In the late 1980s the big news was that peace was breaking out in Asia. One after the other, from Afghanistan to Cambodia, the killing fields happily reverted to their traditional role of feeding people. And Asia — or those regions racked by invasion and civil war — prepared for a long break from slaughter. But a decades later, the welcoming sound of peace breaking out is now a faint echo among the sound and fury of renewed war and carnage. From Indonesia to Kosovo the world is back to doing what it does best: mutual slaughter.
The unravelling of the international system imposed on the world by the big powers after the Second World War has thrown up numerous movements for independence. All are violent ones or have the potential of being calamitous. The bloodiest is the war in Kosovo. Europe, which has given us two world wars but since then looked by the rest of us as a haven of peace and stability, is once again back to the business of war.
With old and new hot spots flaring across the globe, the question is how have the Tibetans managed to keep their freedom struggle non-violent for so long? Why is Tibet’s non-violent struggle relevant and important to the rest of the world?
Seeking non-violence
A part of the answer lies in the personality of the Dalai Lama and his Buddhist beliefs. His uncompromising attitude towards violence and his unquestioned authority among the Tibetan people have prevented the Tibetans in Tibet and in exile from taking up arms. And in the Tibetans’ ability to keep their struggle non-violent lies the ability of a large part of Asia to check itself from falling into the abyss of violence and civil strife. A sustained Tibetan armed struggle could trigger a similar upsurge of ethnic anger and violence among the Uighurs of Xinjiang and Mongols of Inner Mongolia where discontent and ethnic pride have continued to simmer and flare. Like the Tibetans, the Mongols and Uighurs bristle at their boot-heel subjugation by China. The consequences of violence breaking out in any of these parts would be unpredictable for China.
The Tibetan struggle initially started off as a violent and desperate reaction to the Chinese communist invasion and occupation of Tibet. The comparative military strength and leadership qualities of China and Tibet did not deter the rag-tag Tibetan army in challenging one of the world’s largest fighting machines. The battle hardened People’s Liberation Army, flushed with victory over the nationalist Chinese, simply brushed aside the Tibetan army in its onward march to Lhasa.
The defeat of the Tibetan government forces led to the signing of the 17-point Agreement in which Tibet was forced to admit that it was a part of China. In return China promised to leave Tibet’s traditional social order intact and respect the power and prerogatives of the Dalai Lama. In this way, from 1951 to 1959 Buddhist Tibet co-existed uneasily with Communist China. Some Chinese scholars trace the origins of the present one country, two systems concept with which Hong Kong lives under Chinese sovereignty to this agreement China made with Tibet.
However, Hong Kong because of its financial clout provides China a powerful incentive to keep its promises. Tibet, despite its mass and bulk, had no such incentives to offer. Beijing soon began to nibble away at the influence of both the Tibetan government and the monasteries. China also began to impose drastic socialist reforms on eastern and northeastern Tibet, which sparked Tibetan resentment, compelling the Tibetans to take matters into their own hands. Suspecting that communist China was striking at thr very root of Tibet’s separate cultural and ethnic identity, the Tibetans formed a nucleus of resistance movement. Comprising mainly of Khamba tribesmen, the resistance that began in eastern Tibet within a couple of years engulfed the whole of Tibet.
The vicious cycle of Chinese repression and Tibetan resentment presented the Tibetan government and specifically the Dalai Lama with a tricky task of how to handle Tibetan people’s anger or caution patience in the face of the incremental demands of the Chinese authorities for more influence in Tibet. In the choice the Dalai Lama made between his pacifist religious beliefs and his people’s natural instincts to take to arms lies the genesis of the Tibetan philosophy of non-violence. Throughout the 1950s the Dalai Lama felt that he was sitting between two volcanoes, each likely to erupt at any moment. He knew the dire consequences if the Tibetans pitted their raging anger against the might of China. It was the classic case of the rock and the egg. If the egg was thrown at the rock, the egg would be smashed. If the rock was thrown at the egg, again the egg would be smashed.
Above all the Dalai Lama was torn between his roles as both the political and spiritual leader of Tibet and his helplessness in the face of growing Tibetan anger and rapidly diminishing Chinese patience. In his autobiography, My Land and My People, the Dalai Lama wrote, “Worst of all, I felt I was losing control of my own people. In the east they were being driven to barbarism. In central Tibet they were growing more determined to resort to violence; and I felt that I would not be able to stop them much longer, even though I could not approve of violence and did not believe it could possibly help us.”
Dalai Lama’s role in exile
In the 1950s the Dalai Lama was only in his teens. The Tibetan struggle had gone too far into a violent phase for the Dalai Lama’s peaceful approach to make any appreciable impact on the resistance movement. The fiery cauldron of repression and resistance boiled over in March 1959 when Tibetans took to the streets of Lhasa to demand independence. The Chinese reaction was predictable and brutal. The result, in terms of human lives, was catastrophic. By whatever estimate the calculations are based on, the Tibetan population was decimated. According to official Chinese data, in the fighting in the 1950s, the crackdown on the 1959 uprising and the mopping up exercise which followed, about 87,000 Tibetans were killed in central Tibet alone. Tibetan exiles put the total number of Tibetans killed at 1.2 million.
The Dalai Lama, followed by thousands of Tibetan refugees, sought asylum in India. But the resistance movement continued from new bases in Mustang, Nepal. However, because of the rapprochement between the US and China in the early 1970s, the CIA funding for the resistance dried up. At the same time the Nepalese Army moved in to disarm the Tibetan guerrillas. The guerrillas refused. The Dalai Lama intervened by sending an emissary with a taped message urging them to peacefully surrender their arms. The guerrillas surrendered, but several, torn apart by the need to obey their political and spiritual leader and their commitment to the cause of Tibetan freedom, committed suicide. This ended the violent phase of the Tibetan freedom struggle and a critical chapter in Tibetan history was closed.
In exile, the Dalai Lama had more time to reflect on the Tibetan situation and how he could deal with it. Right from the start he and his advisers realised that the issue of Tibet could only be solved satisfactorily through a process of negotiations with the Chinese government. However in the 60s and 70s, China was in no mood to talk. Because of this, many young Tibetans questioned the relevance and effectiveness of the non violent strategy the Dalai Lama advocated. They pointed out that their opponent was a one party dictatorship. That Gandhi and his non-violent philosophy succeeded because the British were great sticklers, if not for the spirit of law but at least for the semblance of justice being done. The response the Dalai Lama made against these compelling arguments was shaped by two factors: his Buddhist beliefs and the ground reality.
For Buddhists everywhere, life in all its diverse forms is sacred. By killing a person you are committing the worst negative act because you are depriving that person of a chance to enlightenment. As for the geo-politics of the Tibetan situation, the Dalai Lama believes that any sort of armed Tibetan uprising would constitute mass suicide. An armed uprising would be the best excuse for China to obliterate the Tibetans from the face of the earth. Instead the Dalai Lama made his own proposal of the Middle Way Approach, carefully crafted on non-violence and on a policy of not seeking outright independence for Tibet. He explained his ideas in two documents, the Five Point Peace Plan and the Strasbourg Proposal. As one would expect, China rejected this proposal. And the non-violent struggle continues to this day.
Reference books:
Kalampedia 