ADAM YAUCH, 1964-2012

Rapper Conquered Music World in ’80s With Beastie Boys

Chris Farina/Getty Images

The Beastie Boys performing in 2004: Michael Diamond, left, Adam Yauch and Adam Horovitz.

By JON PARELES

Published: May 4, 2012

Adam Yauch, a rapper and founder of the pioneering and multimillion-selling hip-hop group the Beastie Boys, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 47.

His mother, Frances Yauch, confirmed his death. He had been treated for cancer of the salivary gland for the last three years.

With a scratchy voice that grew scratchier through the years, Mr. Yauch rapped as MCA in the Beastie Boys, who were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year. They offered many listeners in the 1980s their first exposure to hip-hop. They were vanguard white rappers who helped extend the art of sampling and gained the respect of their African-American peers.

While many hip-hop careers are brief, the Beastie Boys appealed not only to the fans they reached in the 1980s but to successive generations, making million-selling albums into the 2000s. They grew up without losing their sense of humor or their ear for a party beat.

Mr. Yauch (pronounced yowk) was a major factor in the Beastie Boys’ evolution from their early incarnation, as testosterone-driven pranksters, to their later years as sonic experimenters, as socially conscious rappers — championing the cause of freedom in Tibet — and as keepers of old-school hip-hop memories. The Beastie Boys became an institution — one that could have arisen only amid the artistic, social and accidental connections of New York City.

In the history of hip-hop, the Beastie Boys were both improbable and perhaps inevitable: appreciators, popularizers and extrapolators of a culture they weren’t born into.

“The Beasties opened hip-hop music up to the suburbs,” said Rick Rubin, who produced the group’s 1986 debut album, in a recent interview with The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. “As crazy as they were, they seemed safe to Middle America, in a way black artists hadn’t been up to that time.”

The rapper Eminem said in a statement, “I think it’s obvious to anyone how big of an influence the Beastie Boys were on me and so many others.”

The Beastie Boys started their major-label career with two pivotal albums: “Licensed to Ill” (1986), a cornerstone of rap-rock that became the first hip-hop album to top the Billboard chart, and “Paul’s Boutique” (1989), a wildly eclectic, sample-based production that became a template for experimental hip-hop.

The Beasties brand expanded well beyond music: with their own magazine and record label, Grand Royal; with the social activism of Mr. Yauch’s Milarepa Foundation, which produced an international series of Tibetan Freedom Concerts; and with work in film, as Mr. Yauch (calling himself Nathanial Hörnblowér) directed Beastie Boys videos and went on to start Oscilloscope Laboratories, an independent film production and distribution company.

The Beastie Boys’ appeal endured. Into the 2000s they could headline large events like the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Each of their albums up to “To the Five Boroughs” in 2004 has sold at least a million copies, and many of them have sold in the multimillions, in the United States alone.

“I burn the competition like a flame thrower/My rhymes they age like wine as I get older," Mr. Yauch rapped on the Beastie Boys’ 2011 album, “Hot Sauce Committee Part Two.”

When they started rapping in 1983, the Beastie Boys — Mr. Yauch, Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock) and Mike Diamond (Mike D) — were greeted by some hip-hop purists as a novelty act. They were Jewish bohemians, not ghetto survivors; they were jokers, not battlers. Yet the Beastie Boys recorded for a label that was a bastion of New York hip-hop, Def Jam, and they toured alongside Run-D.M.C. and LL Cool J.

They went on to garner admiration and influence with productions that kept coming up with surprises — including, eventually, the rappers’ playing instruments again — and with rhymes that would mingle humor, boasting and an increasing idealism. Even when the Beastie Boys were treated as a joke, it was a joke they would be in on for decades to come.

Adam Nathaniel Yauch was born on Aug. 5, 1964, in Brooklyn. Playing bass, he and Mr. Diamond started the Beastie Boys in 1981 as a hard-core punk band. The group’s original drummer, Kate Schellenbach, has said, “Whereas other bands, just as awful as the Beastie Boys, would actually believe they were good, for Mike and Adam the whole point was to be terrible and admit it.”

That group broke up after releasing an eight-song, seven-inch EP, “Polly Wog Stew.” The Beastie Boys reappeared in 1983 with Mr. Horovitz on guitar, and made “Cooky Puss,” a 12-inch single of prank phone call recordings over a rock guitar riff and hip-hop scratching. The group had been listening to New York hip-hop since the late 1970s.

Mr. Yauch once said that the Beasties had started rapping as a joke, but found that audiences liked it better than their punk-rock. Mr. Rubin, then a student at New York University, joined the group as a disc jockey. He also brought them to the attention of Russell Simmons, the manager of Run-D.M.C. and other leading hip-hop acts of the era. He added the Beasties to his roster.

When Mr. Rubin and Mr. Simmons started Def Jam, the Beastie Boys were one of the label’s first signings: catalog number DJ 002, in 1984, was the Beastie Boys’ single “Rock Hard.” The Beastie Boys toured with Madonna in 1985, to the confusion of pop audiences.

But with the 1986 release of “Licensed To Ill,” hip-hop pushed its way onto rock radio. The songs blasted rock guitar riffs from bands like AC/DC and Led Zeppelin behind the Beastie Boys’ cartoon-voiced rhymes about girls, drunken escapades, vandalism and guns. “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)” became a Top 10 single, and “Licensed to Ill” went on to sell more than nine million copies in the United States. The group toured with a stage set including caged go-go dancers and a 20-foot hydraulic penis.

The Beasties parted ways with Mr. Rubin and Def Jam amid a lawsuit over royalties. On “Paul’s Boutique,” their first album for Capitol, they worked with the Dust Brothers production team. The results were innovative, densely packed tracks that quick-cut amid rock, funk, jazz and more; meanwhile, the rappers shared the lyrics so thoroughly that all three might rap a word or two in a single line. The album went on to sell two million copies, and musicians inside and outside hip-hop have praised it as a landmark.

In 1992, the Beastie Boys expanded their ambitions as tastemakers by starting a label, Grand Royal, in association with Capitol. The label released music by, among others, At the Drive-In, Sean Lennon, Atari Teenage Riot and Jimmy Eat World. They also started Grand Royal magazine, which delved into fashion and movies as well as music. But those efforts lost money, and shut down in 2001.

With their album “Check Your Head” in 1992, the Beastie Boys began featuring their own instruments. They would go on to make an instrumental album, “The Mix-Up,” in 2007, which won a Grammy Award.

While the Beastie Boys’ music continued to offer a crunching, squealing good time during the 1990s, the rhymes it carried grew more mature. Vandalism was replaced by constructive thoughts, and offhand sexism was replaced by explicit respect for women. After travels in Tibet and Nepal, Mr. Yauch became a practicing Tibetan Buddhist. On the Beastie Boys’ 1994 album, "Ill Communication," he rapped “Bodhisattva Vow,” a version of a pledge taken by devout Buddhists, over a hip-hop drumbeat mixed with the deep chanting of Buddhist monks. The Beasties also brought Buddhist monks to perform ceremonies at the 1994 Lollapalooza Festival.

In 1994 Mr. Yauch started the nonprofit Milarepa Fund, which presented the Tibetan Freedom Concert series to raise awareness of Chinese control of Tibet. The first one, in 1996, drew more than 100,000 people to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco; concerts followed in New York, Washington, Tokyo, Sydney, Amsterdam, Taipei and elsewhere. After Sept. 11, 2001, Milarepa organized New Yorkers Against Violence, offering relief efforts for victims of violence.

