Chinas Blackbox-Politik, dahinter eine „Hölle auf Erden“

Chinas Blackbox-Politik, dahinter eine „Hölle auf Erden“

Am 10. März 2009 war der Jahrestag der Niederwerfung des Volksaufstands der Tibeter und seit 50 Jahren ist der Dalai Lama im Exil. China hat möglichen Unruhen mit einer sehr wirkungsvollen Blackbox-Politik vorgesorgt. Kaum ein Ausländer darf nach Tibet, Journalisten wurden herausgeflogen (siehe Ausschnitte aus New York Times-Beitrag).

Für die Tibeter ist ihr Land seit 50 Jahren zur „Hölle auf Erden“ geworden. ... traurig.

"Dies stieß die Tibeter in solche Abgründe von Leid und Not, dass sie im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes die Hölle auf Erde durchlebten." sagte der Dalai Lama zitiert aus Die Zeit.

Dabei strebten die Tibeter nach nichts anderem als nach einem Arrangement, wie sie innerhalb der Volksrepublik leben könnten. "Ich habe keinen Zweifel, dass sich die gerechte Sache Tibets letztlich durchsetzen wird", sagte der 73-Jährige Dalai Lama. Sein Volk strebe nicht nach Unabhängigkeit, sondern nach einer rechtmäßigen Autonomie.

Aber es gibt noch Hoffnung, dass sich das Herz der chinesischen Führung öffnet für ein kleines Volk in einem großen verschlossenen Land auf dem Dach der Welt.

Der Dalai Lama ist beharrlich und verhandelt bisher ohne sichtbares Ergebnis. Er möchte nicht nur Versprechungen von Wohlstand und wirtschaftlicher Entwicklung, sondern Autonomie für sein Volk in Tibet.

Siehe weiter auch Die Zeit unter: www.zeit.de/themen/international/tibet/index

Der Dalai Lama ist zum bedeutendsten spirituellen Lehrer unserer Zeit geworden.
Ein „einfacher Mönch“  wie er sagt, aber ein Buddha des Mitgefühls wie ihn viele sehen.
Ein Buddha hat Budhichita, den Erleuchtungsgeist, den er ausstrahlt und der die Menschen ergreift. Er überträgt dieses Bewusstsein bei seinen Reden und durch seine Bücher in aller Welt auf viele Millionen von Menschen, die tief ergriffen sind.

Im vergangen Jahre hatte ich das Glück den Dalai Lama in Bethlehem Pensilvania, Bochum, Mönchengladbach  und in Nantes zu sehen. Meinen Sohn Aaron hat er in Mönchengladbach gesegnet und auch mich in Bethlehem. Ein Segen ist auch eine Übertragung. Dafür bin ich dankbar, es macht mich glücklich, aber traurig bin ich über das, was in Tibet geschieht.

 Aus der New York Times  mehr zum Tibet Jahrestag von EDWARD WONG (March 14, 2009).
Wir zitieren kurz einige Ausschnitte:

„ The Heights Traveled to Subdue Tibet

The paramilitary officer took our passports. It was close to midnight, and he and a half-dozen peers at the checkpoint stood around our car on the snowy mountain road. After five days, our travels in the Tibetan regions of western China had come to an abrupt end.

My colleagues and I waited for the police to arrive. We were to be escorted to the local police station, interrogated and put on a plane back to Beijing.

“This is for your own safety,” the paramilitary officer said.

The detention, two weeks ago, was not entirely unexpected: I was reporting on Tibet, one of the most delicate issues in the eyes of the Chinese government. And I was traveling through Tibetan areas of Qinghai and Gansu Provinces as the government was deploying thousands of troops to clamp down on any unrest.

Tibetans widely resent Chinese rule, and Chinese leaders fear that Tibetans could seize on this month, the 50th anniversary of a failed uprising, to carry out a wave of protests, similar to what took place a year ago. Part of the mission of the security forces is to evict foreigners so that whatever occurs will be kept hidden from the world.

That, of course, has always been part of the problem with Tibet. China’s lockdown this month is only the latest episode in a long history of both Tibetans and Chinese trying to keep the mountain kingdom closed to the outside world. News of Tibet has always been difficult to obtain because much of the region lies on a remote plateau above 15,000 feet that is ringed by mountains. Information becomes that much harder to get when governments padlock the gate.

Drawing a veil over Tibet has only encouraged outsiders to project their own imaginings and desires onto the hidden land, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

It happened in the 19th century, when Tibetan officials, seeing Britain and Russia jockey for influence in Central Asia during the Great Game, decided to close Tibet to foreigners. The very state of isolation spurred explorers, spies, missionaries, colonial officers and Buddhist devotees into quests to reach Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.

