Role of India in Tibet Issues

Southland Tibetans join global protests against the Chinese crackdown.

By Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 23, 2008

He has waited for so long.

Pema Khangtetsang was 4 years old when he says Chinese communist soldiers entered his Tibetan village in 1949, promising peace and liberation. He was 10 when they belied that message by confiscating his family's land and attacking their deep Buddhist beliefs and adoration of their spiritual and political leader, the Dalai Lama.

He was 13 when he fled Tibet for refuge in India -- a harrowing 10-day journey of searing sun, frigid snow and nothing but tea leaves to eat. At age 49, he was elected to Tibet's government-in-exile in India after teaching Tibetan language and culture at Punjab University for 20 years. Seven years later, in 2001, he joined his wife and children in the United States.

Now, more than half a century after China invaded Tibet, the 62-year-old Long Beach grocer is still waiting -- waiting for the day when the repression of his homeland will end, when Tibetans once more will be able to freely practice their faith, honor their traditions, reclaim their economy and control their political destiny in their own land.

China bars Tibetans from displaying the Dalai Lama's photos, studying his teachings, controlling the land's mineral resources or teaching their own version of Tibetan history and culture in the schools, Khangtetsang said.

His patience is waning.

"His Holiness has been talking peace, peace for the last 50 years, but no peace is in sight," Khangtetsang said as he headed for a protest rally in Westwood on Friday evening. "The Chinese are more bound than ever to destroy everything which identifies Tibet. I don't know where this is going to lead."

In recent days, growing Tibetan impatience has led to the largest uprisings against Chinese rule in decades, with violent clashes reported in Tibet and protests in several cities worldwide. Tibetan exiles claim there have been nearly 100 deaths, but China reports one-fifth as many.

U.S. leaders, including presidential candidates of both parties and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), who visited the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, last week, have criticized China, and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom issued a condemnation of what it called China's "heavy hand of repression" against Buddhist monks and others.

In Los Angeles, Tibetans and their supporters staged five straight days of protests last week in front of the federal building on Wilshire Boulevard. About 200 of them -- some wearing saffron Buddhist robes and others in their traditional dress -- gathered there Friday to wave Tibetan flags, hoist "Free Tibet" signs and chant, "China out! China out!" As night fell, they lighted candles as cars whizzing past honked in support.

A spokesman for the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles declined to comment beyond e-mailing an official government response that condemned the "violent sabotaging" and blamed the Dalai Lama for allegedly instigating his supporters to set fire to more than 130 buildings in Lhasa, kill innocent civilians and attack Chinese government offices in Washington, New York and Chicago.

"Their sinister intention is to create trouble during a sensitive time. They intentionally took provocative actions and blew up the incidents, and even went so far as creating bloodshed in order to put pressure on the Chinese government, disrupt the Beijing Olympic Games, undermine China's stable and harmonious social and political situation, and tarnish China's international image," the Chinese news release said. "Their ultimate political purpose is to separate Tibet from China."

Though Tibetans in China and Tibet have been afraid to speak to journalists, those in Westwood eagerly poured out their stories and pleaded for an international investigation of the violence.

About 15,000 Tibetans are believed to live in North America, but fewer than 400 are in Southern California and about 1,000 are in San Francisco, community activists say. No detailed demographic data on them are available, but community leaders say Tibetans here include doctors and professors, truck drivers and nannies.

Tibetan Buddhist centers have sprung up in Pasadena, Westminster and Long Beach; a small Sunday school in Culver City teaches about 25 children each week the Tibetan language and history, cultural and religious practices.

Nawang Phuntsog, a 54-year-old Cal State Fullerton education professor, was a toddler when his parents put him on their backs and crossed the Tibetan border into Bhutan after Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Tse-tung launched his Cultural Revolution in 1966.

As barley farmers who owned land and yaks, Phuntsog said, his parents were scheduled for a "struggle session" where they were destined for public beatings, humiliation and forced confessions of guilt for their capitalist sins. Instead, they fled.

Phuntsog, who was raised in India and came to the United States for his doctoral work in 1986, tries to remain hopeful about Chinese intentions.

"China has a wonderful opportunity to solve this crisis in a way where Tibetans would be given the dignity and respect they deserve and China in the process would redeem its image," he said at Friday's protest. "It's a win-win situation for China if it showed courage."

Phuntsog, like many Tibetans interviewed, ruled out resorting to armed resistance against China in favor of the nonviolent approach long advocated by the Dalai Lama. Tibet's supreme leader has urged what he calls "the middle way" that would give Tibet autonomy while remaining part of China.