When Dr. Lobsang Sangay, head of the Tibetan government in exile, spoke before a Canadian Parliament Committee on 12 June, he claimed to speak for six million Tibetans not actually under his authority, while failing to articulate even one concrete measure his or previous governments in exile have taken to either improve the lives of about 100’000 exiled countrymen actually under their jurisdiction, or to expedite their return to their homeland.
Instead, he spent most of his address to the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, and much of his response time in the questions and answers session, lamenting the Chinese occupation of Tibet and its subsequent annexation and exploitation of the territory. His remarks came notwithstanding the official position of the government in exile, known as the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), which backs the Dalai Lama’s “middle way” approach of viewing the territory as an autonomous region within China.
A week later he quietly visited Israel for five days in a low-key bid to shore up support for his campaign. Dr. Lobsang Sangay claimed he deliberately chose not to meet with government officials, saying he wanted to learn more about the country first, but intends to return to Jerusalem next year to step up his advocacy. When Dr. Sangay spoke with The Jerusalem Post at the tail-end of his five-day trip to Israel, he claimed again to speak for six million Tibetans, comparing the situation of the Tibetans to the situation of the Jews searching for the Promised Land in Palestine, today Israel. However, he systematically avoided commenting on issues related to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.
In his Canadian and Israeli visits, Sangay ran through an often-repeated litany of grievances in his efforts to tick the boxes of human rights and environmental organisations, a litany dictated by his monetary and ideological patron, the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC). Somewhat ironically, the U.S. recently withdrew from the UN Human Rights council, while the CECC is headed by Republican Senator Marco Rubio, not well known for a strong stand on human rights or environmental issues elsewhere.
In Canada, Sangay spent some 15 minutes lamenting Chinese actions in its subjugation of Tibet before taking 45 minutes of softball questions which could almost have been copied from the CECC website. At no point did he offer a set of proposals to indicate what the CTA itself might do if it were ever in a position to govern both the 100,000 Tibetan refugees that it purportedly represents, and those six million Tibetans already living under China in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR).
Similarly, in Israel Sangay spent most of his time explaining the ecological and humanitarian situation in Tibet to the Israeli public, citing the same grievances as in Canada, visiting the symbols of the Jewish state and forgetting to mention grave human rights issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nor did he visit the Palestinian territory. In the future, Sangay said, he plans to seek support from Israel for the Tibetan people, recalling that the current Dalai Lama has visited Israel on several occasions.
In both Canada and Israel, so scant on detail were Sangay’s discussions that those in attendance are unlikely to have learned much at all about what the CTA actually does to advance conditions for those Tibetans it theoretically serves. Perhaps the only thing that Canadians and Israelis learned from Sangay is that he uses two measures to weigh human rights. Territorial occupation may pass without comment in the case of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, but China’s occupation of Tibet is a grave human rights violation.
Not a single mention was made of how the CTA might implement government in the remote case that Tibet achieved independence, nor yet how the land might be governed as an autonomous region. There was no discussion on how the CTA might transition from a small administration serving 100,000 refugees to a national government of six million citizens. Nor was there any allusion to how the CTA would develop the regional economy, promote health and education, administer a judicial system or conduct foreign relations, all areas for which any government-in-waiting should at least have a basic plan.
But maybe that was by design. Drawing attention to any of these issues would have risked revealing how little, in reality, the CTA does or has done in concrete terms, and how short in substance its efforts have been in these areas since the Dalai Lama and his followers first fled Tibet following a failed uprising against Chinese occupation in 1959. While the CTA was first formed in September 1960 and has since received hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian donations, in all that time it has failed to develop even a rudimentary plan of action outlining the steps that would be needed and the areas of most urgent focus should it one day actually take on the role of representing all Tibetans. While it has devoted a large amount of resources to waging a costly and often successful propaganda war against China, the CTA appears to have spent far less on dealing with the real issues facing even the relatively small number of refugees in its charge.
While China’s ascendancy is one factor, the sheer deficiency of tangible CTA policies and measures in its 60 years as an exile government explains the despairing state of the Tibetan cause today, and shows why many Tibetans refugees have taken matters into their own hands, some becoming Indian citizens, others choosing to return to the Tibet Autonomous Region under Chinese rule.
In place of policy development, the CTA has preferred to produce a constant stream of rhetoric against China, exploiting the charm of the Dalai Lama and China’s unworthiness in order to develop a persuasive international public relations strategy, to focus its efforts on maintaining the fiction of a determined population presenting a united front in the face of a mighty oppressor. In the meantime, it has silenced any and all dissenting voices from within and without the exile community, sometimes vigorously. For example, Lukar Jam, who opposes the Dalai Lama’s Middle Way and has therefore been labelled anti-Dalai Lama, was fiercely opposed by the sitting Tibetan leadership in his 2015 campaign to head the CTA, with leaders actually manipulating electoral rules to scupper his campaign. In the meanwhile, Tibetan monks pushing for dialogue with China such as ex-Tibetan Prime Minister Professor Samdhong Rinpoche do not seem to be getting much support and may even have had their efforts sabotaged. The message of amity and reconciliation from advocates of world peace such as Mingyur Rinpoche, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche and Tsem Tulku Rinpoche seem to fall on deaf ears in Dharamsala where the CTA is headquartered. Those who are more outspoken about the urgency of accord such as Tsem Tulku Rinpoche have been mercilessly harangued at every opportunity for daring to suggest that in the interest of peace and for the sake of the Tibetan refugees who are now in the third generation as exiles, that the CTA should create a climate of détente to return China to dialogue, instead of constantly agitating Beijing, precisely what the Dalai Lama’s Middle Way is advocating.