In 1998 he married Dechen Wangdu, who survives him along with their daughter, Tenzin Losel; and his parents, Frances and Noel Yauch.

Yet onstage and on albums, the Beastie Boys never grew overly serious. Mr. Yauch directed Beastie Boys videos, including “So Whatcha Want,” “Intergalactic,” “Body Movin’ ” and “Ch-Check It Out,” with a deft touch for slapstick and retro references. He also directed a 2006 documentary made from footage shot by Beasties fans, and a 2008 basketball documentary, “Gunnin’ for That No. 1 Spot.”

Mr. Yauch moved into film distribution and production with Oscilloscope Laboratories, operating it like an independent record label where everything was done in-house. Oscilloscope’s first releases, small indie films and documentaries, were modest in critical reception and box office, but the company quickly scaled up.

In 2009 Oscilloscope drew recognition for Oren Moverman’s military drama “The Messenger,” including Oscar nominations for best original screenplay and best supporting actor (Woody Harrelson). Another Oscar nomination, for the documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” followed.

Oscilloscope has continued to release films that often do not shy away from difficult topics, like a Columbine-style killing in “We Need to Talk About Kevin” and the documentary “If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front.” It also kept a hand in music with documentaries like “Shut Up and Play the Hits,” about the band LCD Soundsystem. In his brief film career, Mr. Yauch had the respect of many veteran industry players, earning a reputation for nurturing films and filmmakers that others wouldn’t touch.

After his cancer diagnosis in 2009, Mr. Yauch went under extensive treatment. But he was eventually able to participate in the recording of “Hot Sauce Committee Part Two,” which is full of songs celebrating the sound and bygone figures of the 1980s New York City — uptown and downtown — that had nurtured the Beastie Boys.

A version of this article appeared in print on May 5, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Rapper Who Conquered Music World in ’80s With Beastie Boys.

Marko Djurica/Reuters

Mr. Yauch in 2007.

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Mr. Yauch in 2008.

HOT SPOTS - LITZINGER

Tibet Talk – on Life, Death, and the State

Ralph Litzinger, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University

<--- Return to 'Self-Immolation as Protest in Tibet'

Several weeks ago I was invited by a friend to attend a large private dinner for an art opening in Beijing.  He was smuggling me into a place I didn’t belong, for these are not my usual digs, and I soon found myself seated with wealthy collectors and patrons and chroniclers of the art scene in Beijing and beyond.  I was surely the only anthropologist at the event.

Our lavishly prepared table was itself a work of art, candles flickering in a darkened space, beautiful dishware, waiters pouring delicious wine, exquisitely prepared and presented dishes, with hints of flavors from around the world.  I was grateful for this opportunity to have a great meal, to sit with the movers and shakers of Beijing’s global art world.  As the evening wore on, and people moved from table to table, I became interested in how talk of art, and gallery openings, and rising stars in the art scene soon gave way to discussion about the state’s obsession with stability and harmonizing all kinds of inequalities, discordances, and conflicts, what used to be called contradictions.  On this particular night most of the political talk is all about rumors of political happenings in Zhongnanhai, that imposing enclosure to the west of the museum of the Forbidden City, where the top echelon of China’s leadership does the everyday work of the state.  Our dinner is occurring at the very end of the two legislative meetings—the “liang hui”—that take place each year in early March, the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.  Tonight, the fate of Bo Xilai is the main course.  The Maoist inspired mayor of Chongqing has just been toppled.  Premier Wen Jiabao has warned in his final press conference about a return to the days of the Cultural Revolution, a clear reference to Bo Xilai and his “Chongqing model.”[1] The charismatic Bo’s political career is in ruins.  This is all for the good, someone at the same event later insists.  If Bo had won his much-desired seat on the Politburo Standing Committee, and brought his “ruthless” and “brutal” politics to Beijing, the rich in China, in the flash of a moment, would flee with their wealth.  I want to ask her if this isn’t what the rich are already doing, but I have other things on my mind.

A pause comes in these speculative musings about Bo.  I ask: what about the self-immolations in Tibet?  Would political instability in Tibet, the continued protest and bodies on fire, a bolstered military presence across the Plateau, a return to the spring protests of 2008, worry you?  Would you take your money and art and everything else and flee?  Could the “Tibet problem” bring apart the country, in the way that a Bo Xilai power clique in Beijing might bring the country apart, or, at the very least, herald a quick end to the neo-liberal dream of China’s never-ending machine of growth, development, and it “peaceful rise” on the global stage?

I have asked these kinds of questions in other contexts in Beijing.  No matter the setting—even the ever-loquacious Beijing taxi driver pauses before he or she answers—talk of Tibet tends to produce a momentary silence.  As for the art collectors, dealers, and chroniclers of the endlessly cool and hip, it is not that they are unaware of what is going on “out West.” But even they, so smart and informed about all the other political intrigues of the moment, are challenged about how to think the new wave of protest through singular acts of self-immolated bodies.  I see in their faces what I see all over Beijing when I insist on Tibet talk.  Sadness.  Compassion.  Some hints of anger (at whom, it is not clear).  But what I don’t see is fear.  Not the kind of fear that Bo Xilai and his “red politics” have produced.  No one really thinks that the thirty or more Tibetans who have swallowed petrol and set themselves ablaze will bring an end to China; no one really thinks their own futures, and fortunes, are linked to the problem of “national unification” on the far-away and always restless ethnic borderlands.  In talk about Tibet, there is the palpable sense that a body on fire can never really fight the state, with its military, roaming militias, systems of surveillance, its capacity to round up, pacify, subdue, cordon off, educate and monitor.  In another context, a sympathetic acquaintance in Beijing says to me, “They are so brave, but to what end?  They will only induce the government toward even more violence.  The military has all the power.  It is a hopeless cause.  There must be other ways.”

Are there really other ways?  Should there be other ways?  How to imagine alternatives when the state seemingly remains unchallenged in its foundational relationship to violence, in all its myriad forms?[2]  But let’s turn a couple centuries of theorizing the state and its relationship to violence on its head for a moment.  Is the self-immolating subject, where we arguably see the work of the state and its effects most profoundly on the body, turning violence, through hybrid forms of spectacle, devotion, and signification, back against the state?  Is it stealing, in a sense, the state’s claim on violence?  Is the body in flames unmasking, if only for an instant, the state’s claim to be the sovereign subject that most effectively, most foundationally, regulates care and punishment, life and death? 