Britain shot its way to Lhasa during a brutal military invasion in 1904, then tried to keep other foreigners out. The Chinese Communist Party, after conquering Tibet in 1951, kept the region closed during decades of repression (and made it into a “hell on earth,” the Dalai Lama said on Tuesday).

China gradually opened Tibet to tourists, only to close it during each stirring of civil unrest.

A large element of Tibet’s historical allure grew precisely out of its isolation, that it was untouched by the modern world and did not welcome incursions,” Orville Schell, author of “Virtual Tibet,” a book about the enduring Western fascination with Tibet, wrote in an e-mail message. “So, there is a certain irony in the fact that China, which had been successful in removing a good deal of the allure of the Tibet mystique to Westerners by making it so accessible, now once again feels obliged to ‘close’ it.”

The history of Western attempts to penetrate into Tibet in the 19th and early 20th centuries is recounted in “Trespassers on the Roof of the World,” by Peter Hopkirk. The travelers often braved blizzards, mountain passes and marauding bandits, only to be stopped short of Lhasa by armies of Tibetans led by high-ranking monks. Sometimes they were taken prisoner and tortured. (I didn’t have it quite as bad on that mountain road. Not only did the paramilitary officers not draw weapons on us, they offered us hot milk as we sat in our car.)

In 1879, Col. Nikolai Prejevalsky of the Imperial Russian Army set out with an escort of armed Cossacks for the Tibetan capital, only to be halted within 150 miles of Lhasa by Tibetan officials. He turned back.

Eighteen years later, a British adventurer named A. Henry Savage Landor was captured on his way to Lhasa, brought to a provincial governor and tortured, including being stretched on a rack for 24 hours. After his release, he returned to England and wrote a best-selling book about his captivity.

Those who did make it into Lhasa usually did so in disguise. A handful of Indian spies in the employ of the British Empire posed as holy men. A Japanese Buddhist named Ekai Kawaguchi pretended to be a Chinese physician. And a Frenchwoman fluent in Tibetan language and culture, Alexandra David-Néel, became the first Western woman to set foot in Lhasa when she entered dressed as a pilgrim in 1923.  .....

One Chinese friend who worked in a Tibetan area of Qinghai Province told me he gets shocked looks from friends when he shows them photographs of himself with red-robed monks. “They get scared,” he said. “They say, ‘What are you doing? Who are these people?’ They don’t know how to react.”

That sense of confusion was echoed by a Chinese reader engaged in a discussion on Tibet last week on this newspaper’s Web site, nytimes.com.

“Even for me, a real Chinese, Tibet is such a remote and mysterious place,” wrote the reader, Cao Wei, of Shanghai. “I don’t have an idea what all these things are about. “

Quelle:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/weekinreview/15WONG.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Wong%20tibet&st=cs

Und noch ein Editorial

Published by NYTimes on March 10, 2009

„The Dalai Lama’s Speech

 The Dalai Lama is a man of peace and forbearance. So it is a measure of Tibet’s suffering and growing desperation that he accused China’s government on Tuesday of turning Tibet into a “hell on earth.” We only hope Beijing heeds his warnings before it is too late.

The Tibetan spiritual leader still advocates a “middle way” of nonviolence. But China stubbornly refuses to pursue serious compromise on Tibet.

The Dalai Lama spoke out on the 50th anniversary of a failed Tibetan uprising. After the Chinese military crushed the rebellion, the Dalai Lama was forced to flee across the Himalayas to India. Since then, he said, Beijing has suppressed Tibet’s religion, culture, language and identity to near extinction. He charged that Chinese authorities viewed the Tibetan people as “criminals deserving to be put to death.”

China has invested heavily in recent years to improve the quality of life in Tibet. But that is canceled out by harsh restrictions on the Tibetans’ rights. That repression has increased significantly after anti-China riots erupted in Tibet’s capital last year.

We accept that Beijing must protect lives and property from unrest. But it responded to the 50th anniversary with force rather than reason by sending in thousands more troops, ordering monks to stay indoors and cutting off cellphone and Internet services. That level of repression is intolerable and unsustainable.

Beijing insists that the Dalai Lama’s real plan is to break Tibet away from China, even though he has repeatedly endorsed autonomy. It is long past time for serious talks to test the Dalai Lama’s intentions.

The revered, 73-year-old leader has so far managed to deflect demands for independence. But Tibetans are increasingly frustrated. And when the Dalai Lama dies, Beijing will lose its best interlocutor for resolving the dispute peacefully.

This week, China’s president, Hu Jintao, called for building a “Great Wall” of stability in Tibet. But without serious negotiations, and a political solution, there will be only instability — just what Beijing’s leaders fear.“