South Africa: The following is an article that appeared in a national newspaper and Renato Palmi’s response to the article.
Sunday Independent
January 30, 2005
By Peter Fabricius
Nicholas Haysom, Nelson Mandela’s former legal adviser, is to help the Dalai Lama to negotiate with the mainland Chinese government to grant autonomy to his homeland, Tibet.
Haysom has become an expert peace negotiator over the past few years. He played a leading role in negotiating the 2000 Arusha peace accord for Burundi and the Naivasha peace agreement for Sudan, which was signed this month.
He is also involved in peace talks in Sri Lanka between the government and its Tamil Tiger foes.
Haysom said in an interview this week that during the past month he had been approached by representatives of the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan government-in-exile to advise them in the negotiations they were seeking
Sponsored influx of Chinese is diluting the local culture
The Dalai Lama is the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and also the political leader of Tibet, which was once an independent state but was gradually absorbed into China. It continued to enjoy considerable autonomy until the communist government asserted direct control over it during the 1950s.
The Tibetan government has been based at Dharamsala in northern India since the Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959 after a Tibetan uprising against the Beijing government.
Haysom said the Dalai Lama’s representatives had also approached Kenyan professor Yash Ghai of Hong Kong University, who had experience of the negotiations which gave Hong Kong considerable autonomy after Britain returned it to Beijing in 1997.
Haysom said the Dalai Lama was hoping to negotiate a degree of autonomy for Tibet similar to that enjoyed by Hong Kong. The Chinese call this arrangement “one government, two systems”, and it allows Hong Kong to conduct most of its own affairs, except defence and foreign relations.
The Dalai Lama turned to Haysom because of his considerable experience in negotiating special constitutional arrangements to protect minority groups within states sharply divided on ethnic, religious and cultural lines.
He said the Tibetan government-in-exile had been engaging China for 20 years to try to establish formal negotiations and that these contacts had increased over the past three years.
At the latest meeting, in September last year, the Dalai Lama’s envoy said he had emphasised to Beijing “the importance of preserving and developing our heritage, namely the Tibetan language, culture and religion, while making economic progress”.
Haysom said these negotiations had been moving “painfully slowly” but he believed that a new opportunity had arisen because of changes both in China and in the Tibetan government-in-exile.
Tibet seemed to be “replacing its secessionist demands with an attempt to engage the Chinese government within the broad constitutional framework of the Chinese constitution”, he said.
It had called upon him and Ghai so as to ground its new approach on an expert and professional appraisal of the Chinese constitution, he said.
On the other hand, China was expanding its engagement with the world, joining the World Trade Organisation and generally integrating itself more into global economics and politics.
It was also to host the 2008 Olympics, where it might face some boycotts because of its human rights record, Haysom pointed out.
Overall, therefore, it seemed to be trying to improve its human rights image by engaging in negotiations with Tibet, which was a “sexy” international issue, supported by celebrities such as film star Richard Gere.
Haysom said that although the Chinese government had created the Tibetan Autonomous Region, covering part of historical Tibet, the region still fell squarely under the control of the Chinese Communist Party – unlike Hong Kong, which was dealt with in a different and special part of the Chinese constitution.
And so the Dalai Lama felt that Tibetans did not have enough autonomy over their own unique ethnic, cultural and religious affairs.
They were also concerned that the officially sponsored influx of ethnic Chinese into Tibet had diluted Tibet’s culture and was also threatening its once-pristine environment.
On the other hand, Tibet was not seeking nearly as much economic autonomy as enjoyed by Hong Kong.
“What has China to lose? Not much. Essentially, all the Tibetans are asking for is the same degree of autonomy enjoyed by states or provinces in federal states such as Australia.”
Though Beijing might be concerned about setting a precedent for other ethnic regions, Tibet felt that, like Hong Kong, it had a long history of separate identity which made it different from these other regions. – Foreign Service
Tibet article NOT the “Inside Story”
Although it is always heartening to see local media coverage of the Tibetan freedom struggle, the article penned by Peter Fabricius (“Tibet seeks autonomy along same lines as Hong Kong” – Sunday Independent, 30 January 2005) was poorly researched, misleading, and denigrating to the Tibetans’ cause.