The banner on the side of the vehicle reads: "Tibetans and Han: One Close Family"

Can this question – how the self-immolating body speaks back to the state -- be answered through anything but theoretical reflection?  I don’t know how to answer this.  So much of Tibet is off limits now.   Journalists sneak in.  Some get banged about.  A few get their story out.  There is now an increasingly “global” documentation of what is happening in Tibet, but the flow of information is clearly not coming from China, via social networking sites that are closely monitored, from the academic community or from the activist environmentalists who have worked on the Plateau for over a couple of decades.  Their speech is essentially forbidden.  We do get to digest the occasional and predictable state media commentary on what the self-immolations mean, just who is causing all of the trouble.  On the streets, at fancy dinners where the cosmopolitan elite gather, in a university cafeteria, on a park bench or in a bar, I have found suggestions of a new kind of “cruel optimism,” manifest in an increased tendency to reflect, to seek some meaning, to move beyond the silence, to find ways to affectively attach oneself to the unthinkable (Berlant 2011).  And even still, Tibet still seems to be further away than ever.  Especially for the traveling Chinese middle-class, it remains the must-see tourist destination, the exotic Shangri-la, the place of Buddhist monasteries and mountains peaks and high grasslands, but also a place of danger, of protest always on the brink of eruption, like that which gripped the country’s attention in 2008 (until the Sichuan Earthquake in May of that year shifted the discourse away from unruly and ungrateful ethnics out West toward an imagined national unity based on compassion and volunteerism).  In our present conjuncture, a new subject works to emerge, throwing all these previous ways of knowing, relating, and attaching to Tibet and its futures into disarray.  It is the self-immolated body on fire. 

In Beijing, few, if any of those I have spoken to can name the names of the dead, or tell you who has survived.  What they give words to is the belief that the state, even with its military and security presence, is also an agent of care.  This is the state that harmonizes.  It relieves poverty, pays people to think and maybe do something about environmental problems, is concerned about the wealth gap, raises the occasional warning about exploitative capitalism, corruption, land expropriation, and, as we see in Wen Jiabao’s final press conference, it warns of a return to a Cultural Revolution-style politics.  Even so, people know that the state that harmonizes is all a bit of governmental theatre.  Most people know that the caring state cannot do its work without also deploying its capacity to do violence.  Only the state, at once and always caring and violent, can stop the madness of bodies on fire.  Only the state can restore “harmony.” 

When it comes to Tibet, I have never encountered such unquestioned belief in the capacity of the state to set things right.  What no one seems to ask about is how the self-immolating body, the body that protests through flames and charred tissue, a body that is often wrapped in barbed-wire so it can not be saved (cared for) by the Public Security or Health official on the ground, is not just giving itself to a greater cause.  It is using fire to steal from the state its foundational relationship to violence.  It is denying the state, if only for that singular moment when the body ignites in flame, its sovereign claim to determine how individuals, in this most precarious of times, will be cared for, how they will live, and how they will die. 

April 3, 2012

NOTES

[1] For a discussion of Wen Jiabao’s final press conference, see: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/03/29/the_revenge_of_wen_jiabao?page=full On debates about the “Chongqing Model,” see this special issue of Modern China: http://mcx.sagepub.com/content/37/6.toc

[2] See Faison 2011 for a recent commentary.

REFERENCES

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Duke University Press, 2011.

Didier Fassin, “The Trace: Violence, Truth, and the Politics of the Body,” Social Research, Vol. 78. No. 2 (Summer 2011): 281-298.

Between Tibet and China, India Plays Delicate Balancing Act

By HEATHER TIMMONS and MALAVIKA VYAWAHARE

For more than 50 years, India has been a sometimes gracious, sometimes uneasy and occasionally hostile host to tens of thousands of Tibetans who fled their homeland and settled here after claiming religious and political persecution by the Chinese government.

Last week, India played all three roles, as President Hu Jintao of China met with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and other emerging market leaders in New Delhi.  After a Tibetan set himself on fire during a planned protest in central Delhi, the Indian authorities put Tibetan communities under a virtual lock down and jailed hundreds of Tibetans.

For India, which has been sometimes criticized for an ostrich-like “non-alignment” approach to foreign policy, the situation represents an unusually sophisticated balancing act. India has allowed generations of Tibetans to build a miniature Tibet within the country, and officials express sympathy for the Tibetan cause. But maintaining a growing economic relationship with China is vital, analysts and political experts say.

“We need to handle the matter delicately,” said Muchukund Dubey, former foreign secretary of India and president of the Council for Social Development, a New Delhi-based research group. That delicacy involves abiding by very specific rules about what Tibetans can do in India, despite India’s democratic roots. Tibetans “have every right to organize themselves, but they cannot indulge in political activities,” Mr. Dubey said. The Tibetan man’s self-immolation was certainly political, he said, as well as “embarrassing” to the government of India.

Associated Press23-year-old Dalai Lama, bespectacled, astride a white horse crosses the Zsagola pass in Southern Tibet along with his escape party on March 21, 1959, after fleeing Lhasa. Pursued by Red Chinese troops, the Dalai Lama was on the fourth day of his flight to India, in this file photo.

Political experts in India have been openly critical of China’s handling of Tibetans’ quest for autonomous rule and their desire to preserve an independent culture, while pragmatic about the need to forge good relations with China.

“There is definitely a need for the Chinese government to recognize the policy failure” in Tibet, said Manoranjan Mohanty, chairman of the Institute of Chinese studies, an academic group in New Delhi. The Indian government often raises this issue during private talks with Chinese officials, he said. But India is “also concerned about $70 billion worth of trade we have with China,” Mr. Mohanty said. “The target is to increase it to $100 billion by 2015.”

Since the Dalai Lama first fled China in 1959 to India after a failed Tibetan uprising, India has maintained a nuanced position. “The Indian government, while sympathetic to the case of the Dalai Lama, contends that Tibet legally is a part of China,” an article from The New York Times in September 1959 reported. Flash forward to 2006, the last time Indian and Chinese heads of state made a joint statement about Tibet: “The Indian side reiterates that it has recognized the Tibet Autonomous Region as part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China, and that it does not allow Tibetans to engage in anti-China political activities in India. The Chinese side expresses its appreciation for the Indian position,” it said.

India’s uneasy hospitality does not come without some advantages for India, political analysts say. India has informally agreed with China not to allow its officials to meet with the Dalai Lama or share a stage with him, but that is sometimes broached. “Whenever there is a problem between India and China, India plays the ‘Tibet card,’” said Srikanth Kondapalli, the chairman for East Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University. “When China indulges in anti-Indian activities, the Indian foreign secretaries meet the Dalai Lama,” he said.

In July of 2010, India’s foreign secretary, Nirupma Rao, met with the Dalai Lama at his residence. The substance of their discussions was not disclosed, but they happened a week after India’s national security adviser, Shiv Shankar Menon, met officials in Beijing to talk about, among other things,
China’s plans to build nuclear reactors for Pakistan.

West Bengal’s governor breached the agreement not to share a stage with the religious leader last December, attending an event with the Dalai Lama, a move that was interpreted by political analysts as a push back against increasing pressure from China to restrict the Dalai Lama’s activities in India.

About 100,000 Tibetans now live in India, mostly in close-knit communities in Delhi, Dharamsala and other areas in northern India. Many consider themselves to be temporary refugees, biding their time before an autonomous homeland is returned them, even if they have lived in India for many years.

They are granted the right to work, health care and education in India, but not to vote. They are promised protection from repatriation and can own land in specific areas, a privilege not extended to other foreigners. The Central Tibetan Administration, based in Dharamsala, is considered by Tibetans to be a fully fledged government. It holds elections and a finance and health department, a planning commission and an attorney general. Still, the Indian government considers it a “non-governmental organization,” or NGO, the same designation given to charities.

