Tibetan no longer afraid to speak out
For years, this was how it was whenever Chagzoetsang was interviewed: The longtime advocate for Utah's Tibetan community would start to criticize the Chinese government for human rights abuses in her homeland, then invariably would say, "Don't print that."
But those days of pulling punches are over. Following uprisings last month in Tibet in which an estimated 100 monks and others were killed and hundreds more detained, Chagzoetsang said it's time to speak out.
"If they're willing to give their lives," she said, "I can be a voice."
That new urgency is also spurring protests such as the one planned this week in San Francisco. Tibetans and their supporters from around the United States will gather to draw attention to Chinese human rights violations. The San Francisco march and mobilization correspond with the running of the Olympic torch there on Wednesday, the only torch run on U.S. soil during the run-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics in China.
Tibet was first occupied by Chinese troops in 1950; the Dalai Lama fled the country in 1959, the same year Pema Chagzoetsang's parents escaped with their baby daughter across the Himalayas.
Sam and his Tibetan friends have relatives who still live in Tibet, and some of those relatives have been reached by telephone. "Everything is monitored, so even making a phone call like we're having, they're sacrificing themselves," Sam said. At any other time, it wouldn't be worth the risk, he said. That desire to protect relatives and others in Tibet was her reason for being guarded during media interviews over the past 15 years, said Sam's mother.
Chagzoetsang says she's willing now to talk about what she saw in Tibet's capital, Lhasa, four years ago: improvements in infrastructure, but children and old people begging on the streets; Chinese-run elementary and high schools that few Tibetans can afford; young adults with no job opportunities because Chinese nationals are favored in hiring; a ban on many Tibetan Buddhist religious practices; meager health services. Chagzoetsang cries again as she recounts these problems.
Although the Chinese point to the fact that they have been negotiating with the Dalai Lama for the past 10 years, nothing has improved for Tibetans, she said. "It was a volcano waiting to erupt." Since the uprising in Lhasa in mid-March, she said, the Chinese government has stopped water supplies and electricity to some Tibetan rural areas.
Although the Chinese government insists that Tibetans want independence as a separate country, she said, the Dalai Lama for the past decade has been willing to settle for true autonomy within China. The Dalai Lama is not calling for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics.
But protesters in San Francisco hope they can persuade Olympic officials to cancel the torch run through Tibet.
They're also urging big sponsors such as Coca-Cola to call for the release of all Tibetan political prisoners and an end to "oppressive tactics being used by the Chinese authorities in Tibet."
E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com
Recent comments
It takes courage to speak out on controversial matters. I applaud...
Anonymous | April 9, 2008 at 12:26 p.m.
Tibetan Buddhism is the emerging Great Religion (I think of it as...
Anonymous | April 7, 2008 at 6:20 p.m.
The US is free because we know we are. My ancestors bled for this...
bhparkman | April 7, 2008 at 6:01 p.m.
