By Andreas Lorenz
A Tibetan who once believed in the Chinese Communist Party and carved out a career within the Beijing bureaucracy has now decided to publish a damning report of China's policies in his country. To protect his anonymity, the official, who is known nationwide, met secretly with SPIEGEL at a restaurant in a Chinese provincial city. He hopes that what he has written about the oppression of his people will be published as a book in the West, thereby exerting pressure on leaders in Beijing.
Near the police station on
the main street of Xiahe, a town in China's Gansu Province, the Tibetan farmer
poured gasoline over his body and lit himself on fire. Images taken with mobile
phones show the man, engulfed in flames, running down the street until he falls
to the ground.
Police and soldiers immediately
appeared on the scene, jostling with bystanders trying to take Dorjee's charred
body to his house, according to Tibetan custom. The officers eventually
relented.
Dorjee is one of more than 100 Tibetans who have
turned to self-immolation since March 2011 in protest of Chinese rule in Tibet.
Another man, who also took his life a few days later, left behind a letter that
sums up the sentiments of these unfortunate people: "There is no freedom in Tibet. His Holiness the Dalai Lama
is not allowed to return home. The Panchen Lama is in prison."
The mood is desperate in the region known as the
"Roof of the World." Never before have so many Tibetans sacrificed
their lives in this manner to draw the world's attention to their fate. But not
everyone believes this is the right approach. A few hundred kilometers from the
Labrang Monastery, a high-ranking Communist Party official is shaking his head
in disapproval. The self-immolations, he says, are an "overreaction, an
excessively radical act. Buddhism forbids suicide."
And yet he can understand the motives, he says.
Conditions are dramatic in his native Tibet. "The economic situation, the
standard of living, culture and education have greatly improved in Tibet, he
says. But the government exacts too high a price from Tibetans in return for
this development, he adds, noting that Beijing is trying to discipline them
with violence. "There is substantial surveillance and limited
freedom."
The man is a senior official in the Communist
Party. He is well known, not only in Tibet but also throughout China, and no one suspects him of being a
member of the opposition. He is one of the privileged, someone who long
believed in the promised goal of a socialist China, one in which not only the
Han Chinese, but also Tibetans and all other ethnic groups would lead a better
life.
But now he intends to make a stand. "I am a
Tibetan, and I work in the government. I have the authority to describe what is
really going on," he says.
'Far Worse Than the West Suspects'
He has served the Chinese government since youth.
Like many Tibetans, he had who come to terms with the fact that Beijing has
ruled their country since the Chinese army invaded in 1950. These individuals
include party officials, police officers, propagandists, journalists and
engineers, all of whom behave like people who want to live in peace under
foreign rule. They assimilate, parrot the party slogans and enjoy their growing
affluence, though they often feel miserable in the end.
This helps to explain why this contemporary
witness sat down and penned an account of the more recent history of Tibet, as
seen through his eyes. He focuses on what the propagandists and chroniclers
working for the system suppress or sugarcoat, writing: "Everything was and
still is far worse than people in the West suspect."
He is determined to remain anonymous for as long
as possible. "I don't want to mention my name, I don't want you to mention
my profession, and you can only describe the place where I live in general
terms," he says.
He aims to have the book published abroad, which
is his only option, of course. If it emerged that he, a respected official,
were in fact a Tibetan dissident who compares the "fate of the
Tibetans" with that of the Jews under the Nazis, his comfortable existence
would quickly come to an end. He could face a prison term and possibly even the
death penalty.
The book is written in Mandarin, the language of
the rulers in Beijing. The author wants as many people as possible to
understand his people, who, as he says, have been "plunged into pools of
blood and purgatorial fire" in exchange for a foreign utopia.
Ironically, some Tibetans were initially pleased
to see the Chinese invade Tibet, because the new masters brought the promise of
modernity and prosperity. They believed that the Communists, led by Mao Zedong,
would help them liberate themselves from a brutal dictatorship of monks. The
Tibetan people lived a harsh life under the thumb of monasteries and the
aristocracy, who oppressed their subjects, treated them like serfs and whipped
them into submission.
But the mood changed when the Chinese government,
under Mao, did not keep its promise to allow the Tibetans to maintain their
traditions and religion. The collectivization of agriculture proved to be
especially devastating. Tibetan nomads were forced to settle in so-called
people's communes, destroying their traditional way of life. By the 1950s,
there was growing unrest.
Atrocities and Brutal Policies
In the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966
to 1976), the Red Guards, including many Tibetans, attacked their supposedly
"revisionist" and "imperialist" countrymen. Thousands of
monks were beaten to death or put in camps, and ancient relics were destroyed.
The Red Guards used their artillery to flatten hundreds of monasteries.
The Communist Party officials wanted to destroy
the culture of their subjects. Tibetan women, for example, were made to wear
the kinds of trousers worn by Han Chinese women, and helpers cut off their
braids. Clan elders and abbots were sent to reeducation camps, where they were
forced to study Mao's directives every day.
The Chinese military brutally crushed any
rebellions. When monks killed a corporal in the People's Liberation Army in
1956, a Chinese cavalry regiment exacted its revenge in the town of Qiuji Nawa
in Gansu Province with an attack on about "200 innocent women and
children. They surrounded a tent, threw hand grenades inside and then fired at
it."
The author quotes a former soldier who witnessed a
similar massacre: "Some women were stabbed in the vagina with swords and
their chests were split open. Some two- and three-year-old children were
grabbed and thrown into the Yellow River."
In the early 1980s, the Communist Party had to
admit that it had "seriously harmed the interests of the people" with
its brutal policy. By then, Tibet had become a permanently restive region. As
the Communist Party official writes, Beijing's claim that "millions of
Tibetan farmers" had become "masters of their own house under the
party's leadership" proved to be nothing but propaganda.
In his opinion, there are many
reasons for the unrest and the rage of Tibetans. One is that the long-cherished
hope that the Dalai Lama could one day return home from India, where the
Tibetan government in exile has its headquarters, is beginning to fade. Beijing
condemns him as a "traitor" and refuses to even consider talks.
It was an affront to Beijing when, in 1987, the
Dalai Lama spoke to members of the United States Congress in Washington, where
he presented his Five Point Peace Plan. He demanded, among other things, that
Beijing put an end to the immigration of Han Chinese to Tibet and its use of
the Tibetan Plateau as a nuclear waste dump. According to the Communist Party
official, after the visit "a new spirit of opposition began to grow among
young intellectuals and a few officials, as well as laborers, farmers and
shepherds."
No comments:
Post a Comment