Some of the young Tibetan students arrested during last week’s protests said they had left Tibet as children, without their parents, and spent most of their lives in India. While Tibetan student groups sometimes recruit their Indian counterparts, discussion of Tibet’s struggle is somewhat limited –the country’s largest English-language newspapers carried pictures of the Tibetan who had set himself alight on Monday in Delhi, but thoughtful political analysis of the situation was sparse. From a purely populist point of view, on Wednesday, when the man who self-immolated died in Delhi, “Rihanna & Ashton Kutcher” was trending on Twitter in India, but “FreeTibet” was not.

Last week’s crackdown on Tibetan protests is hardly unusual. In March 2008, about 100 Tibetans, mostly monks and nuns, attempted a march from Dharamsala to the Tibetan capital of Lhasa to protest China’s hosting of the Olympics. The Indian authorities quickly quashed the march, issuing a restraining order against the marchers and then arrested them.

Chinese officials thanked India for cracking down on Tibetan protesters last week.  The “Chinese side appreciates effective and concrete measures taken by the government of India,” in curbing protests, Luo Zhaohui, director general of the Chinese Department of Asian Affairs, said.

While Indian officials and policy experts acknowledge the situation is far from perfect, India is still playing the leading global role in aiding the Tibetans, they say. “We open our hospitals and our schools to them,” Mr. Dubey, the former foreign secretary said. “Is any other nation doing any better for the Tibetans?”

Tibet: A Reporter Looks Back

A commentary by Dan Southerland

2012-03-30

Photo courtesy of RFA listener.

Much has changed under Chinese rule over the last two decades in Tibet.

Over the past 25 years in Tibet, repression has grown. But so has resistance.

More than two decades ago, during two trips to Lhasa, I witnessed resistance to Chinese rule and heavy policing of the Tibetan capital.

Today as before, the Chinese government is attempting to control the region through arrests, censorship, nationalistic “reeducation” campaigns, restrictions on monasteries, and on occasion the use of lethal force.

Of course, much has changed since I covered Lhasa in 1987 and 1988. The Han Chinese presence in the city has grown. A new railroad brings in more Chinese. Tibetans are now a minority in their own capital.

The biggest recent surge of resistance on the Tibetan side has been a wave of 33 self-immolations by Tibetan protesters since late February 2009, with 31 of them occurring in the last year alone.

The Chinese government has tried to discredit Tibetans who burn themselves to death by calling them criminals, terrorists, mentally ill, or losers in life.

Chinese propaganda efforts

This propaganda is likely to succeed with Chinese who don’t have access to the complete story.

But it is unlikely to work with most Tibetans, since many of those who have engaged in the extreme act of self-immolation have been monks and nuns who are respected in their communities.

They are seen as sacrificing their lives for a greater cause.

Some of the Chinese whom I knew when I was in China in the late 1980s felt  that Tibetans were ungrateful for all the money that Beijing had pumped into modernization projects in Tibet.

But most of my Chinese friends had never even been to Tibet.

They couldn’t understand why Tibetans were “causing so much trouble.”

Resistance to Chinese Rule

A conversation with a Tibetan monk in August 1988 seemed to sum up a reality that makes it hard for China to totally conquer this troubled region.

Speaking with the monk inside the Jokhang Temple in the center of Lhasa, I played the devil’s advocate.

I said that in some regards he and his brothers and sisters were probably better off as a result of Chinese economic reforms, new roads, and other modernization efforts.

Inviting me to accompany him past a row of prayer wheels that he spun as we walked, the monk said that, yes, in some ways his family’s life had improved. But, he said, he resented the growing Chinese presence in Lhasa.

Another monk who emerged from a corner of the Jokhang put it more bluntly.

“We want the Chinese out of here,” he said.

Admiration for the Dalai Lama

Everywhere I went in Lhasa at the time, both on foot and on bicycle, Tibetans asked if I had any pictures of the exiled Dalai Lama.

Nothing seemed to be more valued as a gift by Tibetans.

Here again resides an abiding truth: Admiration for the Dalai Lama and calls for his return to Tibet have not subsided.

Chinese government attempts over the years to control Tibetan monasteries have exacerbated Tibetan-Chinese tensions.

In 1995, the government offended Tibetans through a decision to disregard Tibetan tradition and impose a boy of the government’s own choosing as the 11th Panchen Lama, an important religious figure.

And in 2007, the government went on to decree that it would oversee the official recognition of all reincarnate lamas, called Living Buddhas by the Chinese.

The government’s ongoing campaigns to demonize the Dalai Lama appear in the meantime to have only strengthened resistance to Chinese rule.

Other issues

Religious freedom is not the only issue for Tibetans, and monks and nuns are not the only protesters.

In recent years, attempts to impose the Chinese language as the main means of instruction in schools and universities have stirred anger and protests from Tibetan students.

Tibetan nomads resent being forced to settle in permanent homes, and nomads have been at the forefront of a number of protests over the past few years.

Rural Tibetans resent widespread mining, particularly when it takes place on land considered sacred. For them, pollution and the loss of forests is also an issue.

Tibetan intellectuals have also grown vocal on these issues in recent years.

So the Chinese security forces over the past several years have targeted the writers, artists, and singers who give a voice to many voiceless Tibetans.

Blaming the Dalai Lama

The Chinese government blames the Dalai Lama for the unrest in Tibet and for allegedly inciting the self-immolations.

The Dalai Lama fled into exile India in 1959 in the midst of an abortive Tibetan uprising against the Chinese. That was 53 years ago.

As The Economist  magazine notes in a recent issue, “what is remarkable … is that a third post-1959 generation is growing up in Tibetan areas that is largely hostile to China and loyal to the Dalai Lama.”

That new generation includes many who are now calling for independence from China rather than for the autonomy under Chinese rule that has been consistently advocated by the Dalai Lama in recent decades.  Some of them are Chinese-speaking Tibetans.

And that new generation includes a majority of the 33 who have self-immolated.

Getting the story out

Reporting from Tibet has become much more difficult than it was when I was there more than two decades ago.

The government has blocked reporters attempting to reach locations where protests and self-immolations have occurred. 

But at least four foreign correspondents, by my count, have succeeded in clandestinely visiting Ngaba, a town in Sichuan Province where the Kirti monastery has been a focus of protests.

According to an Associated Press reporter, Ngaba now looks like an occupied town.

A further challenge for reporters has been to discover who these Tibetans are who have taken the extreme step of burning themselves to death.

What made them do it? What kind of persons were they?

Who was Tsering Kyi?

Fortunately, three correspondents have been able to piece together a profile of Tsering Kyi, a 20-year-old woman who burned herself to death in gasoline-soaked blankets on March 3. She has been characterized in the Chinese state media as a loser, someone who had nothing to live for.

The official Xinhua news agency said that she suffered from fainting spells after hitting her head on a radiator.  Her grades declined and she lost the courage to go on, according to Xinhua.

But the profile that emerges from reporting by Barbara Demick of the Los Angeles Times, Andrew Jacobs of The New York Times , and Jason Burke of The Guardian provides a contrasting view.

Relatives of Tsering Kyi told the reporters that she was healthy student who did well in school. At the same time, she was angry over an official decision more than two years ago to introduce new Chinese-language textbooks and restrict teaching in the Tibetan language at her school.

The last thing the Chinese government is likely to want to emerge now is accurate profiles of Tibetans such as Tsering Kyi who burn themselves. Especially sensitive might be profiles that humanize the immolators by describing the respect with which they were regarded, as well as their anger at the government’s policies.

