Flesh is Grass

The Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD) reports that at least 64 protesters have been killed, over 1000 arrested, hundreds have vanished and homes have been ransacked and raided. Chinese officials, on the other hand, put the number of arrests at 24 - but they seem to be distinguishing between arrest and ’surrender’ - a distinction which probably should be ignored.

Last week India helped China to avoid embarrassment by, from what I can gather, arresting peaceful protesters. There seems to be a law against “threatening the region’s peace and tranquility”.

If you scan the pages of TCHRD for some sense of what democracy might look like for Tibet, how it might get there, there’s nothing - the democracy part is practically non-existent, or lost in the advocacy.

Around 40% of China’s mineral resources are in Tibet, including gold, coal and what are estimated to be the world’s largest deposits of uranium. Tibet is huge, Western-Europe-sized, with space for an expanding Chinese population and, mostly grassland and high desert surrounded by the world’s highest mountains, plenty of out-of-the-way spots for disposing of nuclear waste. England attempted to take control of Tibet for a while in 1904, and Russia wanted it. China’s ‘peaceful liberation’ of Tibet began in 1949 and was complete by 1951 with the death of 10,000 Tibetans. Two eastern provinces were annexed, and the remainder became the Tibet Autonomous Region. Mao’s Cultural Revolution followed, sloganised as “Smash the Four Olds”- ideas, culture, customs and habits. For Tibetans this mean a reduction in the number of monasteries from 6000 to 6. Although there was some relaxation in the 1980s, Tibetan culture and religion - Tibet is of major importance for Buddhists - face discouragement. The incumbent Dalai Lama, identified as Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, was detained in 1995 and vanished; the Chinese substitute, Gyaincain Norbu, has been rejected by the Tibetans. Han immigration is encouraged and rewarded by the Chinese government; the 7% of Han settlers in the 2.8m population have disproportionate influence and appropriate much of the increase in GDP witnessed since settlement began in earnest. Alongside the existing three airports, the opening of the Golmud-Lhasa railway is likely to intensify change and consolidate China’s control. Environmentalists are also concerned about the impact of development and tourism on the rare species of the region.

The recent demonstrations against Chinese occupation, marking the 49th anniversary of the uprising that led to the current Dalai Lama’s flight to Dharamsala, were begun peacefully by monks with a parallel protest by students and lay people. It’s not clear what triggered the firioting but the massed Chinese army appeared to have been expecting it. Its swift military crackdown resulted in a violent escalation.

What is happening? Like most people I’m very ignorant about Tibet. It’s interesting to observe that, as in the case of Palestinians, the reporting and support for Tibetan independence (which I also support) is occurring in a historial vaccuum. Going by the intense interest in Palestinians I thought Comment is Free bloggers would be supporting Tibet as a national liberation movement, but Tibet is completely missing from its front page this lunchtime. There’s one instance of China - it appears in the word ‘machinations’ in a post by Robert Norton-Taylor on the legacy of Iraq. A CiF search reveals Alex Stein on growing links between Jews and exiled Tibetans, arising from Tibetan interest in how Jews have survived exile as a people and regained their sovereignty. Also I’m getting Brendan O’Neill for once - as usual he’s playing moral police officer, more critical of the flavour of concern for Tibet than worried about Tibet itself. I have to grudgingly concede that as usual he makes a number of good points. One is that the fetishisation the Dalai Lama is not effective in campaigning for democracy in Tibet:

It would be like Britain being under occupation, and campaigners around the world hailing Prince Charles or, worse, Dr Rowan Williams as our true, brave, godlike spokesperson.

Another is about the anti-modern, occidentalist quality of support for Tibet:

In his 1991 book Sacred Tibet, Philip Rawson wrote: “Tibetan culture offers powerful, untarnished and coherent alternatives to Western egotistical lifestyles, our short attention span, our gradually more pointless pursuit of material satisfactions…” In other words, the driving force behind Tibetophilia today is not political solidarity with the Tibetans, and certainly not any positive argument for full democratic equality for Tibetans, but rather a sense of disgust with western life. It is a deeply narcissistic project, where “the west perceives some lack within itself” and seeks to find fulfilment in the always-preserved “pure east”.

This is why pro-Tibet campaigning can so easily slip into ugly China-bashing. In the morality tale constructed around Tibet, China comes to be seen as the evil representative of modernity, a faceless, smog-producing people who are ruining western activists’ spiritual backyard in Tibet. As Donald S Lopez Jnr argues in his fascinating book Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West:

“The invasion of Tibet by [China] was and still is represented as an undifferentiated mass of godless Communists overrunning a peaceful land devoted only to ethereal pursuits… Tibet embodies the spiritual and the ancient, China the material and the modern. Tibetans are superhuman, Chinese are subhuman.”

