By Crystal Orderson
LHASA, Sep 30 2019 (IPS)

Tibetan medicine is one of the world’s oldest known traditional medicines, originally developed during the pre-Buddhist era in the kingdom known as Shang Shung. IPS correspondent Crystal Oderson visited one of the major Tibetan health facilities in Lhasa…. and got a glimpse of the age old tradition.

By Crystal Orderson
LHASA, Aug 22 2019 (IPS)

According to the Tibet’s Social Science Academy’s Institute of Rural Economic Studies, the number of Tibetans still living in poverty has been brought down from 850,000 a few years ago to 150,000.

Tibetan officials say the government is committed to reducing that number to zero by the end of this year.

By Crystal Orderson
LHASA, Aug 19 2019 (IPS)

Tibet’s complicated typography means that the terrain is not easy for its people. Whilst the country is breathtaking, one incredible story about Tibet is that of the dramatic socio-economic changes the region has undergone.

A by-stander pauses beside a large poster featuring Tibetan martyrs. Credit: Robert Stefanicki/IPS

By Robert Stefanicki
DHARAMSALA, India, May 20 2014 (IPS)

Nestled in the Kangra Valley in the shadow of the Dhauladhar Mountains in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, Dharamsala is beautiful to behold. But the scenic landscape belies a dark reality: the cult of martyrs that has developed in this town, home to the Tibetan government-in-exile since 1959.

While some nations declare as martyrs those who lost their lives in freedom struggles or wars for independence at the hands of enemy soldiers, Tibetans recognize as martyrs those who take their own lives through the desperate act of self-immolation.

“People take their lives out of desperation and helplessness. Instead of disappearing into [Chinese] prisons, they choose to die in the fire." -- Kirti Rinpoche, exiled abbot of the Kirti Gompa monastery
Since 2009, almost 130 people have set themselves aflame in protest over China’s heavy-handed tactics in the Tibetan plateau. For decades Tibetan people have been demanding an end to Chinese rule and the return of the Dalai Lama, their spiritual leader, who fled Tibet’s former capital Lhasa over 50 years ago.

The “suicidal tide” swept Tibet in the aftermath of protests that erupted in Lhasa in the lead-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, and then spilled all over the Land of Snow.

Today, the faces of those men and women are omnipresent throughout the Indian city that hosts the bulk of some 100,000 Tibetan exiles.

The flames that claimed so many lives have become an important element of patriotic murals, sculptures and paintings visible all over Dharamsala. Even more spectacular are the large posters that display photographs of all those who committed suicide, each accompanied by a brief caption containing nothing more than the person’s name, place of origin and date of death.

Shadowy silhouettes stand in for those whose photographs could not be found. Some images capture martyrs in their final moments, consumed by fire. Other pictures show only charred corpses, unrecognisable without the identifying information.

Bravery, or wasted life?

The jury is still out on whether martyrdom is helping or hurting the Tibetan cause, with the diaspora far from reaching a unanimous assessment on self-immolations.

Take Tenzin and Ngawang, inseparable friends who were born in Lhasa in the 1980s and generally see eye to eye on just about every topic under the sun. But when it comes to the subject of patriotic suicides, the two stand on opposite sides of the debate.

The young man’s opinion echoes that of any Tibetan who is strongly opposed to China’s constant policing of the community, the replacing of Tibetan with Chinese as the language of instruction for all students above primary-school age, and laws that forbid Tibetans from freely practicing their religion, including a ban on displaying photographs of the Dalai Lama.

Tenzin, however, shakes his head, saying gravely, “Most of those who take their lives are in their twenties or thirties. This is a loss for our nation and we cannot afford such a waste.”

Tibetans have learned, the hard way, that aggressive or violent resistance will not lead to freedom but only to bloodshed and a further restriction of liberties. This maxim was tested most recently during the 2008 protests, when Tibetans in Lhasa set fire to some shops run by Chinese immigrants, provoking a wave of repression from the Chinese authorities.