Government intimidation

According to reporting by the Tibetan exile website Phayul, Chinese officials told Tsering Kyi’s family members to sign a letter stating their her immolation was not political in nature.

Efforts to intimidate the family members of other Tibetans who have burned themselves can be expected.

And the power of the state to intimidate cannot be underestimated.

In 1987 near Lhasa, I was able to get into a Tibetan monastery surrounded by the police by simply climbing over a back wall.  When the police spotted me and a colleague trying to get into another monastery, we were able to outrun them on foot and then by bicycle.

The police presence in Lhasa is now much larger and surveillance cameras are everywhere, even around monasteries. I wouldn’t be able to play cops and robbers with the police in today’s Lhasa.

But amazingly international broadcasters such as Radio Free Asia have been able to get the story out today thanks to sources inside Tibet who provide tips through short phone calls, email messages and smuggled cell phone videos.

Dan Southerland is RFA's Executive Editor.

See related Tibet Stories:

• Breaking away in Lhasa - 1988
• China’s crackdown brings it all back to me

In the span of barely a year, Tibet and its activists have become known for self-immolations. Until recently, suicide-as-protest—not to be confused with suicide bombings intended to kill others—was so rare in the political vocabulary of Tibetan activism that a protester named Thupten Ngodup, who set himself on fire in New Delhi in 1998, is memorialized in a white stone bust in the exile town of Dharamsala. That has changed abruptly, with thirty-two self-immolations in little more than a year, in markets, remote cities and towns, and now expanding to New Delhi. In the beginning, the protesters were mostly monks and nuns, some in their teens, who doused themselves in kerosene, and, in some cases, filled their stomachs with it to maximize the conflagration. Their deaths remained largely invisible, captured by little more than grainy cell-phone footage, and rarely investigated because police barred foreign reporters from the area.

But lately that pool of protesters has widened, mostly strikingly with Jamphel Yeshi, a twenty-seven-year-old refugee who told friends he had been tortured in China before fleeing to India. Last Monday, as Chinese President Hu Jintao prepared to visit India, he set himself aflame and ran screaming down a street lined with photographers. By day’s end, he had died in a hospital, and the horrific photographs of his protest had appeared around the world.

China's Tibetan herders face uncertain future

By Robert Saiget (AFP) – 1 day ago 

GUOLUO, China — Tibetan herder Gatou used to live a nomadic life on the grasslands of the Tibetan plateau before he was rehoused under a controversial Chinese government scheme.

Now he inhabits one of scores of small brick houses that have sprung up in incongruously neat rows in the rugged and mountainous terrain of the Guoluo Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in northwest China.

"They are giving us houses for free, with electricity," Gatou, who like many Tibetans only goes by one name, told AFP at a prayer festival he has organised for his community, his brown eyes beaming from a dark tanned face.

"Most people welcome this. But they are also making people settle down in fixed homes, which does not conform with the traditional lives of herders."

China has invested billions of dollars into resettling Tibetan herders, who have for centuries led a nomadic life, moving regularly to seek fresh grazing for their animals.

Beijing says the policy is aimed at improving nomads' living standards, creating markets for their livestock and the traditional herbal medicines they gather and curbing rampant environmental degradation on the roof of the world.

But while some Tibetans welcome the changes, many worry about the disappearance of a lifestyle that has endured for hundreds of years, and see the resettlements as part of a broader erosion of Tibetan culture in China.

Kate Saunders, spokeswoman for the International Campaign for Tibet pressure group, told AFP the policy appeared to be aimed largely at bringing nomadic populations traditionally free of government interference under control.

"These policies give the authorities greater administrative control over people's movements and lifestyle," she said.

Herders also complain of being forced to sell their livestock, of unfulfilled government promises of jobs, schools and medical facilities, and of corruption in the settlement scheme.

"They promised me a job if I sold my herds and settled down," said a former nomad in his 40s who identified himself as Norbu.

"But I can only find seasonal work and I can never make enough money to support my family. I feel cheated," he told AFP.

The resettlements into exclusively Tibetan neighbourhoods are ostensibly voluntary, but activists say there is plenty of government pressure.

Simmering resentments have fed into rising tensions in China's Tibetan-inhabited areas, where anger at Beijing's rule has sparked a series of self-immolations by Tibetan Buddhists over the past year.

Stephanie Brigden, head of the rights group Free Tibet, has described the policy as "one of the greatest expulsions of a people from their land in history," and said there is no doubt it has fuelled the protests in Tibet.

It is hard to know exactly how many Tibetan herders have been resettled. The UN cited recent Chinese reports saying between 50 and 80 percent of the 2.25 million nomads on the Tibetan plateau were being "progressively relocated."

The UN Human Rights Council in January urged China to "suspend the non-voluntary resettlement of nomadic herders from their traditional lands."

China should "examine all available options, including recent strategies of sustainable management of marginal pastures," and allow herders more say in how they seek out their livelihoods, it said.

The United Nations says the settlement programme covers the Tibetan Autonomous Region and Tibetan-inhabited areas in Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan and Gansu provinces, although policies differ widely from one area to another.

Gatou said those rehoused herders who have been able to keep their animals and still have access to grasslands were now enjoying better lives, although unemployment was turning some settlements into shanty towns.

"Things are changing quickly on the Tibetan plateau," Gatou told AFP as he fiddled with his mobile phone and looked out over a line of cars and motorbikes parked next to a quiet meadow below snow-capped peaks.

"Not even a decade ago, most people travelling in those cars would have been on horseback."

Copyright © 2012 AFP. All rights reserved.

Between 50 and 80% of the 2.25 million nomads on the Tibetan plateau are being "progressively relocated" (AFP/File, Peter Parks)

Tibet Burning: The Politics of Self Immolations

The string of self-immolations inside Tibet—started in 2009 by a Kirti Monastery monk Tapey and which most recently on March 30 claimed two monks in Barkham County—sees no sign of letting up. On the contrary, despite one of the harshest crackdowns the Chinese government has unleashed in response, the state paranoia more acute and the military repression more penetrating than during the clampdown on the 2008 uprisings, and despite the abysmal response forthcoming from the international community, there seems to be at work an incredible wind fanning across the occupied Buddhist country that is at once frightening and pregnant with hope.

While analysts and observers scramble to offer logical explanations for the horrific protests unfolding at an alarmingly accelerated rate, much of which regurgitate the obvious and overlook the vital, it is safe to say the self-immolations suggest three undeniable truths. One: the Tibetan freedom struggle is way past its snapping point. Two: the fiery protests are a natural embodiment of the movement’s radicalization that was a long time coming. And three: the Tibetans inside Tibet are the true drivers of the narrative of the Tibetan freedom struggle, not the ones in the diaspora, not even the exile leadership headed by democratically elect Dr. Lobsang Sangay. Just as with the hardened earth and the grassy patches and the dusty grounds and the concrete sidewalks onto which have collapsed the 33 self-immolators (32 of them since last year alone), embers rolling out from their bodies as though rosary beads, the landscape of the Tibetan freedom movement now stands irreparably scorched and irredeemably altered.

