A Just Cause Is Not Enough : Tibetans Lack Key Advantages of the <i> Intifada</i>

During past years when Tibetans were imprudent enough to hurl themselves against their Chinese occupiers, generating little notice abroad and even less support, I was sure that an important lesson for us all lay buried in their futile efforts. Yet it was only last month when the Tibetans began to once again challenge the Chinese--using, as they had before, simple stones--that I finally realized just what that lesson is. It is that, in this world, not all intifadas are created equal.

It was, of course, the Palestinian intifada aimed at Israel that made this realization possible. I suppose I should have had a hint of it a year ago March, when the Tibetan intifada last flared up and the Palestinian one was already 10 weeks old. But at the time the Palestinian uprising hadn’t yet achieved the success that it subsequently did, a success that enables it, a year later, to teach us so much about the Tibetan intifada in particular and all intifadas in general.

And what a success the Palestinian intifada has been. In just 16 months it has reset the geopolitics of the Middle East. It has overturned diplomatic agendas in every world capital. It has mobilized public opinion, in the United States and elsewhere, in favor of its goals. It has thrown the Israeli people into spasms of existential dread and agonies of moral turmoil. It has turned the once-fearsome Israeli army into a frustrated and ineffective police force. And it has revived the hopes of Palestinians, both those under Israeli occupation and those living in other places, that they will some day realize part, or even all, of their decades-old national dream.

This enormous success can be attributed primarily to three reasons. Most of all it’s due to the powerful images of violent resistance and military response that burned themselves nightly and relentlessly into the consciousness and memories of television-watchers everywhere, both ordinary citizens and government officials. These images, captured by battalions of cameramen and described by legions of reporters, were displayed in excruciating and compelling detail--detail that, in its repetitive, exquisite, prolonged and ferocious focus, turned individual instances of wounding and killing, and occasional episodes of brutality, into an endless landscape of large-scale murder and crushed bones.

Another reason for the success of the Palestinian intifada was the widespread support it received, not only from fellow Palestinians outside the occupied territories and fellow Arabs, but also from nations long sympathetic to the Palestinian cause (notably the East Bloc and the Third World) as well as those (Japan and Western Europe) whose economic needs in the Middle East have long influenced their diplomatic preferences.

Finally, the Palestinian intifada has been successful because the power against which it has focused itself operates under self-imposed restraints. Israel has not been prepared to do what other powers have done in response to similar challenges. Israel, however imperfectly, has engaged in riot-control, not war and extermination. The Palestinians know that they face a nation that is affected by its own traditions of justice and compassion. Or consider the case of the British in India. Had Gandhi attempted to wrest independence from, say, the Soviet Union or China, or even from many of the other European powers, he would have had to suffer a far larger number of deaths in his intifada and struggle many more years.

None of these characteristics that have made the Palestinian intifada a success have been present in the Tibetan intifada . The Chinese have made sure there would be few witnesses to the uprising, or their response to it. They banished not only reporters and cameras, but also tourists. The Tibetans have no outside supporters who count; the U.S. State Department, for its part, reacted to the news of the latest riots by reassuring the Chinese that it saw Tibet as forever belonging to China and by stressing the importance of addressing “the legitimate concerns of the inhabitants of Tibet,” not the legitimate rights of the Tibetan people. And the Chinese, for their part, have exercised few restraints in their responses to Tibetan rioters. For them the strategic value of Tibet is, by itself, more than enough justification for the total absorption of that country and for China’s settling of its own population there.

For the Chinese, therefore, calls for Tibetan independence are treasonous acts of insurrection, and street riots justify all the mass killings that may be necessary to end them. It’s not hard to understand why the Tibetan intifada has failed so consistently and why it will no doubt continue to fail.

But the Tibetan intifada isn’t the only one doomed to fail. Others, too, lack several or all of the qualities necessary for success. The several intifadas now simmering in the Soviet Union--the Armenian one, the Estonian one, the Latvian one, the Lithuanian one, the Georgian one, the burgeoning Ukrainian one--may have greater access to cameras and reporters than they would have had in the decades before glasnost . But that access is still a limited one. Should these areas erupt, outside support would be even weaker than it was for the East German, Polish, Hungarian and Czech intifadas that took place during the 1950s and ‘60s. And they would be suppressed no less brutally, quickly, efficiently.

And in many corners of the world, there are other intifadas that are likely, for various combinations of the same reasons, to fail just as surely--the Tamils in Sri Lanka, for example, the Sikhs in the Punjab, and that oldest and bloodiest intifada of them all, the Kurds, whose unhappy fate it is to attempt in obscurity, and without any reliable supporters, to wrest a homeland not from one brutal power but from three or four.

All of these failed and failing intifadas --like the many that have failed in history, including our own American Indian intifada, are unable to achieve success, but not because they are carried out in the name of a cause that is any less just than that of a successful intifada . They fail because of the nature of the circumstances in which they are pursued and the nature of their occupying enemy.

Clearly, any people that feels its land is occupied by another people or power would be wise to refrain from launching an intifada unless it can use the mass media to transmit and magnify its message, unless it can be sure to have outside friends ready to express their support in diplomatic if not military terms and unless it is occupied by an enemy that, like Israel, lacks the stomach to respond to it totally and ruthlessly. Unfortunately for Tibet, a just cause is never enough.