Frustratingly, Fabricius conveys a completely inaccurate history of Tibet: far from being “an independent state [that was] gradually absorbed into China … enjoying considerable autonomy until the communist government asserted direct control…”, Tibet was a sovereign, virtually defenceless nation until the Chinese decisively invaded it in 1950, ruthlessly and illegally occupying it ever since. This distortion perpetuates the international silence around the PRC’s periodic and horrific massacres, abductions, torture, rape and execution of the peace-loving Tibetans. It also obviates any focus on the PRC’s decades-long plundering of Tibet’s vast and previously unexploited natural wealth, the deliberate economic and intellectual exclusion of Tibetans – who are now a minority in their own country – the forced sterilisation of Tibetan women and girls, along with countless other acts of religious, cultural, educational and material genocide.
Hence, what intrigues one is the article’s apparent confirmation that Haysom and Ghai’s assistance to the Tibet Government-in-exile (TGiE) with regard to the Tibetan-Chinese negotiations for autonomy, has indeed been approved by the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Given the unflinchingly repressive posture that the PRC has sustained for 55 years over Tibet, if they were to agree to an approach based on such foreign assistance in this highly sensitive matter, it would constitute a welcome extension of the parameters determining the process of negotiations, and might bode well for authentic détente without the usual preconditions set out by the Chinese government. Historically, though, the PRC has strongly rejected any form of foreign intervention, whether from other governments, NGOs or Tibet Support Groups, claiming that the Tibet problem is an “internal issue” and will remain so.
Having studied this history and worked closely within such support groups for many years, I would observe that this request for independent, experienced assistance is an indication that the TGiE, in its desperation to take the negotiations to the next level and so try to secure some future for their endangered homeland and nation, are willing to risk any response from the PRC. One can only hope that, as Fabricius remarks, this unprecedented inclusivity by the PRC would be genuine – albeit motivated by its economic agenda underpinning World Trade Organisation membership, and fears of its appalling human rights record being exposed by activists at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
What is most perturbing about this article, however, is the language used by both Haysom and Fabricius in regard to the plight of the Tibetans. He attributes what is, in reality, the Tibetans’ plea for the return of their own country, culture and citizenship, as being “secessionist demands” – in patent alignment with the PRC’s contention that Tibet was always a part of China and that the Dalai Lama’s quest for a free Tibet is “splittist”.
As Fabricius, even if unwittingly, portrays it, Haysom’s perspective is already very flawed and skewed in the PRC’s favour; how, then, could one imagine the TGiE attempting “to engage the Chinese government within the broad … framework of the Chinese constitution”? There simply is no remedy in the hegemonic “Chinese constitution” allowing for such engagement, not to speak of the deserved recognition of Tibet’s sovereignty.
Furthermore, anyone who cares, whether in principle or in person, about the Tibetan people, would never describe their plight as “sexy”. If, in an interview, Haysom used this free-floating cliché that is deeply insulting in its glibness, Fabricius should have phrased the point more deftly. Instead, he compounds the injury by introducing the ubiquitous, inanely derisive and unfair associations that the world media has constructed around actor Richard Gere’s profoundly solid involvement with the freedom struggle for Tibet. For the record, Gere is no flaky Hollywood hanger-on to the cause: long before the Dalai Lama became one of the West’s favourite society figments, Gere founded the most prominent lobbying group for Tibet in the US – the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) – using primarily the wealth of leading personalities to generate global media interest and consolidate support within the White House for the Tibetan struggle. Not only is he banned from entering the PRC: because he has used every public opportunity to speak for the Tibetans and to berate those who shamelessly use the Dalai Lama as a glitzy figurehead, Gere has been banned, by his fellow-citizens in a so-called “free society”, from ever presenting again at the Academy Awards.
Because of the PRC’s stranglehold on the flow of information in and out of Tibet, it is precisely the kind of canvas painted by Fabricius that relentlessly trivialises the Tibetan campaign as something superficial about culture and ethnic traditions, rather than something inordinately grave about the very survival of a unique nation. Readers in all democratic countries need to know that his patchwork of platitudes, possibly “Made in China”, belies the cruel reality of everyday Tibetan life inside Tibet, as witnessed by Tibetan refugees giving testimony in exile.
The abandonment of an entire people to a wretched, voiceless eddy of dislocation and destruction by an uninformed, and therefore indifferent, international community, is an issue that South Africans, in particular, should – in the spirit of ubuntu – confront. After all, as the Dalai Lama has written many times, we are one human family.
From: Renato Palmi – Independent Tibet Analyst
South Africa
Email: yakshack@iafrica.com