A recurring point of reference has been the Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Duc whose burning profile in meditation pose photographed in 1963 remains one of the most iconic images of self-immolation as a protest form.  The Vietnamese self-immolator was protesting against the then President Ngo Ding Dem’s Roman Catholic Administration for its religious persecution of the country’s Buddhist population. Thich Quang Duc and those who followed him were all from the monastic community. The same, to a great extent, is true with Tibetan self-immolators; majority of those who died on the spot and those who survived and were captured by Chinese authorities were monks or nuns. The parallel, however, stops here.

Dislocation of Context

Beyond that, any exaggerated location of religious impulse in the self-immolations is unwarranted. It both translates into fabrication as well as a disservice to the Tibetan martyrs. While some such distortions are ill articulated, others are downright manipulative. A case in point being an article titled “Man on Fire” (Himal, February 10, 2012) written by Bhuchung K. Tsering of International Campaign for Tibet, who termed the self-immolations as a precursor to a “Tibetan Buddhist Liberation Theology.”

The missionary-centric emphasis—inspired possibly by an internet-scouring binge involving the use of such key words as “Buddhism,” “Freedom,” “Liberation”—to support which the writer quotes an obscure Peruvian priest might have been left to content with its banality, had the overall article not been more damaging. A Vice President of the resource-rich Tibet advocacy group established to lobby support from the U.S. government, the position has lent itself into making him one of the foremost “Middle-Way” Approach propagandists. The diplomat’s utterances have typically centered on editing out Tibet’s political nationalism, the country’s independence aspirations being the target of his signature censorship. His writings, even on crises such as ones unfolding in Tibet, read like a brochure for a Buddhist spiritual utopia.

In his Himal piece, Bhuchung cautiously treads his truth-obfuscating maneuver. In between paragraphs, he devotes ample references to the word “political”. Only on a fuller reading do they reveal as being customary and serving a more dubious design: one of summoning disapproval upon any potential reading of pro-independence slant into the fiery protests. In perhaps the most spectacular narcissistic exercise in the history of Tibetan opinion writing, the writer concludes the article by quoting himself from another piece he wrote in 1998.

“Writing in the Tibetan Review at the time, this writer warned against reactions that unintentionally glorified death:” he writes before paraphrasing the following extract, “Thupten Ngodup’s action was the result of the courage of his conviction. Interpreting it in any other way so as to bolster a short-term political objective would not be doing justice to Thupten’s action. We should not take his action as a model……for other Tibetan freedom fighters to follow.”

The object of his umbrage is no doubt the Rangzen advocates, foremost among them Jamyang Norbu who had, shortly after the first exile self-immolation, written a studied piece on Pawo Thupten Ngodup, who was a dedicated member of the Tibetan Youth Congress, the oldest and most influential among Tibetan NGOs committed to restoring independence for Tibet; it was during the Delhi Police’s forcible interruption of an unto-death hunger strike organized by the activist group that the elderly Tibetan, in a blazing mass of flames, bolted to first exile martyrdom. These details Bhuchung conveniently sidesteps. As for the longer-term political objectives one is supposed to interpret from Pawo Ngodup’s action, one is offered little clue.

The Politics of Religion

In explaining the centrality of religion in the Tibetan nationalism vocabulary, Bhuchung not unfairly invokes the traditional usage of words such as “Tendra (Enemy of the Faith)” and Tensung Thanglang Maggar (Voluntary Force for the Defence of the Faith).” What is, again, left to suffer for casualty is the wider historical and etymological context that engendered such uniquely dichotomous and paradoxical native lexicon. In the olden Tibet, right up to the eve of the 1949 Chinese invasion, on account of the dominant role played by the three seats of Tibetan Buddhism and validated by the institution of the Dalai Lamas, Tibet’s religious identity was promoted at the exclusion of all national and political sovereignty-consolidating initiatives as we’ve come to appreciate in the modern terms. As Tsering Shakya says in his Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet since 1947, the final blow to Tibet’s efforts to garner international support came in the form of its non-existent international personality.

Furthermore, such simplistic reading as the writer employs discounts the complex role Tibetan monks have played on the national stage, both during factional infightings and in armed struggle against Communist Chinese aggressors. The trenchant rivalry in the 1940s between the Regent Redring and the incumbent Tagthra, who at various times fronted the Tibetan administration when the Dalai Lama was a minor, saw monks from the two establishments engage in fierce battles. As Melvyn Goldstein quoted a witness in his A History of Modern Tibet, 1913-1951: The Demise of the Lamaist State, as saying about the skirmishes, gunfire rang incessantly over the Lhasa city.”

Monks, and not just the Great Thirteenth Dalai Lama, played a pivotal role during the battles for Tibet’s independence in 1912-13 when the last of the Chinese soldiers were driven out of the country. Jamyang Norbu has written about the monk-Kalon Jampa Tendar who had disrobed and taken up a gun to lead the Tibetan army, and who had, upon Tibetan victory, to a demoralized group of surrendered Chinese soldiers, offered philosophical consolation along the lines of victory and defeat being two sides of the same coin, before packing them off along a safe route back home. One of the most unforgettable lines from “Shadow Circus, ” Tenzin Sonam and Ritu Sarin’s documentary on the CIA-backed guerrilla resistance in Tibet, belongs to a former monk-freedom fighter who describes the experience of killing Chinese soldiers: “Each time we pulled the trigger and a Chinese soldier fell, we said Om Mani Pedme Hung!”

To say that to those monks or former monks politics was secondary to religion would be a stretch. It was just that the language for political identity as defining an individual or a nation was not celebrated. In a vocabulary-rich civilization in which a mere title for a reincarnate lama could fill up pages, the term politics at best stood for administration, a system in which to support the flourishing of Buddhism. It warrants mentioning that in olden Tibet while flags and banners of every religious stripe were ubiquitous on rooftops of every monastery and select households, similar hoisting of the Tibetan national flag, outside the military exercises of the ragtag Tibetan army, became popular only after the Tibetans were forced into exile. This however cannot be construed to mean the Tibetans didn’t hold paramount their allegiance to the nation’s political sovereignty. Just as it cannot be argued that in their call for freedom for Tibet, or even return of His Holiness, the self-immolators were not staging a pointed political defiance to end the fifty-three years of China’s bloody occupation.

Rage and Rejection

However horrific or gruesome, self-immolation is, in essence, an act of conflating one’s body with space. In the case of self-immolators inside Tibet, if any religious connotation comes close, it seems to be the concept of Lu ski Chonme Phul wa (offering one’s body as flame)” in that by burning themselves these courageous protestors were shedding light on the sufferings of the larger Tibetan population under the boot heel of China’s tyrannical rule. Through turning themselves into human bonfire, they were projecting the most visible, the most visceral face to tens of thousands of others who, following more traditional forms of resistance (protests, pamphleteering, posters-circulating et all) are inevitably arrested, imprisoned and tortured, their subsequent fate unanimously sealed between deaths in prisons or release, after many years, back into the society as empty, broken shells.

Self-immolation, on the other hand, grants the protestor greater control over his body and a precious finality to his expression of resistance. One burns, one dies, refusing his tormentors any claim over his body. It bequeaths the protestor an unequivocal rejection of the oppressor state: the Communist Chinese government. Instead of languishing in another construct of colonialism such as a lock-up or a prison, one collapses and returns to the uncorrupted land of his birthright. His body on fire is his slogan, as are his vocal utterances for freedom for Tibet and return of His Holiness, which once released the expectation is that there will be no revocation, of the kind normally extracted by Chinese soldiers from traditional protestors through intense torture.

