Let's Make a Deal - PRC and the Dalai Lama

Comment is Free -the Guardian 11 April
Ian Williams

It's absurd to claim the Olympics are not political. They are clearly designed to showcase the host country - and its government. No one knows which party will be in government in Whitehall for the London Olympics, but very few doubted which regime would be in charge in Beijing when the international Olympic committee picked it as the venue for this year's games.

It was equally clear that there were many interest groups eager to use China's concern that no one rained on its big parade to get leverage. The Olympic committee itself secured commitments on freedom of expression for the press, and NGO pressure has already secured weakening of China's support for Sudan. Watch out for similar processes and protest if Beijing protégé Robert Mugabe tries to hang on in Harare.

But over Tibet, Beijing is missing a serious opportunity. The Dalai Lama has made it clear all along that he would cut a deal with Beijing short of independence - which is not necessarily true of younger Tibetan activists suffering under Chinese occupation tactics. However, the Dalai Lama has enough clout to swing a compromise.

He is, after all, no longer young. In fact he is older than the People's Republic itself. Technically, when he dies, he enters the Celestial Olympic relay race. The monks in Tibet will go on their cross-country run to see into which newborn his soul has sprinted. At the risk of violating the new strictures from the UN human rights council on disrespecting religions, I may say that I doubt this myself.

Indeed even the Dalai Lama himself seems agnostic on the question, since he has been suggesting elections and similar un-heavenly ways of appointing a successor. The atheists in Beijing indignantly condemned any hint that reincarnation was not the way to go, waving the Book of the Dead with the fervour with which they once brandished Mao's Little Red Book.

Of course, some Chinese and their apologists claim that the Chinese occupation freed the Tibetans from religious obscurity and backwardness. They may even have a point. But then the British claimed to be rescuing Ireland from the backwardness of obscurantist papism - but forgot to ask the Irish about it. China is making the same mistake, and flooding the Himalayas with Han settlers is unlikely to help.

It is in the nature of totalitarian thought processes that they do not have to connect the dots between their dicta. If the Dalai Lama is a living, divine reincarnation, then they really should talk to the one they have now. He is urbane, reasonable and pragmatic by most quasi-divine standards,

When he dies, there will almost certainly be a schism: one effectively nominated by the Commissars, and another by the Tibetan Diaspora. The "Chinese" one will be rather young and inexperienced by definition, not to mention somewhat tainted by Beijing's hand in the selection, while the exterior one, if elected, would lack the traditional authority.

The existing Dalai Lama could accept a Hong Kong-style deal, albeit with real autonomy, in return for a Chinese flag and token garrison in Lhasa. Beijing allows Hong Kong to control the admission of other Chinese citizens, even though they share an ethnicity and languages. Tibet, and indeed the Uyghurs in Xinxiang should have the same privilege of controlling immigration. Hong Kong has its own representative offices around the world. Of course one presumes that the Tibetans want no sunset clause on their autonomy and democratic elections - which would give Beijing good reason to control the border to stop the infection spreading.

It would certainly be cheaper than the PRC's costs to maintain the occupation, which brings no economic return for the occupiers.

The alternative is that eventually China will have to accept that sovereignty is not a divine mandate from heaven, but derives from the consent of the government, and that Beijing's behaviour in Tibet is boosting the calls for independence. History proves that denying a people a say in their future reinforces their demands.

Time to talk to the Dalai Lama.

Sporting Chances for Burma?

China's Olympic workout

The Beijing Games next year may prove to be China's Achilles heel - if human rights groups can hit it.

Full text of Comment is Free
October 1, 2007 11:00 AM | Printable version

The UN general assembly and the Olympics may not seem that connected, but there are similarities. The latter is an official occasion for global peace and harmony to which almost every country in the world sends its national team to compete ferociously with others and whip up varying degrees of nationalist fervour at home.

Last week's meeting of the general assembly was no different, although we did miss Hugo Chavez's attempt to expand President Bush's reading material beyond the Pet Goat. There was something quite athletic about how different delegations raced up the aisles in the competitive walkout stakes to make sure that a row of empty seats greeted whoever the demon of the day was as he took the rostrum. The sprint was definitely the race that the original Olympians, the Greeks, won to protest the omission of (Former Yugoslav Republic of) from Macedonia's title.

The Cuban foreign minister's articulate and, sad to say, factually based (if somewhat one-sided) verbal assault on Bush, in reply to the latter's attack on Castro, played a nice counterpart to the orotundly obscure style of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In fact the puzzled expressions of the Iranian and American presidents almost had me thinking they were competing for the Mad Magazine Alfred E Neuman "What, Me Worry?" gold medal. (Bush wins on quotes.)

But the Iranian did actually put himself forward for the press - as long as they were not from the Israeli team. Bush may be somewhat challenged, but he knows his limitations enough to avoid unchoreographed and unscripted press conferences.

It may have been my early years as a conductor on football trains, but I've always been very dubious of the idea that sport and peace go hand in hand. Even apart from the personal experience of trying to fend off scores of rabid fans after someone's blood, sport's track record of promoting harmony does not impress. It is not just the fans - think of the football war of 1969. The Olympics has not been much better.

Indeed totalitarianism and the track seem much more closely related. From Hitler in 1936 - and it would have been held in Tokyo in 1940 if throwing javelins had not been overshadowed by firing shells - right on to Beijing, tough regimes love sport. Just look at the gymnastic splendour of a Kim Jong Il birthday party, the inhumane training regime of the East Germans.

At least one thing that can be said about the major American sports, baseball and the American version of football, is that since few other countries play them at a serious level, they are not really the occasions for xenophobic competitiveness on a grand scale. It seems like archetypal American isolationism that they have a baseball World Series just for themselves.

But the Beijing Olympics offers a genuine opportunity for peace. The Chinese are so concerned about urination on their 2008 parade that human rights organisations and governments that support human rights (and even those like Bush's that pretend to do so) have a rare but serious opportunity to get the Chinese onside. The Taiwanese know this - that's why they are staging their referendum on UN membership early in the New Year - not long before the Olympics.

From Darfur to Rangoon, there are definite signals that roguish states that have benefited from Chinese diplomatic protection are feeling a little chilly. The more calls there are for boycotts, the less likely Beijing is to go out on a limb for its mass murdering friends.

Human rights supporters should keep talking boycotts, and they may even put some truth in the rumours of a responsibility to protect that the UN general assembly voted for in 2005, with none against. China seems to have forgotten that principle - that mass murders by governments are a threat to international peace and security that demand United Nations action.