Some argue that self-immolations fall somewhere in-between the two, representing the need for a rebellion while embodying the principles of non-violence.

“This is a sacred act, not born of hatred,” a monk named Kanyag Tsering told IPS. “In their last messages, those people do not call for the overthrow of the communist government [of China], but for the return of the Dalai Lama.

“They ask their fellow countrymen to give up gambling, avoid discord, work together for the well-being of Tibet. They do not harm anyone. While taking their lives, they could easily take the lives of some Chinese too, but they do not,” he added.

Paradoxically, most Tibetans are deeply religious, practicing a form of Buddhism that prohibits suicide. But supporters of self-immolations, lay and religious people alike, claim that Buddhism does not forbid the sacrifice of one’s life for a higher purpose.

In fact, one of the first references to self-immolation, which simply means ‘sacrifice’, can be found in the ancient Buddhist texts known as the ‘Jataka tales’, which recount an incident involving a past incarnation of the Buddha giving up his body to feed a hungry tigress.

According to the exiled abbot of the Kirti Gompa – a Buddhist monastery in China’s Sichuan province whose initiation of the self-immolations earned it the title of the “most militant” monastery in the country – the morality behind self-immolations comes down to a matter of intentions.

“People decide to self-immolate for the good of the six million Tibetans in Tibet…This means their intentions are good, that they are acting in accordance with the teachings of Buddha,” Kirti Rinpoche told IPS.

He added that there is not a single family in Tibet who, since the first uprising of 1959 and subsequent exile of the 14th Dalai Lama, has not had at least one member killed or tortured in prison.

“People take their lives out of desperation and helplessness. Instead of disappearing into prisons, they choose to die in the fire,” the monk said.

Mixed Messages

Despite the backing of influential spiritual leaders, more and more Tibetans are coming to realise that the flames are futile.

Five years of self-immolations have prompted little by way of international pressure on Beijing, which has responded by stepping up arrests and repression of anyone even suspected of being involved with the suicides – families, friends, monasteries and, sometimes, whole villages have been denied civil rights and forced to pay heavy fines.

So far the strongest call to halt the fiery protests has come from inside Tibet itself. In November 2012, the lamas (spiritual leaders) of Rebgong – a county in China’s Qinghai province – wrote: “Knowing the value of human life, we beseech you, kneeling on the ground and folding hands on our chests: stop the desperate self-immolations.”

The lamas advised Tibetans to use their “priceless human bodies” to “make great deeds for the benefit of all beings”, rather than giving in to “despair, agony and suffering.”

From the diaspora, the lone call echoing similar sentiments came from the Karmapa lama, the widely revered head of the Karma Kagyu order, an important sect of Tibetan Buddhism.

The government-in-exile remains ambiguous. Prime Minister Lobsang Sangay insists that while he “highly discourages” the drastic action, it is the “sacred duty” of the exiled community to support it.

Meanwhile, the only man capable of stopping the burnings – the one whose name hangs on the lips of all those writhing in the flames – avoids the subject.

Pressed by journalists, the Dalai Lama has called the acts “understandable” but says he does not encourage them. Some say his words can be interpreted as silent encouragement.

“The Chinese government accuses His Holiness of inciting self-immolations,” Thubten Samphel, a former government spokesperson and head of the newly founded Tibet Policy Institute, told IPS.

He himself has no doubt that the sacrifices would end if the spiritual leader wanted it so, but recognises that if the Dalai Lama called for a complete halt of all burnings and the people obeyed, it would only confirm China’s accusations that the previous acts could not have happened without his say-so.

The Buddhist monk Thubten Wangchen has sparked a confrontation between Spain and China over human rights in Tibet. Credit: Saransh Sehgal/IPS.