Too much of today’s pro-Tibet campaigning is underpinned by two things: self-loathing for our own, apparently over-modernised societies, and a semi-colonialist view of Tibetans as spiritual children and the Chinese as evil automatons. No wonder it can attract the support of such an archaic, illiberal figure as Prince Charles. Tibetophilia will do nothing whatsoever to increase the freedom of the people of Tibet, or the people of China.

By way of background on Tibet there’s a wide-ranging list of information sources and primary texts for Columbia University’s Modern Tibetan Studies Programme. There’s a very fresh piece by Mark Leonard in Prospect about China’s intellectuals and their search for alternatives to German or Nordic models of the state, “sophisticated techniques to prolong its survival and pre-empt discontent” resulting in a “deliberative dictatorship” which China hopes will prove the democratic world wrong. But despite evidence of much more debate and deliberation than those outside China are maybe used to assuming Amnesty International’s 2007 annual report informs us that China’s membership of the newish UN Human Rights Council has achieved little reduction in sales of arms to repressive regimes such as Burma and Sudan, or in harassment, suppression and detention of dissenters, restrictions on freedom of expression and religion, or a change in the death penalty for a number of non-violent crimes.

For news about now, 10×10 is a good snapshot of what is current, or has been at any given time since it started in November 2004. The Time China blog is keeping up with the ongoing demonstrations as best it can. Also The Guardian. There are press releases from the Free Tibet Campaign, the International Campaign for Tibet and the Tibet Centre for Human Rights and Democracy.

Some recent accounts from around the web:

China’s Xinhua news agency said ten “innocent civilians” burnt to death in fires in an unverified report which said no foreigners were harmed.

The Tibetan government in exile, a group based in the north Indian town of Dharmsala, put the death toll much higher claiming that around 100 Tibetan demonstrators were killed and many more injured.

“The Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet’s Buddhists, urged China not to use violence to quell the protests, which he called “a manifestation of the deep-rooted resentment of the Tibetan people under the present governance”.

“I therefore appeal to the Chinese leadership to stop using force and address the long-simmering resentment of the Tibetan people through dialogue with the Tibetan people,” he said in a statement.

China offered a swift riposte, the official Xinhua news agency issuing a statement blaming the violence on the “Dalai clique”, Beijing’s usual term for the Dalai Lama’s supporters”

“Several buildings owned by Chinese immigrants and Chinese Muslim immigrants were set on fire,” the witness said. “All those shops owned by Chinese were ransacked and burned. Tibetan shop owners were told to mark their shops with scarves.”

“Tibetans attacked Han Chinese indiscriminately, hurling stones.”

“Tibetan sources in the city said the protesters were burning and smashing Chinese shops and anything Chinese as they moved through the city, leaving thick black smoke billowing over Lhasa.”

“The chanting mob beat up around five or six drivers who had to be carried away with blood on their faces … then they put a motorbike under the fire engine and set fire to it so the engine was burned.”

China has promised to punish the orchestrators of the uprising. The ultimatum from China is that in return for leniency the unrest must end by Monday. The Burmese were quickly resubmerged by Western forgetfulness but the Olympics will shine a light on Tibet until 24th August.

John Pilger is an ill-considered but prolific social commentator fuelled by intense anti-imperialism. Although he’s louder than he is important, I was excited to acquire my first John Pilger book, 2007’s ‘Freedom Next Time’, as I was trawling the train at Cannon St looking for a copy of The Sun for some budget aftermath. Somebody had abandoned it (I surmise) in despair of learning anything of use. I found it on the floor with its cover bent back and a footprint on it.

It’s incredibly wide-ranging and systemic criticism of, from what I can gather Western, ‘domination’ and ‘betrayal’ of ‘invisible’ communities (although he also gives a lot of ink to Palestinians who are dominated but very visible indeed) and the suffering they experience at the hands of the architects and props of America, which he considers a ‘pre-fascist state’.

I opened it on several random pages and found only demagogic cavilling, achieved through selective quoting, heavy use of inverted commas and badly-cited references which discourage readers from checking his sources.

