Web Letters: Carrying a Torch for Tibet

About the "brutal" repression in Tibet, let's recall some of the facts. The figure of a hundred and more deaths is being manufactured by that handful of Tibetan exiles, nurtured and funded by governments now occupying Iraq, Afghanistan, parts of ex-Yugoslavia.

A reporter from The Economist newspaper was in Lhasa a couple of weeks ago. He deems "plausible" the figure of nineteen deaths given out by Chinese-Tibetan officialdom. Of those, most if not all were Chinese (Han or Hui) lynched by Tibetan mobs in Lhasa. That is borne out by tourists in Lhasa and their blogs. No one's seen the eighty Tibetan dead in the city, a number trotted out by the exilees in India and their friends in the Western countries.

If Dalai is not openly exciting the lynch squads, he's sure covering for those folks in the "government in exile" and "youth congress" who're doing precisely that. Tibet's economy has been growing at 14 percent, faster than China's. Sure, Chinese capitalism is stoking inequalities, as also is capitalism in Brazil, India, the US and elsewhere. So "class" anger is being transformed into jingoist action in Tibet? Who's stoking it? The exilees and their foreign patrons?

They also talk of "cultural genocide" by the Chinese. Actually, the Tibetan language is nowadays not just spoken, but also read and written--didn't happen at the time of Dalai and his predecessors. Want to read about the horrendously exploitative lamaist setup in old Tibet? Find the book of Heinrich Harrer, the German mountaineer who lived some time there during World War II, when Tibet's yellow-and-brown-robed elite were ruling the roost.

Salil Sarkar

Paris, France