COMMENT: FREE TIBET, FROM BOTH CHINA AND THEOCRACY

As of March 20, 2011, the effective head of state and head of soul of the Tibetan Government in Exile, the Dalai Lama – by all accounts a seemingly pleasant, hugely experienced and likeable public figure, whose made a virtue of peaceful resistance to Chinese occupation of Tibet – will preside over a long awaited transition to democracy for his country's widespread diaspora. They may be the elections of a government with no state, therefore a transfer of largely symbolic power and so subject to perhaps an acceptable degree of cynicism, but this is a remarkable concession from a man who is, essentially, a divinely appointed autocrat - and he didn't even have to be beheaded!

For the first time since the office of the Dalai Lama was established in 1578 as a bishop prince of sorts (to use a Western comparison) by the edict of the Mongol ruler Altan Kahn, who was slowly becoming infatuated with Buddhism, the final rubber stamping of laws will no longer be held by one unelected head of state but by an elected body. For the first time since the Tibetan Government in Exile was founded in 1959, it actually gets to be a government. Well, aside from not having a country to govern.

Regardless of the Lama's reputation as a benign dispenser of wisdom, that it's taken 52 years for the man who in 1999 said, “I think of myself as half-Marxist, half-Buddhist,” to actually act upon this admiration for the working man and let his people “take control of their future" may seem insincere, especially given his track record in silencing internal criticism, but over the 75 years of his life a huge amount has changed for both Tibet and the ruling theocracy of which he is at the head.

Tibet in 1895, as recalled by Dr AL Waddell, was ruled by an "intolerable tyranny of monks." His sentiments echoed in 1904 by Perceval Landon who described the rule of the previous Dalai Lama rule as "an engine of oppression" and "a barrier to all human improvement." At about that time, another English traveller, Captain WFT O'Connor, observed that "the great landowners and the priests . . . exercise each in their own dominion a despotic power from which there is no appeal," while the people are "oppressed by the most monstrous growth of monasticism and priest-craft the world has ever seen."

Despite the cultural superiority of your average well heeled English gent at the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th, Landon was exceptionally well travelled. A friend of Rudyard Kipling, he covered the struggles in South Africa for the Times and served as private secretary to the Governor of New South Wales, Australia, visiting almost every point on the atlas between. To suggest he may have had a touch of colonial snobbery about him is reasonable, but to suggest he was so unused to the sight of unfamiliar cultures that he was moved to dismiss them in such strong terms is ridiculous – his writings from neighbouring Nepal on its culture, religion and history are still relevant and still in print.

Chinese propaganda makes much of its role as a 'modernising force' against exploitative monks and landowners to justify their invasion in 1950, and the Tibetan revolt of 1959 that drove the Lama and his followers from the country as the death rattle of the landowning class in the face of reforms. What gives these claims strength, and lends this propaganda power, is that they are based on a truth that supporters of Tibetan independence rarely acknowledge. When our relatively harmless 14th Dalai Lama came to power, he inherited a kingdom where torture and mutilation were the preferred methods of punishment (A Tom Grunfeld's 'Making of Modern Tibet' cites monks getting around the prohibition of taking a life by whipping a wrongdoer to near-death and then releasing them in the wilderness to die 'naturally', along with amputation and eye gouging for other offences), serfs who fled from their landlords were hunted down, boys taken from their families to be raised as monks were often sexually abused, and monasteries owned vast tracts of property, people and animals. Pradyumna Karan, professor of Japan Studies at the University of Kentucky and author of histories of Japan, Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet, admitted, “most of them amassed great riches. . . . In addition, individual monks and lamas were able to accumulate great wealth through active participation in trade, commerce, and money lending."

As with all of these things – from the many abuses and crimes of the Vatican to the hypocrisy and Hindu nationalism of Gandhi – the problem isn't religion itself, but people and what they do with its teachings. As if a reminder were needed of the evils any belief can do when wielded by the venal and cruel, humanist writer and journalist Christopher Hitchens said, “Buddhism has some of the same problems as Western religion. Zen was the official ideology of Hirohito's fascism that was used to conquer and reduce the rest of Asia to subservience. The current dictatorship in Burma is officially Buddhist. The Buddhist forces in Sri Lanka are the ones who began the horrific civil war there with their pogroms against the Tamils in the 1950s and 1960s. Lon Nol's army in Cambodia was officially Buddhist.”

It's this enduring image of a tranquil, mountainous Shangri La, backlit by chanting and gently drifting blossom, every bit as patronising as depicting Scotland as mist-cloaked, magical Brigadoon, that feeds China's vile actions cold scraps of legitimacy under the table. Their almost exclusive access to the image of a 'modern' Tibet in the consciousness of the public, to whom the symbols of Tibetan independence are forever a line of prayer flags and a smiling monk, adds cement to the foundation of fact beneath their gross and distorted claims of ownership. The polarisation of Tibetan independence as a battle between oppressive secular China and mystical monasticism has created a straw man for both factions to rile against. How little of the Dalai Lama's proclamations about democracy are repeated compared to his pious homilies about living a good life?

As the years turn and the old guard have been cycled out of the Tibetan establishment, he's no longer alone in wanting to push his people towards a future that's better than not just the past 50 years, but the past 500. Born in 1983, Trinley Thaye Dorje escaped occupation to take his place as the head of one of the myriad strands of Tibetan Buddhism and has become an icon for many young Tibetans, balancing his traditional monastic schooling with lessons from Australian and English tutors, and an intensive introduction to Western philosophy from Professor Harrison Pemberton of Washington and Lee University. Speaking to Newsweek, he said, “Without tradition, you would be empty. But without modern education, you will have no way to exist in today’s society. I want to help prepare Tibetans so one day when they have freedom they have the [skills] to organise their own country.”

Finally, China will have to negotiate with politicians, elected by the people, and not hated theocratic class enemies of an autocratic regime, and as its rhetoric comes tumbling down, there's a greater chance that its occupation will too and Tibetans will have a Free Tibet, not a Tibet ruled by genocidal Communist party functionaries or sadistic sainted hypocrites.