More than any ulterior Buddhist motives, the self-immolators seem driven by pure anger at the Chinese government, and not just for its unrelenting religious persecutions, most recently through the state-enforced patriotic re-education campaign instituted in 1994, which makes it mandatory for a monk or a nun to, among other avowals, pledge allegiance to the Communist Chinese government, denounce the Dalai Lama as a counter-revolutionary and a separatist, and accept the Chinese -appointed Gyaltsen Norbu as the 11th Panchen Lama over the candidate chosen by the Dalai Lama; Gedun Choekyi Nyima was abducted, at age six, in 1995 and his whereabouts have since remained unknown. To the monks, perennially exposed to arrests and expulsion, torture and deaths, for simply wanting to practice Buddhism in its true form, China’s oppressive policies toward their religion are recognizable for their singular message: Buddhism and Communist China simply cannot co-exist.

Conversely, this realization lays bare the contradiction inherent in the Middle Way Approach, which hopes for a scenario in which Communist China would allow for Tibet cultural autonomy as a reward for giving up its independence. It doesn’t seem impossible, hence, that the self-immolations are also a direct response to the failure of the Middle Way Approach Policy, which frames dialogue with China an end in itself, as opposed to being a means to an end. If this passive strategy required its proponents to wait and bide its time, the self-immolators have demonstrated it to be an unviable option.

In a note left behind by one of the early monk-self immolators, he had written: “Let alone living under the Communist China for one more day, I can not even live for one more minute.”

The Unspoken Communication

The acceleration of self-immolations became noticeable a week after Dr. Lobsang Sangay assumed office of the exile Tibetan government’s prime minister in April 2011, following the Dalai Lama’s announcement of complete retirement from the political scene. The first self-immolation in Tibet had taken place in February 2009 when a young Kirti Monastery monk Tapey had set himself on fire; Chinese soldiers shot at him and took him away. A second one, involving Phuntsog from the same monastery, occurred two years later, full five months before the historic shift in exile polity. At the swearing-in ceremony, the new Kalon Tripa intoned, “Let me be clear: the Tibetan Administration does not encourage protest (in Tibet) in part because we cannot forget the harsh response Chinese authorities hand down in the face of free and peaceful expression.” Within a week, a third self-immolation was reported from inside Tibet.

Since then, on an average, three to four such protests every month have taken place in Tibet, mostly concentrated in erstwhile Kham and Amdo provinces. The fiery self-sacrifices have prompted massive gatherings, which have, on at least two occasions, erupted in open revolt; in January, Chinese soldiers shot into two protests, killing at least ten protestors.

When Lobsang Sangay, in his speech, reminded the exile Tibetan gathering that it was not to him alone the Dalai Lama had devolved his power, it might have been the self-immolators who had taken to heart his concluding refrain: “Let us never forget: during our lifetime, our freedom struggle will meet the fate of justice or defeat. Tibet will either appear or disappear from the map of the world.”

This synchronicity of events is not accidental. An invisible communication line connects the Tibetans inside Tibet and their exile counterparts. The dialogue is unspoken and it is cryptic. No instructions, no orders, no appeals are involved. Over the Himalayan divide at least, no overt call to action is made. Given this scenario, China’s allegation of the Dalai Lama and the exile Tibetan government being behind the self-immolations is absurd. During the 2008 uprisings in Tibet, when hundreds of Tibetans were killed or were reported missing, the best advice the exile leadership had for the remaining others who risked similar fate was to exercise “restraint.” Still, a slight movement in Dharamsala continues to affect events inside the Chinese-occupied region, just as it does in the opposite direction.

The 1987 through 1989 uprisings serve a good example. The revolts, which began with a protest on September 27 outside the Jokhang Cathedral in Lhasa, had their roots in a more somber event halfway across the world: the Dalai Lama’s address to the U.S Congressional Human Rights Caucus. The Tibetan leader had never before been accorded such a high-level platform which opportunity he used to introduce his Five Point Peace Plan, the last of which items, “Negotiations on the future status of Tibet and the relationship between the Tibetan and Chinese peoples should be started in earnest,” was the first hint at what would later become his Middle Way Approach Policy.

As Jampa Tsering, one of the first monk-protestors from the nearby Ganden Monastery, later told me for a story I was writing for Tibetan Bulletin, “We knew the risks were enormous, but we had to do something. We felt staying silent would be construed to mean we agreed with China’s defamation of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.” The exiled Tibetan leader’s recent global spotlight had irked Beijing and its propaganda had stepped up its denunciation campaigns, accusing the Dalai Lama of colluding with “Western Imperialists” to carry out their “splittist” designs on Tibet. And so, on a frosty September morning, Jampa and his fellow monk-protestors took three rounds of the famous shrine, then took out their hand-drawn Tibetan flags and shouted slogans demanding independence for Tibet. Within minutes Chinese soldiers showed up, beat up the protestors and drove them away. But the façade of calm that had reigned for less than last three decades had cracked. This unprecedented defiance sparked off a series of open revolts and thanks to images smuggled out by western tourists Tibet was yet again in newspaper headlines.

If Beijing’s ravenous defamation of the Dalai Lama’s “internationalizing” of Tibet had prompted the Lhasa protests, the events garnered for the Tibetan leader in 1988 another important audience: members of European Parliament in Strasbourg, France. Known as Strasbourg Proposal, the new policy His Holiness outlined was an expansion of the fifth point from the previous year. Independence for Tibet, which the Tibetan leader had repeatedly referred to on both occasions, was officially eschewed as a goal of the Tibetan struggle. In its place the three provinces of Tibet were to become an autonomous entity under the Beijing leadership’s political sovereignty. Meanwhile, inside Tibet the revolt continued. A year later in 1989, as Tibet reeled under martial law, the Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The 2008 uprisings that shocked the world had begun with a procession by some 300 monks from Drepung Monastery to Lhasa’s city center. The monks’ main demand was the release of Drepung monks who had been detained in October of the previous year for whitewashing a wall in celebration of the conferment of the Congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama. The protest kicked off a wave of uprisings that spread across the entire Tibetan plateau, with an unprecedented participation by not only monks and nuns, but laypeople of all ages and backgrounds; the Chinese paramilitary crackdown that followed spawned the bloodiest reprisals the country had seen since the 1980’s uprisings.

The exile Free Tibet movement responded in kind. Activists across the world successfully stripped the Chinese Olympics Torch Relay of its perceived glory and turned Beijing’s bid for international legitimacy into a magnet for epic shame. A renewed vigor was injected into Tibet’s struggle for freedom; a new sense of hope prevailed. Hundreds of exiles and supporters embarked on a walk to Tibet and when the Indian police forcibly stopped the return march, just outside Tibet’s border with India, their collective spirit had already set foot on the Tibetan soil. In India, in Nepal and elsewhere in the world, activists from Tibetan Youth Congress, Students for a Free Tibet, Tibetan Women’s Association, and other organizations, forged an unbroken link of protests and other campaigns, including hunger strikes, which pulled any illusion of respite over its occupation of Tibet from under Beijing’s feet.

