Tibetan Foothold (23 page)

The spring of 1998 brought bad news from Dharamsala; yet another fissure had appeared. An improbable Bon-po-influenced faction was challenging the Dalai Lama’s authority and his condemnation of this provoked the murder of three monks, followed by a threat to his own life. Indian police were guarding his home twenty-four hours a day.

The Panchen Lama conflict caused a five-year break in the Dalai
Lama’s negotiations with Beijing. However, when President Clinton visited China in July 1998 he was assured by President Jiang Zemin that if only the Dalai Lama would acknowledge Tibet as an integral part of China ‘the door to dialogue and negotiation is open’. Soon after, His Holiness told a
Time
reporter: ‘I would like to undertake a purely spiritual pilgrimage to some of the holy places on mainland China. And while I’m there, the opportunity may arise for me to meet the press and intellectuals, and possibly some Chinese leaders. The important thing is to build up trust.’

In November 1998 the Dalai Lama’s representative in Washington, Lodi Gyaltsen Gyari, told the
South China Morning Post:
‘We are in a pre-negotiation mode, this is a critical initial period. There has been progress though various channels. His Holiness is preparing a
constructive
and conciliatory statement and we are trying through informal channels to get feedback.’ (Mr Gyari’s speech pattern suggests that he has spent quite a long time in Washington.) A week later His Holiness told a German audience: ‘Time is running out for Tibetans because of cultural genocide.’ At first hearing, ‘cultural genocide’ sounds like a tiresome buzz-phrase. At second hearing, in relation to Tibet and too many other countries, it sounds like a precise description of a methodical campaign. In 1999 one cannot get very excited about ‘negotiations’ with Beijing – the tragic truth is that the Tibetans have lost Tibet. Now the population is predominantly Chinese, a situation that cannot be non-violently reversed. The Chinese are experts at this Sinicisation game. Inner Mongolia’s two-and-a-half million Mongols have been swamped by eight-and-a-half million Chinese. A century ago the Manchus were recognised as a separate people, proud of their own language and culture; today the three million remaining in Manchuria are hard to find amidst seventy-five million Chinese settlers. The hope that Tibet’s altitude would protect it has long since been quenched. It is truly the Roof of the World, the highest country on earth – but it covers some 600,000 square miles. And very soon there will be one billion Chinese. Recently Beijing published many chilling statistics – for instance, in Amdo province, on Census Day, there were 2,359,979 Chinese residents and 754,254 Tibetans – and many of the
Tibetans under thirty could not speak their own language. In Taktser village, the Dalai Lama’s birthplace, only eight out of forty families are Tibetan.

In June 1999 came heart-breaking news – a World Bank loan is to fund the resettlement of 55,750 Chinese farmers in Qinghai province, on its western plateaux and steppes, regions sparsely populated since time immemorial by Tibetan nomadic herders. Among these people, Tibetan culture of a peculiar but genuine sort has so far survived uncontaminated by the Han invasion. The World Bank’s US$160 million will bring about the destruction of a way of life that cannot possibly co-exist with the proposed project. According to the bank’s vice-president for East Asia, the loan will ‘provide seeds, fertilisers, forests, irrigation, land improvement, basic roads …’ Very likely, given the altitude and temperature extremes of western Qinghai, this resettlement scheme will become yet another of the World Bank’s infamous failures – leaving in its wake a voiceless multitude of uprooted and starving Chinese peasants and dispossessed and demoralised Tibetan nomads.

The US government – the World Bank’s major shareholder – has vigorously opposed the Qinghai project, as has Germany, the
third-largest
shareholder. Yet the bank approved the loan on 24 June, defying the US for the first time in its history.

There is a theory – I forget, if I ever knew, who first articulated it – that the Tibetan diaspora, though so heart-breaking for most of those involved, must benefit the rest of the world. Does this seem like a Shangri-la fantasy? Many Tibetan exiles, having set up business enterprises that do better if not too closely scrutinised, are unlikely to edify their neighbours. (In Old Tibet everyone, from the richest nobles to the poorest peasants, traded enthusiastically whenever the opportunity arose.) Yet I can easily believe that the majority of exiles, living quietly out of the limelight, are continually enriching the communities among whom they have settled. I know that my months of close companionship with Amala changed me by some mysterious process of osmosis – not in any obvious way, but inwardly. At the end of that happy time, the first local friends I met (an eminently civilised
couple, by our standards) seemed almost crude in their perceptions, attitudes and reactions. Yet I was never even momentarily tempted to ‘become a Buddhist’, for the reasons which I hope have emerged incidentally in the preceding pages.

Lismore, June 1999

Dervla Murphy’s first book,
F
ull Tilt: From Ireland to India with a Bicycle
, was published in 1965. Over twenty other titles have followed, including an account of travels in Northern Ireland during the 1970s, a volume against nuclear power, a consideration of race relations in England during the 1980s and a highly-acclaimed autobiography,
Wheels Within Wheels
. Dervla has won worldwide praise for her writing and many awards, including the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize.

Now in her early eighties, she continues to travel around the world, happily setting off to trek in remote mountains, and remains passionate about politics, conservation, bicycling and beer.

Dervla Murphy was born in 1931 in Co. Waterford, where she still lives when not travelling. Her daughter, Rachel, and three young
granddaughters
live in Italy and join Dervla on her travels when possible.