Change Their Green Brains • • •

By ANTHONY HARTLEY TN March, 1959, following a rising in the holy 'city of Lhasa, the Government of the Dalai Lama proclaimed the independence of Tibet and repudiated the 'Agreement of Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet' which had been signed with the Government of the People's Republic of China in Peking on May 23, 1951. This agreement had been preceded by a Chinese invasion of Tibet and the defeat of the Tibetan army at Chamdo in the eastern part of the country, and its signature represented the reassertion of Chinese suzerainty over an out- lying province of the Chinese empire, whose status had always depended on the ability of Peking to make its will felt there. It provided for the return of 'the Tibetan people . . . to the big family of the MOtherland—the People's Re- public of China'; for the maintenance of the powers of the Panchen Lama (the Dalai Lama's traditional rival); for the absorption of Tibetan forces into the People's Liberation Army; and for the setting up of a Military and Administra- tive Committee. It also guaranteed that 'the re- ligious beliefs, customs and habits of the Tibetan people shall be respected and lama monasteries shall be protected'; that 'in matters relating to various reforms in Tibet, there will be no com- pulsion on the part of the central authorities'; and that 'the PLA entering Tibet shall abide by all the above-mentioned policies and shall also be fair in all buying and selling and shall not arbitrarily take a needle or thread from the people.'

It was nearly eight years after this apparently moderate treaty that widespread rebellion against Chinese overlordship and the flight of the Dalai Lama to India enabled the outside world to judge what conditions, were like in the Tibetan autonomous region. Now a legal inquiry committee of the International Commission of Jurists composed of distinguished and largely

Asian lawyers has published its report, Tibet and the Chinese People's Republic, which shows

pretty clearly how the seventeen-point agreement of 1951 was carried out from the Chinese side. Its principal findings are: 1. Acts of genocide have been committed in Tibet in an attempt to destroy the Tibetans as a religious group.

2. No less than sixteen articles of the .UN Declaration of Human Rights have been vio- lated by the Chinese. These include those for- bidding murder, rape, torture, large-scale deportations, and the setting of children against their parents. There were also viola- tions of the right to democratic government, to freedom of thought and expression, to reasonable working conditions and a reason- able standard of living.

3. That Tibet was 'a de facto independent State' in 1951, and that the repudiation of the Agreement on Peaceful Measures was fully justified, since it had persistently been violated by the Chinese.

The Committee did not find that there was suffi- cient proof of attempts to destroy the Tibetans as 'a race, nation or ethical group as such.' The word 'genocide' is therefore only applicable to Chinese policy towards Tibetan Buddhists con- sidered as a religious group.

The conclusions of the report are phrased in moderate and judicial language. Some care is taken to be fair to the Chinese, and possibly the only remediable omission in the evidence given (the inquiry committee was not allowed to enter Tibet itself) was the failure to reproduce medical evidence concerning stories of mysterious opera- tions carried out by Chinese doctors on the geni- tals of male and female Tibetans. The Tibetans themselves believed that they had been sterilised, but this was found not to be so. To a layman it looks rather as if these operations were in the nature of measures intended to control venereal disease, which, applied to a primitive people more or less by force, were naturally misinter- preted and roused panic among the patients. It is only fair to say that some of the Tibetans con- cerned denied ever having had venereal disease, In any case it would have been better to have included in the report an authoritative medical opinion as to what these treatments could pos- sibly have been. The refugees' accounts of them are remarkably consistent and precise.

Indeed, the same could be said of all the refugee narratives reproduced in the report. The tale is a sickening one of murder and brutality carried out by Chinese who clearly felt them- selves to possess an innate superiority over the backward Tibetans. What emerges is a horribly realistic picture of Tibet enjoying the blessings of rule from Peking.

He (a Tibetan collaborator] said . . . that it was better for the Tibetans that the Chinese should come and change such a backward people. The Tibetans themselves could not change their green brains and that the mixing of blood would be good for the Tibetan people. In 1956 the Chkriese began to take away new- born babies, telling the people that babies would interfere with their work. . . . The brains of tilt parents were rotten and the children's should not be the same.

His elder brother told the Chinese when they asked for three thousand children to be sent to China that 125 had already been sent and that it was impossible to send any more. . . . After being taken before a high Chinese official he was put to death, in Po-Tano. The family asked for news and for his body if he was dead. They were told that the body had been buried and they were asked what they wanted to do with it, eat it? One of the road-workers saw him being skinned to death.

He saw Dzorchen Rimpoche, one of the most famous lamas in Kham, tied down to four pegs and slit all the way down the abdomen.

They saw many Chinese inside and horses had been taken inside the temple. The Chinese brought women inside but the monks refused to take. them. These were Khamba women who were brought in groups surrounded by armed Chinese. Scriptures were turned into mattresses and also used for toilet paper. A monk named Turukhu-Sungrab asked the Chinese to desist and his arm was cut off above the elbow. He was told that God would give him back his arm.

These are a few instances taken at random from among hundreds reported by Tibetans from all walks of life. They need no commentary.

But it may be said—it has already been said by apologists for the new regime in Tibet—that all these stories are merely distortions of Chinese efforts to free the Tibetan people from the twin burdens of monasticism and feudalism. Slit a lama's stomach open? A little extreme perhaps, but the only way of loosening the grip of super- stition. Hammer a red-hot nail into a land- owner's forehead? Not quite what penal re- formers would recommend, but he probably did far worse to his serfs. Deport children? Only in order to give them a better, more progressive education. Tibet, after all, was a theocracy, a most unenlightened form of government, just ripe for the Aufklarung from the east. And so on. . . . But, as one reads the evidence, anger conquers irony. Fanatical Chinese Communists possibly believe the line put out by Peking and its propagandists, but in the face of rebellion carried out at enormous cost and continuing despite fierce repression (in the words of a recent number of Red Flag, 'the sizzling flame of activism is visible in both the agricultural and pastoral districts'), only those with 'green brains' could regard their arguments as anything but the usual patter of colonialists. 'They are much better off now. Under our rule the country has pro- gressed economically. Natives are always the worst oppressors of natives.' Justice was done to that sort of cant in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Tibet may have been a theocracy (judging by the Committee's remarks on the nature of Tibetan society it was not a particularly oppres- sive theocracy), but on any decent system of international morality it is impossible to accept the thesis that, because a country is backward, its more advanced neighbour has a right to occupy it and decimate its population. Moreover, the fact that the Chinese have a claim to suzer- ainty over Tibet hardly alters matters. Even if that claim were legally far sounder than it is, the fact remains that the Tibetans have usually managed to defend their independence through- out their history and eviclently wish to keep it now. If international law is made the grounds for handing over a people to their conquerors without protest, so much the worse for inter- national law.

Not that there seems much to be done about Tibet now. The history of past Chinese conquest and the observable fact that the only lasting form of dominion is that exercised over a much weaker and less advanced people across a land frontier make it probable that the Tibetans will be smoothly swallowed by the Chinese python. Chinese history is full of such instances. But it should be added that the British and Indian shelving of the Tibetan question in the UN in 1950 on the grounds that that country's status Was in doubt (not to mention the British absten- tion last year on the Irish and Malayan resolu- tion on Tibet) did no credit to either country. In the case of India it can also be said to demon- strate a remarkable lack of political foresight. Now the Indian Government finds its own fron- tiers threatened by Chinese aggression—a not infrequent result of trying to appease an expand- ing power at someone else's expense. History has its little ironies, but this one is hardly a laugh- ing matter.