Saturday night’s Archive on 4 (Radio Four) began and ended with the haunting voice of a Tibetan singer, mourning the loss of her country’s independence.
Saturday night’s Archive on 4 (Radio Four) began and ended with the haunting voice of a Tibetan singer, mourning the loss of her country’s independence. In A Tibetan Odyssey — 50 Years in Exile, the veteran reporter and Sino-Tibetan expert Isabel Hilton recalled events in Tibet since its invasion by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in October 1950. We heard the voice of Field Marshal Montgomery being interviewed by the BBC just after his visit to Mao Tse-tung in 1961. It should be required listening for every politician seconded to the Foreign Office.
Montgomery is asked, with a politeness that now sounds quaintly historical, why he had not gone to Tibet (it was just two years since the Chinese had ruthlessly suppressed an attempt by the Tibetans to regain their autonomy). Montgomery replied, ‘I think…the Chinese, I would say, were probably not anxious that I should go there. Mind you, I never asked them that. Tibet to me was really unimportant.’
‘Don’t you think,’ the reporter persisted, ‘that you might have asked Mao Tse-tung about some of the reports…of the brutal atrocities by the Chinese.’
‘I could have,’ says Montgomery, ‘but I didn’t want to.’ Then he adds, chuckling to himself, ‘I’m very friendly with Mao Tse-tung. I didn’t want to irritate him in any way.’
All credit to Hilton (and her producer Eleanor Thomas) that no comment was made on this extraordinary conversation. Of course, ‘with the benefit of hindsight’ is a pretty pointless way of looking back on events. But it was not just what Montgomery said. His whole manner sounded so weirdly unprofessional, as if Tibet was all a bit of a joke.
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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