SILENT TEARS FOR TIBET
As the Dalai Lama leaves,
Michael Trend hears more voices
of the suffering we ignore
BY THE time this article appears, the Dalai Lama should be safely back on his way to his exile home in India. The British Foreign Office, who did so much to restrict the terms of his visit and the opportunities it might afford to the British public to hear the Dalai Lama's message, are to be congratulated for shooting themselves in the foot — once again. Far more attention and interest have been focussed on the Dalai Lama than on the Chinese Foreign Minister, Mr Wu Xueqian — the FO's friend — who visited Britain last month. The Foreign Office have helped, more than they could probably imagine, bring the sort of publicity to the Dalai Lama's visit that could not have been bought for a small fortune.
Why did this happen? Mainly because the Foreign Office position is so utterly out of touch with what reasonable people in this country feel about Tibet and the Tibetans that their view was easily exposed as the humbug that it is. Why then do they persist in it? Because the message that overrides all others coming out of the FO, led, it seems, from 10 Downing Street, about China is 'don't rock the boat over Hong Kong'. I saw this most vividly myself when I got ticked off by a FO functionary last week for The Spectator's part in the past months in preparing the British press for the Dalai Lama's visit. He looked me up and down at some length, obviously weighing up what would be the right line to take with me. With a grave look he said and it was meant to sting, as Wooster used to say — that I was being 'unpatriotic'. I was unrepentant by way of reply and he walked away from me shaking his head sadly like a headmaster regretting the failure of a particularly difficult boy who will come to no good in the world.
A few days later I saw a much more remarkable sight: a large crowd of guests at a reception given for the Dalai Lama at the Commonwealth Institute. At the end of the speeches a most extraordinary thing happened. Instead of heading for the food and drinks, instead of breaking away from the terraced galleries and striking up con- versations and greeting their friends, a thousand or so people — mainly British and non-Buddhist — stood just looking down at the Dalai Lama in almost perfect silence for some 20 minutes as he moved about the central platform talking quietly. It would have been a hostess's idea of a nightmare party, this silence and stillness, and the staring, but it was a tremendous testimony to the power of the Dalai Lama: it was just sufficient that he was there.
That, of course, is also China's main problem with the Dalai Lama — that he is there; but he is also their best chance to get a peaceful solution to their 'Tibet prob- lem'. For all their attempts to put pressure on the British press in the past weeks, they know well that in the end the Dalai Lama can offer them a way — quite unique for a modern imperial power — to ease their dilemma. That the Chinese know this became even clearer when I spoke to Mr Frederick Hyde-Chambers (recently awarded the Airey Neave Memorial Hu- man Rights Award) who, with Lord En- nals, has just visited Tibet — the first independent visitors allowed there since the major disturbance of 5 March. This small British party were received after their week in and around Lhasa at the highest level in Peking. The Chinese lis- tened with great interest and little hostility to the courteously delivered message they brought with them.
But the Chinese authorities on the ground in Tibet — like the Foreign Office — had also shot themselves in the foot: and for the same basic reason — that their position is so untenable that the very slightest pressure exposes it as such. They had made it clear that a very close eye was to be kept on Lord Ennals's party, thereby well advertising it to the Tibetans as a group of sympathisers.
0 n his return to Britain, Mr Hyde- Chambets spoke to me of the problems of trying to put over what he had seen in Tibet while avoiding the clichés of decades of sad stories of repression from all over the world. In the end — as those who have laboured for years for dissidents in the Soviet Union know — it is raw evidence that tells. Mr Hyde-Chambers told me what he had seen for himself in Tibet during, ironically, the very same days the Dalai Lama had been teaching in London. The Chinese told him that Lhasa was only five per cent Han Chinese; the evidence of his eyes told him that it was well over half. The Chinese told him that one monastery- he visited had 450 monks; he went all round it and counted only 94. The Chinese said that the 5 March riots had only involved a `few troublemakers'; evidence from Lhasa Tibetans and from the Panchen Lama in Peking puts the figure at upwards of 10,000. The Chinese said that only one soldier was killed; Mr Hyde-Chambers and Lord Ennals met scores of Tibetans who knew of many of their people who had died — including 16 monks — and, in the words of one of them, 'two or three more are killed each day'.
And the physical evidence that the party
brought back from Tibet is such that it cannot but add weightily to this account. Mr Hyde-Chambers put into my hands tattered sheets of paper torn out of flimsy copy-books covered in Tibetan script. These almost pathetic documents had the same power to move one as do the pack- ages of crumpled samizdat from the Soviet Union at Keston College — cries from a people terrified that the world will forget them and leave them to an unspeakable fate. 'To the Honourable Members of the House of Commons, with one voice, we the people of Tibet. . .' one began in translation; and I thought of how no MP has yet asked the Foreign Secretary the difficult questions in the Chamber that he should.
These documents came from a number of sources — some were just slipped into the visitors' pockets as they walked about. From them a picture — fragmented but unquestionably authentic — can be built up. Quite a few of them give tellingly similar stories of horrific incidents and conditions. Some give names of those killed on 5 March: 'Phuntsok, aged 37, of Lhasa Dashod Leather Factory', I found in one translation; and in another, Thuntsok, 37, Dashod Hat and Shoe Factory'. Who was Phuntsok? He had been a lucky Tibetan in one sense in that he had a job in a country where the indigenous population find it very difficult to get work. He was also of the right age and in the right type of position to be the sort of Tibetan that the Chinese authorities would have needed to win over.
Even if the Chinese intend to keep Tibet `closed' for ever, this sort of material will find its way out with ever-increasing reg- ularity and each Phuntsok — each documented individual and every documented incident — will be an ever greater thorn in the flesh of the Chinese.
But even more impressive — and very deeply moving — were some tape record- ings that Mr Hyde-Chambers had. They contained interviews with various people talking in the same calm, measured tones that I had heard the Dalai Lama use in his visit to Britain — and following his line in terms of their content, I was told. But suddenly, as the tape drew to a close, one could hear people moving close up to the microphone — realising, Mr Hyde- Chambers said, that this might be their only chance to speak direct to their spir- itual leader and to the world. With sobbing voices they gave passionate personal mes- sages. I sat there in the comfort of a London house listening with horror to an unmistakable story told in an unintelligible language. Each message ended with the speakers proudly enunciating their names — a tremendous potential risk — as if they had almost nothing else to lose. Then one word repeated over and over again in a hushed chorus: Mr Hyde-Chambers ex- plained, 'They're saying: thank you, thank you, thank you.'
Previous page
