Dalai Lama Faces Tibetan Impatience

Dawa Tsering emerged from six years of humiliation and torture in a Chinese prison ready to take up arms to expel the Chinese from Tibet.

He did not, Tsering said, because the Dalai Lama preaches peaceful resistance.

Yet, inside Tibet and among young refugees like Tsering who slip across the border into India, militancy and impatience are confronting the Dalai Lama, exiled leader of Tibet and apostle of nonviolence.

“People in Tibet, especially people like me, say we should start hit-and-run actions,” said Tsering, who escaped from Tibet at the end of April after a harrowing 23-day flight on foot. “Even if it doesn’t give us our independence, at least it would put the Chinese in a corner.”

Only the unquestioned authority of the Dalai Lama, who is revered as a reincarnated god, has held radicals in check.

As the conflict drags through its fourth decade, however, impatience “could lead to a more violent movement by the people in Tibet,” said Tashi Wangdi, foreign minister of the Dalai Lama’s government in exile, based in this town in the lower Himalayas. “That is a major concern for His Holiness.”

The award of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize to the Dalai Lama reinforced his argument that nonviolence is more effective than bombing railroads and sniping at Chinese soldiers.

In Tibet’s case, active resistance, “apart from the principle, would be suicide,” Wangdi said.

China claims that Tibet has been Chinese since the 13th Century and sent its army into the starkly beautiful “land of snows” in 1950.

In 1959, the Dalai Lama shed the maroon habit of a Buddhist monk and fled in disguise to India. He eventually was joined by 115,000 refugees.

Now, after 33 years, Tibetans say time is running out for their hopes of independence.

They say Beijing, offering high pay to workers and easy credit to businessmen, has encouraged mass immigration of ethnic Han Chinese to submerge Tibetan culture and ethnicity and that their 6 million people are outnumbered by 7.5 million Chinese.

“Tibetans who speak out against the Chinese government are at risk of imprisonment, possibly for years, and torture,” Amnesty International said in a report May 20.

The human rights organization, based in London, said at least 200 civilians were killed in clashes between the time of the 1987 uprising in the capital, Lhasa, and 1990. China reported only 28 deaths in that period, including members of the security forces.

New allegations of torture and repression reach Dharmsala with each arrival at the Refugee Reception Center, which houses 130 people who have come out in the last few months.

Tsering, a former policeman, said he was arrested for stepping into a fight between Chinese and Tibetan moviegoers and clubbing a Chinese man senseless.

In prison, Tsering said, he was beaten continuously for two days by 18 Chinese guards working in shifts, then thrown into solitary for a month. During his six-year term, “the Chinese abused us, they treated us like dogs,” he said.

The feudal structure of the Dalai Lama’s authority has loosened in exile, allowing opposing views to be heard for the first time.

Late last year, an expanded Parliament was elected with the new power, at least on paper, to impose binding decisions on the Dalai Lama.

In February, it resolved that any dialogue with China should be based on the premise of full independence. That put a formal end to the Dalai Lama’s proposal in 1988 to make Tibet a “self-governing democratic political entity,” with foreign affairs and defense remaining in Chinese hands.

No political parties exist among the exiles, but an informal opposition challenges the essence of the Dalai Lama’s philosophy of peaceful protest.

“We are ready to use all means, including violence if need be,” said Tsewang Thuntso, president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, which claims 12,000 members. “We are desperate.”