tibetans have called for freedom from Chinese rule. Above, Tibetan protestors outside the Chinese Mission in New York in March 2008. Credit: William Farrington /IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Nov 5 2012 (IPS)

Human rights workers and Tibet-focused activists are hailing a strongly worded statement by the United Nations’ top official on human rights, drawing attention to growing public discontent in Tibet just ahead of a major leadership shuffle that will reverberate throughout the Communist Party of China.

The statement, released Friday, was the first time that the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights had publicly commented on the situation in Tibet, despite years of lobbying by activist support groups.

“Social stability in Tibet will never be achieved through heavy security measures and suppression of human rights,” the high commissioner, Navi Pillay, said. “Deep underlying issues need to be addressed, and I call on the [Chinese] government to seriously consider the recommendations made to it by various international human rights bodies.”

She also urged Beijing to allow independent monitors into Tibet, while noting that a dozen requests for invitations for U.N. special rapporteurs still await Chinese government action.

“The U.N. matters to China, and this is an important opportunity for China to be called out in a public forum,” Mary Beth Markey, president of the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), based in Washington, told IPS.

“In recent years, China has been very successful at containing bilateral conversations on human rights in private settings. Yet while the U.N. has been seen as a major tool by Western states to strengthen their human rights calls, they have been reluctant to use it as well as they should.”

Pillay’s statement also received immediate plaudits from the Tibetan government-in-exile in northern India.

The head of the government-in-exile, Lobsang Sangay, noted that his government was “encouraged by the powerful statement”. But he also called on the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to convene a special session on Tibet, “in view of the desperate and unprecedented spate of self-immolations by Tibetans due to China’s repressive policies and the continued intransigence of the Chinese leadership to the relentless efforts of UNHRC”.

Seven a week

Pillay’s statement came as a trend of self-immolations has grown in recent weeks, signifying strengthening public frustration with the rigidity of Chinese rule on the Tibetan plateau. On Sunday, a young Tibetan farmer became the sixty-third Tibetan since 2009 to set himself on fire in protest, according to ICT. The government-in-exile puts the number even higher.

In her statement, Pillay specifically referenced the extremity inherent to self-immolation as a form of protest.

“I recognise Tibetans’ intense sense of frustration and despair, which has led them to resort to such extreme means,” she said. “But there are other ways to make those feelings clear. The government also needs to recognise this, and permit Tibetans to express their feelings without fear of retribution.”

Having risen to a rate of seven a week by late October, the self-immolations appear to have severely embarrassed the Beijing government, which has reportedly stepped up the security presence in Tibetan-strong areas.

On Monday, the Chinese government strongly criticised Pillay’s statement. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hong Lei turned the blame on followers of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader living in northern India, blaming them for “ugly and evil acts intended to achieve the separatist goal of Tibetan independence”.

The same day, while travelling in Japan, the Dalai Lama noted his optimism that the once-a-decade changes in Chinese leadership, set to be announced on Thursday, would lead to political reform. The aging monk, who formally gave up his political role in 2011 and has for decades refuted Tibetan aspirations for independence from China, has repeatedly rejected self-immolation, along with other forms of violence, as a method of protest.

New political momen

Yet the polite refusal on the part of dozens of Tibetans to heed the Dalai Lama’s diktat on self-immolation suggests that “these are clearly political acts of standing up to the oppressor”, ICT’s Markey said.

“While much of Tibetan society remains rooted in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, these are very clearly not acts of retreating to pray in the monasteries,” she continued.

“This is very interesting, because the struggle [for Tibetan autonomy] has for so many years been driven by the Dalai Lama’s leadership from the outside. Now we’re seeing Tibetans within Tibet acting within the context of their own political life – doing this for themselves and their future.”

This new process, which can be traced back to the unprecedented public demonstrations that swept the Tibetan plateau in mid-2008, in the run-up to the Beijing Olympic Games, goes well beyond self-immolation, which has unfortunately become its strongest statement.

Increasingly, however, a discussion is taking place within Tibet on how to be Tibetan – and to assert their ethnic identity – within the People’s Republic of China. The result has been a greater consciousness on the part of Tibetans to emphasise their language rights, wear Tibetan clothing or patronise Tibetan shops.

“Our own understanding of self-immolations has developed over time, but it seems now that Tibetans are in new political moment,” Markey said. “There is a concerted effort being made to make known that their situation can no longer be tolerated. The Chinese have tried to characterise these people as unstable, but it’s clearly something greater – these are not mere individual acts.”

Rights-lite campaign

For the most part, however, Western governments, including here in Washington, have been slow to respond with any greater urgency to the strengthened calls for reform from the Tibetan public.

“We have consistently expressed our concern about the violence in the Tibetan areas, about the continuing pattern of self-immolations, heightened tensions, and Tibet in general,” U.S. State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland said in late October.

But even as nonstop media coverage of the U.S. presidential election has continued for months leading up to Tuesday’s polls, the two presidential contenders have had very little to say about international human rights generally, much less on Tibet. Indeed, while China has been referenced repeatedly in the campaigns, it has only been used to talk about trade, labour or protectionism.

“Compared with past campaigns, human rights in China have largely been an afterthought,” Frank Jannuzi, the head of the Washington office of Amnesty International, a watchdog, wrote last week. “China might now be powerful enough that both candidates are reluctant to raise human rights issues for fear of it withholding cooperation in other areas.”

