Forgotten voices

Since 1950, China has been attempting to wipe out 1,200 years of Buddhist teaching and to replace it with the thoughts of Karl Marx. For the past 50 years Tibet’s political and religious leader His Holiness the Dalai Lama has lived in exile in Dharamsala, now a pilgrimage centre in the foothills of the Himalayas. More than 6,000 monasteries inside Tibet have since been destroyed and huge numbers of Tibetans have perished as China has gone about the business of ‘conferring the blessings of Communism’.

The United Nations has taken very little interest in the plight either of the Tibetans trapped inside their own country or of the refugees forced to flee across the mountains to India. Many children have been separated from their parents, taken across the mountains to the Dalai Lama’s schools in the foothills of the Himalayas (a six-week walk across hazardous, snowbound terrain), and left there to be educated in the spiritual values, the language and customs of Tibet.

We heard from a 15-year-old refugee who had left her home when she was eight and been living ever since as an orphan in a refugee camp: ‘I want to see Tibet as a fully independent country, and all the Tibetans welcoming back His Holiness with great joy. That’s most of the time what I dream about.’

Meanwhile His Holiness, whose famous smile could almost be heard through the airwaves, told reporters after last year’s violence, ‘Stability and unity must come from heart, not force...They [the Chinese] cannot control human mind.’ He decided that the best defence for his people was education, and encouraged the movement of children across the mountains. But now, inevitably, this ‘preserved’ culture of the refugee camps is different in nature from that which still exists in Tibet. Some 1,200 years of history has been destroyed in less than 50 years.

Montgomery said back in 1961, ‘China has no territorial aspirations beyond her own legal frontiers.’ When challenged as to what that meant he replied, ‘Of course, I did have some difficulty deciding what were the legal frontiers of China. We ironed that out a bit.’ It’s all there in the archives.

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JohnAnt

March 14th, 2009 1:46pm Report this comment

But should much be made of Montgomery's impressions of China/Tibet? His role as Inspector-General of Nato ended with his retirement in 1958 at the age of 71 - and he was thought by most to be well past it by then. So he was presumably in China as a private invitee of Mao, who knew a useful senile idiot when he saw one.

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