On example concerning the West Bank refugee camp of Jenin, Pilger recounts a challenge from Ha’aretz’ London Correspondent to The Guardian over its description of Operation Defensive Shield, the 2002 Israeli incursion into Jenin and one of the bloodiest episodes of the 2nd Intifada, as a ‘massacre’. With ostentatious incredulity Pilger points to the cold-blooded killing of children and a disabled man, implying that to question the way these were reported was nothing more than a diversion. As well as dealing very lightly with the circumstances of the incursion, he ignores, in the light of the myriad ways the emotive term ‘massacre’ has been invoked to delegitimise Israel or to foment hatred against Israel, the generally acknowledged irresponsibility and, for some, the political expediency, of referring to the strikes in this way. A few weeks ago at Jewish Book Week Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger apologised for writing in an editorial that “Israel’s actions in Jenin were every bit as repellent as Osama Bin Laden’s attack on New York on September 11″. It’s big of him but it did an immense amount of damage at the time. Pilger doesn’t discuss this.

Regarding his support for Hamas and Chavez (I’m not familiar with his writing on Africa - maybe it’s better) this is just more underdoggism disguised as a defense of the weak. The weakest people of all in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians are those who wish to resist the fear-mongering, to avoid the knee-jerk retaliation and counter-retaliation and to accommodate each other as far as possible in a two-state solution. People like Yossi Beilin and Saeb Erekat. Pilger won’t extend his support to them.
The trouble is that, in the case of Israel and Palestine, Pilger’s pet resistance isn’t simply”courageous people battling to free themselves” from occupation. It’s adulterated by incitement to hate Jews and by external - and in the case of Iran imperialist, incidentally - forces against Israel’s very existence. In this book Pilger doesn’t ask us to think, only to gulp down the sour, curdled Pilgerism.

While Israel plans its incursion into Gaza, the worst and loudest anti-Zionists are fighting each other. One is suing another for libel.

The litigious one also tried to close down a blog [1] but Google (it was a Blogger blog) refused and I want it noted that Google here does not quite fit the bill of ‘Zionist tool’ [2]. It is quite a climb-down for a revolutionary socialist to deploy ‘bourgeois law’ like this - almost everybody thinks that British libel law is whimsical, subjective and intrinsically unfair. Meanwhile somebody is leaving deposits all over the blogosphere, including this blog, humiliating sour little posts which link out to other sites to the effect that the substance of what was written is not a libel because everybody thinks and says it. This is how libel law works.

This internecine scuffling has been going on for over a year. Principally, it’s bad for the Palestinians. And it’s bad for free speech. It also reflects badly on the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign which I care less about because, as people have noticed, it has been overtaken by an anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish agenda for some time. Also (these two probably won’t care and it’s nobody’s business but antisemites will make capital out of it because they are both Jewish / ex-Jewish) it looks bad for Jews.

It’s generally bad. There’s no good reason not to just stop.

1 http://peacepalestine.blogspot.com/2008/02/try-to-censor-peacepalestine-its-tony.html
2 http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/211

The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade collaborate with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Brigades of United Resistance to explode another couple of kids in Dimona. One woman is killed, as well as the second suicide bomber, shot before he managed to detonate himself. Hamas spokesman Ayman Taha calls this act of terror on civilians in a shopping centre a ‘glorious act‘. BBC report it as a ‘rare’ suicide bombing and say it is unclear whether the bombers came from Gaza via Egypt.

Settlers of Havat Gilad, near the West Bank town of Jit are suspected of destroying 200 olive seedlings which Rabbis for Human Rights helped to plant with Palestinian farmers. RHR call on the callously unresponsive IDF regiments posted in the area to monitor the settlers.

A “revolutionary and interesting change“, the Jewish National Fund will commemorate the remains of Palestinian villages which are in JNF parks which were destroyed in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. They will have to answer to vandals who deny that there is anything to remember.

A man takes a bullet in the leg for throwing stones by soldiers in a West Bank village, but the man has a hereditary disease and is practically blind. IDF soldiers interrogate his father and shred his Israeli work permit in front of his eyes. Like his leg, the son’s nerves are shot to bits.

Hamas and Egypt are collaborating to control the flow of people in and out of Gaza. Hamas wants to sever ties with Israel, Egypt isn’t sure it wants responsibility for supplying a Gaza which comes with a Muslim Brotherhood vipers nest thrown in. Ha’aretz reports that despite all the excitement, little has changed there.

Last week I forced myself to watch Storyville on Darfur - The Devil Came on Horseback - about former UN ceasefire monitor Brian Steidle’s campaign to persuade the world to protect Darfurians from the Sudanese government, and felt sporadically nauseous for several days afterwards. 250,000 dazed, bereaved Darfurian refugees, oozing displacement, exist in limbo on Chad’s Eastern border where they are subject to raids by the Janjaweed (there is controversy about whether this does in fact translate as ‘devils on horseback’, and if it doesn’t then it has to be said that the documentary is irresponsibly titled considering the way Arabs are frequently negatively stereotyped in the media). The Sudanese government are backing the rebel forces who have been assaulting Chad’s capital N’Djamena.