Supporters hold a candlelight vigil in Dharamsala, India, for Dolkar Tso who self-immolated on August 7, 2012. Credit: Katie Lin/IPS.

By Katie Lin
DHARAMSALA, India, Sep 6 2012 (IPS)

Two Tibetan teenagers set themselves on fire and took to the streets of Aba in southwestern China last week, managing to walk only a short distance before collapsing. They both died the following day.

Since 2009, there have been 51 self-immolations inside of China, as Tibetans protest against increasingly repressive Chinese policies and call for the return of the Dalai Lama, who fled Lhasa, the former capital of Tibet, for India in 1959.

In an address to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of South Asia in New Delhi last month, Tibet’s prime minister-in-exile, Lobsang Sangay, expressed his disappointment at the lack of attention Tibet has received from the international community as the number of self-immolations continues to climb.

“The tragedy in Tibet has been unfolding for the past 50 years but the reaction does not seem to be as much as for the Arab Spring,” he said.

Indeed, the world watched as the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia sparked a revolution in orthern Africa in 2011, bringing down a number of dictatorial regimes across the Arab world as it spread.

Yet despite the string of self-immolations in Tibet and numerous appeals made by both the Tibetan government-in-exile and various rights groups, the desperate actions of these self-immolators seem to have elicited little response from the international community.

Tenzin Norsang, joint secretary of the Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC), an international non-governmental organisation with more than 80 regional chapters worldwide, cites a general lack of interest as the cause for this apparent low response.

“The first thing, is interest,” he says, “If you’re not concerned, if it’s not your struggle, you won’t make an effort to understand it.

“And this is not only the case with Tibet. After the Second World War, more than 100 countries gained independence and nobody took interest.”

Rigzin Namgyal, a 26-year-old yoga teacher, also from Aba in southwestern China, where most of the self-immolations have taken place, echoes Norsang’s view about the level of international attention reflecting a lack of interest, but sees the struggle’s age as being the main issue.

“People like variety and spontaneity, but they’ve been hearing about the Tibet issue for 50 years, since we lost our country,” he says.

Shortly after the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, 40,000 People’s Liberation Army troops invaded Tibet. Following three years of armed resistance, the number of Tibetan rebels was growing and fears arose that the Dalai Lama’s safety was under threat. Finally, in 1959, Tibet’s spiritual leader escaped to India, inspiring a mass exile of more than 80,000 Tibetans.

“Tibet has been in the news for the last 50 years, that’s why they’re not giving specific attention to it – it’s an old issue,” Namgyal continues.

However, according to Dr Robert Barnett, director of Modern Tibetan Studies at Columbia University, the effectiveness of a protest to effect political or social change is not entirely dependent on its presence on the front page.

“Protest impact depends on the type of government you’re dealing with more than the type of protest or media coverage you get,” he says.

“You could argue that Tibetans and their supporters are thinking in terms of strategies that have worked with weak governments, not with an extremely robust one, like China,” Barnett says.

“Tibetan protestors, especially those abroad, tend to use protests and foreign media to communicate their anguish and suffering, but in China that’s widely seen as courting sympathy or even as trying to get more funding and benefits.”

The Tibet issue has made headlines in the past, namely during periods of civil unrest, such as during the 1987 protests and the 2008 uprisings, both of which increased tensions between Tibetans and Chinese authorities and saw a rise in the arrest and arbitrary detention of Tibetans.

But the world’s general knowledge and positive reception of the issue can largely be attributed to the high profile of the Dalai Lama, the widespread image of Buddhists as being non-violent and compassionate, and, as Barnett puts it, “the tone-deaf propaganda statements and policies of Chinese officials, who often bring embarrassment to themselves.”

But this movement will inevitably face several challenges in gaining attention in the future, as China works to improve its propaganda style and as the Dalai Lama, now 77, ages.

In addition to these factors, Barnett believes that, due to all of the media attention garnered and international sympathisers gained during the protests in the late 1980s, there exists a “success deficit” when it comes to communicating the issue of Tibet.

“Many (Tibetans) still tend to rely on publicity for everything,” he says.

“Put crudely, we all need to learn to ‘think politically’ in a deeper, long-term sense – not to conflate politics only with media inches and TV coverage.”

As Barnett sees it, the Tibetan movement has actually received a relatively high response from the international community, especially as compared to other serious cases of human rights abuse, such as mass rape in the Congo.

Support groups and organisations, including the TYC and Students for a Free Tibet continuously run awareness campaigns, and a number of influential administrations have pledged their support to the Tibetan cause, including those of Australia, France, Canada, and Japan.

But Norsang says that these campaigns and statements of concern are simply not enough.

“We have received a huge amount of international support, with many people expressing their solidarity,” he says. “But now, apart from their concern, we need a practical solution.”

On Sep. 18, the United Nations General Assembly will hold its 67^th session in New York City – and it is on this day that TYC plans to stage a protest in New Delhi in an effort to communicate the need for fact-finding delegations to be allowed into Tibet.

In the meantime, the Central Tibetan Administration has made an appeal to supporting administrations to collectively engage the Chinese government in dialogue during the meeting, encouraging it to open its borders to both fact-finding delegations and international media.

As TYC members and supporters migrate to New Delhi to take part in an organised indefinite hunger strike, which began on Sep. 3, Norsang tries to maintain some perspective.

“I feel proud of what we have achieved so far,” he says. “Compared to the struggle of other countries, like India, which was under British rule for 200 years, our struggle has achieved a lot in 53 years.”