Sunday, March 30, 2008 Sun.Star Essay: Trouble in Tibet By Erma M. Cuizon
SOME years ago, I was attracted to books on earth’s highest land, a mountain range in Asia called the Himalayas. In my head was the dream of traveling there to the roof of the world, like I wanted to stand in some high but centuries-old buildings to see rooftops in Paris.
I thought of Tibet and Nepal, I thought of Bhutan and Sikkim, which are places nobody talks about (although they now talk about another Himalayas nation up there, Afghanistan). These are the Himalayan states and non-states disputed over the years by then British India and China, the dominant neighbors of the junior kingdoms in higher grounds.
Long ago in isolated parts of the world, people kept to themselves and lived unhampered with Mother Nature, with a snow leopard or two as pet, perhaps, and a red panda to hug, almost 700 bird species to watch flourish, including the rare and endangered black-necked crane.
But there was always a big-bully nation or two interested in the small fries, for many reasons and for the fact that it was good to count more land than an overweening kingdom already had. They wouldn’t let other small nations alone.
When I was reading books on the Himalayan Zone, old Tibet was Tibet where monks in monasteries looked forward to the birth of the next Dalai Lama.
The Himalayas is a dream-land home of the Mt. Everest of Nepal and Tibet, once the home of quiet nations where yak herdsmen worked out in the wild or inside tents made of ox hair or in shacks of dry-stone walls which also served as their storage places.
Through the years, Bhutan, Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet went through stages of monarchy and capture, capture and independence, and confusion about the form of government. Bhutan and Sikkim are among the most isolated kingdoms in the Himalayas where there were old Buddhist monasteries clinging to mountain cliffs and rice paddies which also served as staircase steps from the sky down to earth in the firm ground.
These kingdoms or states, especially Bhutan, were described as a “mosaic”---some parts Nepalese, Indo-Mongolian and other race types in the zone. Nepal has been trying to be a democracy. You know what Bush did to Afghanistan.
Tibet’s existence as a state has been in a see-saw. In the 5th century, it was an independent small kingdom on top of the world, happily isolated. But it came under Chinese rule in 1700. It pushed for independence from China with a revolt in 1912 and made it. But there emerged the Chinese Communists who put Tibet under Chinese control in 1951 and was under guard by the People’s Liberation Army of China.
In the 1960s, the Red Guards put down the monastic beliefs, vandalized Tibet’s Buddhist heritage. Monks, comprising 25 percent of the population, were forced out of the monasteries, 6000 monasteries of which were destroyed. Not to talk of thousands of Buddhist monks and nuns tortured, imprisoned or killed.
An uprising didn’t work, so the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959 with 9,000 Tibetans. India welcomed the Tibetan refugees, giving them an area in the mountainous region of Dharamsala where Tibet has a government in exile.
And you can’t put the Tibetans down.
In India, they’ve put up monasteries for tens of thousands of monks. They have Tibetan schools to uphold their culture, like the Lama dances, the Losar fete, also the Tibetan New Year. The small state has also published the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives.
Back in Lhasa, Tibet, there’s another “uprising” in the so-called Tibet Autonomous Region of China which started as a rally celebrating the anniversary of a Tibetan uprising that happened almost 50 years ago. Then the Chinese troops came. As of last count this week, over a hundred Tibetans have been killed as the Chinese tried to put down what they call a revolt.
They’ll never leave small states alone to flourish on their own.
We can’t appreciate enough where we are, how we are, what we have—until we hear of what those small kingdoms in a world nearest the sky have gone through. There were wars, there are wars; there’s violence, there’s death.
Don’t you wish you could boycott the Beijing Olympics?