By Saransh Sehgal
BARCELONA, Mar 17 2014 (IPS)

Thubten Wangchen, a Tibetan Buddhist monk with Spanish nationality, has become a thorn in Spain-China relations since Spanish High Court judge Ismael Moreno sought international arrest orders for top Chinese leaders last month following a petition by the monk.

Thubten filed a case of genocide against former Chinese president Jiang Zemin and former prime minister Li Peng and three other top officials over allegations that they committed genocide in Tibet.“Behind the motivation to pursue this case is only one agenda - that the world should know the reality of Tibetan suffering under the Chinese regime." -- Thubten Wangchen, a Tibetan Buddhist monk

The lawsuit seeks to indict Chinese leaders of having information on torture, executions and “forced family planning policies that included widespread abortion and forced sterilisations” against Tibetans. The judge ordered Interpol to issue an arrest order seeking capture and imprisonment of Chinese leaders for genocide, torture and crimes against humanity.

The Chinese government has protested against Spain’s involvement in what it called domestic issues. Soon after the judgment, China’s Foreign Ministry reminded Spain that fiscal repayments on loans from China might be approaching.

“Whether or not this issue can be appropriately dealt with is related to the healthy development of ties. We hope the Spanish government can distinguish right from wrong,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said after the ruling.

China holds a major stake of Spanish debt, and following the order, the Spanish parliament approved a ruling party proposal limiting the global reach of its courts to pursue cases of genocide and other crimes against humanity committed overseas.

The ruling People’s Party (PP) tabled a fast-track legal amendment to curb the use of universal jurisdiction that would virtually do away with the idea of universal jurisdiction in Spain. The amendment is in effect to diminish the global reach of the jurisdiction of Spanish courts.

The legal reform to limit the universal jurisdiction was voted in by both chambers of the parliament and entered into force Mar. 15.

Opposition parties are now accusing China of exerting pressure on Spain to overlook its commitments on human rights.

Thubten told IPS that the government’s reform move “is sad news not only for Tibetan people, but also for the people of Spain. The PP is bowing to Chinese pressure because of economy and debt.”

If this continues, he said, “15 years from now the Spanish people will ask the Chinese for jobs and welfare.”

Several human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have signed an open letter calling the reform in law a “devastating blow for universal jurisdiction and for Spain’s international obligations to ensure that grave crimes don’t go unpunished.”

Thubten and his supporters were using a Spanish law dating back to 1985 that allows suspects to be tried for human rights cruelties committed abroad when a Spanish person is subjected to them. Spanish judges have invoked the doctrine of universal jurisdiction to inspect human rights exploitations overseas, especially in Latin American countries.

The law was used to arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998 on the orders of Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón. Spanish courts also tried to prosecute al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and many others. But in practice, very few cases have been brought to trial.

Thubten, who was born in Tibet in 1954, fled into exile with his family to Nepal in 1959, the same year when Tibet’s spiritual leader the Dalai Lama escaped to India. He brought the case in a Spanish court in 2006 along with the Spanish NGOs Comité de Apoyo al Tibet and Casa del Tíbet.

“Behind the motivation to pursue this case is only one agenda – that the world should know the reality of Tibetan suffering under the Chinese regime,” Thubten said.

The death toll from self-immolations in protest against Beijing’s hardline policies in Tibet has reached 127, he said. “With massive Chinese military presence inside Tibet controlling the people, Tibetans are living under constant repression with no freedom of religion or movement.”

Thubten is calling for a more unified European policy on human rights towards China. “We urge the EU [European Union] to play a major role by appointing an EU special coordinator on Tibet.”

Thubten added: “From my small action, I’m giving moral support to my Tibetans who live inside Tibet.”

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.”

MCRS, a government-approved community station, is one of a handful of localised radio stations providing China’s minorities with news and entertainment in their native languages. Presently, local state-run stations serve five out of 46 ethnic minorities and all programming is approved by the state.

[podcast]http://traffic.libsyn.com/ipsaudio/20120320_communityradio_tibet.mp3[/podcast]