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Free Tibet Later

May 29, 2008

COMMENTARY: Antonio Abaya

While it is admitted here that the people of Tibet have a history that goes back 3,000 years and the Chinese did not officially claim sovereignty over the Tibetan Plateau until around 1900, the realities of the 21st Century make the liberation of Tibet from Chinese rule an impossible dream.

Obviously there is no hope of turning Tibet into a battleground for national liberation, as Vietnam spectacularly was in the 1960s. The total Tibetan population, including women and children, adds up to less than the total Vietnamese killed, combatants and civilians, during their struggles against the French and later the Americans. There are no jungles in which guerillas can hide. There is no supply route to sympathetic sources of munitions anywhere.

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The on-going agitation in the name of a Free Tibet, timed specifically to coincide with the run-up to the 29th Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, is clearly meant merely to embarrass the Chinese, by spoiling their coming-out party in August 2008.

This brouhaha has all the makings of an orchestrated demolition exercise, obviously manipulated and coordinated by some high-powered public relations outfit in New York or London or Paris, and given a glossy veneer by enlisting the public support of Hollywood icons like Richard Gere and Mia Farrow.

The idea is to make sure that CNN and the BBC and the rest of international media give the Free Tibet movement the attention that the publicists are being paid to promote.

I say this because contiguous to Tibet to the east is the Autonomous Region of Xinjiang, home to ethnic Uyghurs, who have been agitating for independence from China for decades – exploding bombs occasionally to remind the world that they are still fighting for a homeland – but no one pays any attention to them.

Why? Almost certainly because they have no publicist in New York or London or Paris coordinating their moves, and no Richard Gere or Mia Farrow to give their cause the Hollywood cachet that would compel liberals of the Western world to march out in their thousands to bash the Chinese.

There are actually more Uyghurs (about 15 million out of a total Xinjiang population of 19.5 million), than Tibetans (2.62 million in Tibet, plus another 4 million outside Tibet).

And Xinjiang is actually bigger (636,000 sq. miles) than Tibet (472,000 sq. miles).But no one sheds any crocodile tears for Xinjiang and its Uyghurs.

I recall from my stamp-collecting years during my teens that there used to be a country called East Turkestan which issued postage stamps in the 1920s.

East Turkestan was made up of Turkic-speaking peoples, all predominantly Muslim, spread out from what is now Xinjiang all the way to the Caspian Sea, near Turkey. But in the mid-1920s, Josef Stalin, as Soviet commissar for ethnic minorities, dragooned all these Central Asian peoples into Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan soviet socialist republics within the USSR, as buffer states to protect the southern flank of the Russian homeland..

Xinjiang itself underwent several permutations throughout its history. But Han Chinese control in the 20th century was reasserted with the entry of the recently victorious People’s Liberation Army in 1949 and its absorption as a special autonomous region in the People’s Republic in 1955.

So predominantly Muslin Xinjiang has at least as much claim to independence (from China) as predominantly Buddhist Tibet, but Xinjiang does not generate as much attention among Western liberals as Tibet does. It helps that Tibet has a Dalai Lama, living in exile in India, who is revered by Western liberals as a holy man on par with the Roman Catholic Pope; Xinjiang has no such icon. (The Dalai Lama has categorically said that he does not favor independence for Tibet, only greater autonomy.)

Especially in the current environment of Islamophobia, few Western liberals will try to grab the Olympic torch as a protest against China, in the name of some scruffy Muslims.

It is unfortunate that the Olympics have been prostituted to politics. In 1956, some Western European countries boycotted the Melbourne Olympics to protest the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising, and some Middle Eastern nations did the same to protest the British-French-Israeli seizure of the Suez Canal

In 1980, the Americans and some of their allies boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics to protest the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In retaliation, the Soviets and their allies boycotted the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics..

The Ancient Olympics, which ran for more than a thousand years from 776 BC to 393 AD, were held every four years among freemen in the Greek city-states and the Greek colonies in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Ironically, the Olympics were occasion for them to call a truce from their endless wars and quarrels among each other. The exact opposite of what has been happening to the Modern Olympics in the past 50 years.

A refreshing exception was in 1964. I was a member of the Philippine Yachting Team (Dragon class) in the Tokyo Olympics then. Our venue was Sagami Bay and the Enoshima Yacht Club, about an hour by train southwest of Tokyo. .

As there were only about 20 countries in competition, our opening ceremonies included the raising of national flags and the playing of national anthems, which was not possible in the general opening ceremonies in Tokyo, because of so many competing countries..

This was the first time that East Germany was competing in the yachting events. So how to reconcile with West Germany?

The solution was Solomonic. East and West Germans competed as one national team The common national anthem that they chose was neither the Deutschland uber Alles of the capitalist West, nor the Internationale of the communist East, but the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with the words from Schiller’s An die Freude (To Joy): Alle Menschen werden Brueder…..” (All mankind will be brothers…) *****

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