The rhetoric has been directed at a Western audience to stir up a common fear: “China destroys the environment and will soon conquer the whole world with the Silk Road project”. It is a hollow soundbite, but does little to promote the Tibetan cause for autonomy. This at a time when clear proposals would be especially vital, given the increasing attention to the Dalai Lama’s supposed ill health (several rumours suggest he is afflicted with terminal cancer). It is now critical for the CTA to restore confidence by showing that it is up to the task of governing six million Tibetans along with some extremely complex geopolitical/cross-border issues.
Smug claims bear little scrutiny
During his Canadian address, one of Sangay’s most ludicrous claims was that the CTA was an example of “a well-practiced implemented democracy” that could actually be a role model for the world. The claim is so flawed that it can be countered on several fronts. Both cynically and shamelessly, he claimed that in the Tibetan concept of democracy, the opposition does not exist (it does, even if it is not welcomed with open arms) and that this notion of governance is a characteristic of the Buddhist culture.
But his somewhat smug assertions do not stand up to scrutiny.
It should not be forgotten that numerous travellers and scholars who visited Tibet prior to the Chinese occupation described a country in which warlords and Buddhist monks lived very well indeed, sharing the country’s riches among themselves, whilst much of the population, and particularly those who worked the lands belonging to the wealthy, lived a form of feudal serfdom, little better off than slaves. A large amount of documentation indicates that these people could be literally bought and sold with the land they lived on, and that condign punishments, including execution, amputations and other forms of torture, were frequently used against those who sought to push back against the authority of their “masters”.
That hardly indicates a democratic tradition, and makes a mockery of Sangay’s claims of a “well practiced” democracy based on consensus rather than adversarial politics. Moreover, his claims gloss over the lengths the government in exile will go to keep dissenters in line.
A case in point is the long-standing rejection of the practice of Dorje Shugden, a centuries-old devotion to a deity considered by many to be a protector of the “Geluk”, or “yellow hat” school of Tibetan Buddhism to which all Dalai Lamas belong. Since 1996, the CTA has maintained an effective ban on the practice, producing a large body of directives, literature and videos claiming it is harmful to Tibetan unity and accusing practitioners of being Chinese stooges. This is in spite of Article 10 of the Tibetan Constitution, itself drafted by the CTA, which guarantees freedom of religion.
The CTA also maintains an ambiguous position on autonomy for the Tibet region as it performs what a somewhat ludicrous balancing act aimed at keeping external proponents of Tibetan independence onside. We only need to consider that the CTA happily accepts support from many Western-based NGOs advocating for human rights in Tibet, virtually all of which openly support Independence for the territory (in the Tibetan language “Rangzen”) as their ultimate objective. But with the Dalai Lama’s “middle way” proposals forming the basis of the official CTA position, any mention of “Rangzen” among the exile communities is discouraged in the harshest of terms, and any pro-independence voices have been systematically stifled by and excluded from the government in exile.
In effect, the Canadian Standing Committee and the Israeli public could learn as much from what Sangay did not say as from what he said. He spoke of how China had exploited Tibet since first occupying the region in 1951, appropriating all water and mineral resources to its own end; how China was shipping its own citizens to the region in order to “dilute” the local population and was using discriminatory wage practices by paying more to ethnic Chinese than to Tibetans doing the same job; and how China’s ultimate goal was to assimilate the local population to such an extent that the Tibetan identity no longer had any meaning.
What he did not mention was, as noted above, that prior to Chinese occupation only wealthy Tibetan landowners, warlords and monks drew any benefit from the country’s resources, while the vast majority of the population were in effect indentured labourers with no democratic rights at all. Nor did he mention that, since its formation, the government in exile has failed to come up with any sort of plan for governing the vast region of Tibet, should it ever achieve its ambition of doing so. He didn’t say, either, that the CTA’s constant antagonising of China has begun to erode the goodwill of the CTA’s hosts, India, and of neighbours including Mongolia, which are seeking to develop better relations with China, now the world’s second-largest economy.
Sangay’s presentation of a Tibetan tradition of consensual democracy may have struck his hearers in Canada and Israel as quaint or even desirable. But those with a deeper knowledge of the CTA would probably point out it is hardly a tradition – as noted above, even in country’s most recent history as an independent nation, the majority of its citizens were little more than slaves. They might also note that in the CTA’s efforts to present a picture of unity to the outside world, it appears more willing to silence dissenters than engage in discussion; and that, when faced with concerted opposition among the people it is supposed to represent, the CTA’s response is generally neither consensual nor democratic.
If the CTA is to go beyond grandiloquent speeches, bizarre and erroneous claims of a “democratic tradition” and other empty grandstanding, it needs to develop real and achievable policies that can both improve the lives of the Tibetan diaspora in a real and measurable way, and engage China openly in order to seek some degree of common ground. As major economies around the world seek to improve relations with China, Tibet is no longer a cause célèbre that ruling Western governments use as a bargaining chip in negotiations. Instead, the Tibetan question has become a marginal issue, raised by opposition politicians in western democracies – with diminishing effect – when they wish to get noticed. Unless it can come up with a concrete programme that can ultimately achieve real benefits for the Tibetan diaspora, the CTA risks becoming irrelevant in the very near future.
