Protests and posterity

Compiling ICT’s log of protests in Tibet from August 2008 to the present day brought out the whole spectrum of emotions. Primarily, it was impossible not to be deeply moved and impressed by the bravery of the protestors, particularly those who acted alone and could have been in no doubt they were risking their liberty and even their life by protesting in public; it was impossible too not to be terrified, particularly for child protestors or a monk in his nineties when so many of the protests provoked a violent reaction by police, including even beating protestors to death or opening fire with live ammunition; and there were other protests, like a string of related incidents in Jomda county in the Tibet Autonomous Region that are shocking for the depths of despair and desperation they reveal in parts of Tibet, and at the same time which vividly underscore the abject failure of China’s policies there. And then there are the occasional ones that actually raise a smile: during the widely reported protests in April 2009 by hundreds of students at a school in Labrang, local leaders were on the long drive to the provincial capital to proudly collect an award for “preserving stability” when news of the protests reached them and they had to return empty-handed, and, one likes to imagine, with egg on their faces.

And then to cap it all off there was a surreal sense of astonishment when looking up bleary eyed from a stack of accounts of protests to read China’s official line on Tibet: the Tibetan people are now their own masters; Tibetans are living happy and prosperous lives “like other ethnic groups”; and that only “an extremely tiny minority” protested – not because they have any grievance with the Party or their privileged status in the motherland, but because they were incited to perpetrate “violent criminal activities” by the Dalai Lama.

Along with implementing strict and repressive measures attempting to ensure that any information about the protests does not leave Tibet, such denials – or more accurately, such propaganda – has become the main means of explaining away the protests. And not only is the nature and legitimacy of the protests being denied and subverted, the mere fact that they took place at all is being completely omitted from government White Papers about China’s ethnic policies, or limited to depicting the protests as a single “riot” in Lhasa.

In the coming months and years, the Chinese authorities are undoubtedly going to further ratchet up their efforts to shift all culpability for the protests onto the Dalai Lama, while strenuously denying that Tibetans have anything to protest about in the first place. This line was more or less set in stone as early as March 15, 2008, the day after the protests in Lhasa turned violent, when according to Xinhua, the protests were “a political conspiracy plotted by the Dalai clique to split Tibet from the motherland”. (In contrast, on March 11, 2008 Jampa Phuntsok, Chairman of the TAR, while noting that a number of peaceful demonstrators had been questioned and released the day before, said “It’s really nothing.”)

The evidence of “the Dalai clique” being the masterminds behind the protests is at best flimsy, at worst laughable. Zhu Weiqun, Executive Deputy Director of the United Front Work Department and one of the Party’s main “point persons” on Tibet said in response to a question about accusations that the Dalai Lama was behind the protests, “I think the facts have been clear. First, the existence of the separatist group itself, including the ‘government in exile’, is against the Chinese law, and was the source of riots.” That, believe it or not, is about as compelling as the “evidence” ever gets.

ICT’s decision to log the protests, which will be an ongoing process of adding, verifying and corroborating information as and when it comes to us from various public and confidential sources, is intended to provide a rampart against the Chinese authorities’ attempts to denigrate and criminalize those Tibetans who risked their lives to protest against the iniquities and blindness of China’s policies in Tibet.