Run for the Parliament or Forever Hold Your Peace

This year marks 25 years since His Holiness the Dalai Lama first unveiled before the US Congress his Five Point Peace Plan for Tibet. This peace plan, along with the Strasbourg proposal of 1988, formed the bedrock of what has since been known as the Middle Way policy of our exile administration. This policy has been subjected to a number of piercing critiques over the last 25 years but despite receiving a harsh review, it has gone on to attain a monolithic personality of its own. Speaking ill of it has got people accused of disloyalty to the Dalai Lama and proposing alternative approaches has earned them reputations as extremists and radicals. Needless to say, changing this policy altogether has become a forlorn possibility. Regretably, our exile administration has not even considered making a few strategic adjustments to the current policy of reconciliation with Beijing in order to induce the latter to come to the table.

In light of this fact, I think any change in the existing orthodoxy is inconceivable so long as our veteran activists, intellectuals and emerging youth icons, who profess political views contrasting that of the policymaking elite in Dharamsala, keep on operating outside the exile institutions and choose only to episodically cry foul from the side-lines.

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Circling the Issue: South Asian Connections to Tibet

(Iona Liddell & I jointly wrote this article for the South Asia Journal. Iona is a freelance writer-activist who has lived and worked in India, Bangladesh and Nepal. She writes on human rights, conflict and refugee issues in South Asia.)

The town was under complete lock down that cold January day when two young Tibetan men ducked into the courtyard of a hotel, doused their bodies in kerosene and set themselves alight. Running out into the streets of Ngaba in Sichuan province they shouted “His Holiness the Dalai Lama must return to Tibet” and “May His Holiness the Dalai Lama live for 10,000 years!” as they burned. Tennyi, a monk of Kirti monastery, died of his injuries that same day, and Tsultrim, thought to be an ex-monk of the same monastery, passed away the next day.

Tennyi and Tsultrim’s self-immolations were the first of 2012 in Tibet. There have been 23 more since then, taking the total number of self-immolations since 2009 to 38. Over that time, the image of the burning Tibetan – most often a monk or a nun, but also lay people, the young and the old – has been seared by the media into the world’s consciousness. Struck by the poignant horror of such acts, and unable to conduct field research, there has been a certain reticence amongst commentators to deal with their meaning analytically. But the self-immolations are clearly messages. Although an exhaustive statement cannot be made about what each of the self-immolations ‘means’, at the very least it can be concluded that the Tibetans who self-immolated were not content with their lot and, as the immolations were public spectacles, this discontent was sourced outside of themselves in the local socio-political context. It can thus be speculated that their acts embodied the concerns of many people in the same area.

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Transcript of My 10th March Speech

Tashi Deleg & Good Afternoon, Everyone!

My name is Samdup Tenzin and I am a Tibetan postgraduate student at the Edinburgh University. May I begin by expressing our heartfelt gratitude to Alison Johnstone, the Green Party MSP for Lothian for taking time out of her busy schedule to be amongst us today. The fact that you have come here physically to show your support for our cause really means a lot to us.

The last 53 years have been a period of unimaginable pain and suffering for our people. The Tibetans inside Tibet have been at the receiving end of decades of political repression, cultural assimilation and economic marginalization. Their voices have been routinely stifled and their genuine grievances left unaddressed. The increase in number of self-immolations in the past year is indicative of the degree of desperation and helplessness experienced by Tibetans inside Tibet. 

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