Beijing's top religious official yesterday launched a scathing attack on the Dalai Lama, signalling there is little room for compromise when President Clinton raises human rights in Tibet with President Jiang Zemin in Beijing today, writes Conor O'Clery.
The Director of the State Administration for Religious Affairs, Mr Ye Xiaowen, told a press conference the Dalai Lama "has damaged Buddhism, undermined Tibet and disrupted the motherland" and he was a traitor who planned to restore feudal serfdom in Tibet. Mr Clinton has promised Tibetan exiles and activists outside China that he will urge Beijing at his summit with Mr Jiang to protect Tibet's cultural and religious heritage and resume a dialogue with the Dalai Lama. The attack on the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet comes at the climax of a three-year campaign to eradicate nationalism in Tibetan Buddhist monasteries. The government official in Tibet responsible for religious affairs told The Irish Times in an interview in Lhasa last week that the re-education of monks and nuns, which involves a written test of their patriotism, was almost complete and that some Buddhist monks and nuns had been weeded out and expelled from monasteries because of "unpatriotic" behaviour. They had "counter-revolutionary minds", said Mr Jagra Losangdainzin, the deputy director of the Tibet Autonomous Region Committee of Nationality and Religious Affairs. A report just published by a delegation of EU ambassadors who visited Tibet last month, puts the number of monks and nuns forced out of religious institutions at 2,639, with a further 1,115 sent home because they were under the legal age of 18.
The harsh treatment of "unpatriotic" monks in Tibet is one of the issues Mr Clinton has promised to raise with Mr Jiang and yesterday's news briefing was clearly designed to state the Chinese side in advance. The Dalai Lama is still a popular figures throughout Tibet - his picture hangs even in the homes of some Tibetan Communist Party members - but Beijing has said there can be no dialogue with the Dalai Lama until he first declares Tibet to be an inseparable part of China. The 1989 Nobel Peace prize-winner advocates autonomy within China but Mr Ye accused him of playing a trick, saying he would first seek autonomy and then go for independence.
Mr Ye also said Washington's appointment of a special co-ordinator on Tibet was "inappropriate" and the official, Mr Gregory Craig, was unlikely to be given a visa. He accused Hollywood film-makers of distorting the facts about Tibet in such films as Kundun and Seven Years in Tibet and asked: "Should we send Tibet back to its original system of feudal serfdom? What kind of human rights would Tibet have then?" Mr Clinton is also expected to raise the question of Chinese immigration into Tibet, which is rapidly changing the unique character of the remote Himalayan country. The US State Department claims that half the population of the capital, Lhasa, a wholly Tibetan town before Chinese troops entered the country in 1951, is now settled by Han Chinese.
Lhasa's vice mayor, Mr Ping Cuo Jie Bo, told The Irish Times that 87 per cent of the 400,000 population of the capital is still Tibetan. However, in my four days spent in Lhasa, several Chinese and Tibetan residents told me the proportion of Chinese was much higher, and much of the city is now like any other in China. The authorities in Tibet exercise "extremely tight control over the principal elements of Tibetan religion and culture", according to the report of the EU ambassadors, Mr Endymion Wilkinson (Commission) Mr Anthony Galsworthy (UK), Mr Pierre-Louis Lorenz (Luxembourg) and Dr Gerhard Ziegler (Austria). Beijing's priority was clearly "to combat the political expression of Tibetan nationalism and the emergence of an independence movement," the report said. The visit was the first by EU diplomats and was requested as part of the new EU-China dialogue on human rights. The envoys were told there were 1,800 prisoners in Tibet's jails, of whom 200 were sentenced for "crimes against state security". They said most of the 200 political prisoners were Buddhist monks and nuns. There are currently 46,380 monks and nuns in Tibet, the maximum allowed by Beijing, and 1,787 monastic sites. Officials denied that monks were obliged to sign a document denouncing the Dalai Lama but the EU delegation established that this had been the case at the Ganden Monastery, one of the biggest in Tibet.
They also said there had been resistance to the political indoctrination. Some people had been killed when a fight broke out between local people and an aggressive patriotic education team sent to a monastery in Nagqu prefecture last year. Every monastery now has a management committee on which a government official sits, they said. Otherwise religion is practised freely in the 96 per cent Buddhist country and religious festivals are not hindered.