While the exile administration had seemed to make waiting for Beijing to talk its end game, the Free Tibet activists had brought the fight to China’s door. Media attention was minimal, so was the international diplomatic show of support, but Beijing knew, as clearly did the exile activists, that the real author driving the narrative for Tibet’s freedom struggle lied inside Tibet. As if on cue from the voices from behind the Himalayas, the only autonomy being realized, across the diaspora, was a certain decentralization of the Tibet movement. While Tibetans’ spiritual allegiance to His Holiness remained unwavering, every second Tibetan on social network sites such as Facebook had a new middle name: “Rangzen (independence).”

The Birth of Second Exile Martyr

Against this background, the self-immolation in Delhi of the 27-year-old martyr Jamphel Yeshi assumes immeasurable importance. The recent escapee from Tibet, by all accounts an unassuming youth with a devout bend of mind and an indefatigable appetite for Tibetan history, bolted across the Jantar Mantar ground, during a Tibetan protest ahead of Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit, in a raging cloud of fire. If, on account of the media blackout in Tibet, the 30-odd self-immolators’ sacrifices communicated only through a few grainy and obscure images, martyr Jamphel Yeshi’s searing figure more than filled up the naked eye of the camera.

Just as the self-immolators inside Tibet had projected a visceral front to the tens of thousands of other traditional protestors whose actions, as well as their fate, had been rendered invisible by China’s strong arm, martyr Jamphel Yeshi, in one single stroke, amplified the new radicalization of the Tibetan freedom struggle. The Tibet self-immolations had been given an intimate face. By the time he succumbed to his burns two days later, his blazing profile was captured by the major national and international medias. The massive 2008 uprisings made it to the cover of the New York Times only once; the featured image was that of Chinese soldiers behind plastic shields. When martyr Jamphel Yeshi reclaimed the honor, the image was that of a man on fire, as befitting the country he stood for.

It is no accident that the site for the fiery exile protest was the same ground on which the first Tibetan self-immolation had taken place. It would not amount to mere conjecture if one were to assume that Tapey, the Kirti monk, had been inspired by Pawo Thupten Ngodup, whose self-immolation in 1998 shook the Tibetan world. While comparisons have been drawn to the Tunisian fruit vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation had unleashed the Arab Spring, it is more likely that the inspiration for the self-immolators in Tibet had been of the indigenous kind.

Martyr Jamphel Yeshi only helped draw the circle full.

Features & Opinion

The ‘Art’ of Protest in Tibet

Still from 'Cry of the Snow Lion'

About thirty men and women have set themselves on fire protesting against the Chinese rule in Tibet, over the last few years. But for some, protest has a different face. They shoot to tell the story of Tibet to the world, hoping their voices of dissent proliferate through the screen. For a long time now, Tibetans living in Tibet and in exile in other countries have been using cinema as a tool for advancing their freedom movement.

“Today, the visual medium, particularly films and video clips have become the most powerful tool for disseminating the Tibetan cause, say Tenzing Sonam and Ritu Sarin who made the documentary ‘The Sun Behind the Clouds’ in 2010. The documentary takes a look at the Tibetan movement for independence 50 years after the fall of Tibet.

Dhondup Wangchen who made ‘Leaving Fear Behind’ thought long and hard before deciding to make a documentary film on the occasion of the Olympic Games in China. “What prompted him was that a documentary distributed for free online would have the potential to reach the maximum number of viewers and be a long-lasting contribution to the Tibetan struggle,” says Dechen Pemba, Wangchen’s associate.

Through his film, Wangchen wanted to draw the world’s attention to Tibet at a time when everybody was eyeing Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. Wangchen and his friends spent the winter of 2007 travelling all over Tibet interviewing ordinary Tibetans on camera on their views on the Olympics, the relationship between Tibet and China and their feelings about the Dalai Lama. But Wangchen’s worst fears came true when he was detained in Tibet on March 26, 2008 on charges of ‘subversion of state power’ and sentenced to six years imprisonment.

Tenzing and Sarin didn’t have to face the aftermath directly being Indian citizens. But their Beijing liaison was interrogated by the

Tenzing Sonam and Ritu Sarin

government about her role in their film. The Chinese government tried to pressurize the Palm Springs International Film Festival 2010 in California from showing the film and when the festival refused, it withdrew two Chinese films that were part of the festival in protest.

Tenzing who was born in Darjeeling to Tibetan refugee parents says, “The film was sparked by the knowledge that March 2009 would mark the 50^th anniversary of the fall of Tibet and the flight into exile of the Dalai Lama. It seemed the right time to take a hard look at where the movement was at and where it was headed.”

While Tenzing and Sarin were shooting, the March 2008 demonstrations broke out in Lhasa and spread throughout the Tibetan plateau, eventually turning into the biggest uprising against Chinese rule since 1959.

Living in exile can give shape to a variety of stories. Pema Dhondup who grew up as a refugee in Dharamsala now runs a production house in Los Angeles. He made a fiction film called ‘We’re no Monks’ in 2004 which revolves around four friends in Dharamsala who under social, political and economic frustrations plot to become terrorists. “The idea came to me from my own experiences growing up as a Tibetan refugee in India. The thought of doing something radical in desperation is in every Tibetan youth today,” Dhondup says.

Dhondup’s film raised furore by presenting the idea of Tibetan struggle for freedom turning violent. But cinema is often an ugly mirror

Still from Sun Behind the Clouds

of the society. “It is the power and charisma of the Dalai Lama that is holding back the Tibetans both inside and outside Tibet. Think of a time when the Dalai Lama is gone… Now violence does not only mean terrorism or guerilla warfare, it also means things that are happening right now, the self immolations,” Dhondup explains.

A few foreign filmmakers including Hollywood stalwart Martin Scorsese have attempted to bring the Tibet issue to celluloid oblivious of its consequences. Scorsese directed ‘Kundun’ in 1997, a film on the life and writings of the 14^th Dalai Lama. As a result, the film’s distributor Disney’s business plans in China were put to jeopardy and Scorsese banned by the Chinese government from entering China ever.

Tom Piozet, a cinematographer from California made a documentary on Tibet called ‘Cry of the Snow Lion’ in 2002. Ten years in the making, the film was conceived in 1987 when Piozet first visited Tibet with his wife. “The Tibetans warmly invited us into their homes, but each time they would bring someone who knew English and request us to tell their stories of oppression to the world.” Piozet says.

Telling of these stories isn’t easy and requires a lot of courage, both on the part of the filmmakers as well as the subjects. Tenzing and Sarin were afraid that they were being watched when they travelled to Beijing to film the dissident Tibetan poet, Woeser and her husband Wang Lixiong. They also sent a cameraman to Tibet to do some clandestine filming as they could not go there themselves.

Dhondup Wangchen

When shooting interviews with Tibetans for ‘Leaving Fear Behind’, Wangchen gave them an option to cover their faces and remain anonymous. But a majority of the 108 people interviewed agreed to have their faces shown on film, longing to tell their stories to the world. The footage was then smuggled out of Tibet and the post-production of the film carried out in Zurich. But the Chinese threat still looms large over those who participated in the documentary. Lhaten, a peasant from Shingtsang village of Tibet was arrested on suspicions of having connections with Dhondup Wangchen on November 1, 2011. He went ‘missing’ after his arrest and couldn’t be traced till date.

But these are hardly any reasons to discourage Tibetan filmmakers. Another film called ‘Imprisoned’ is in the making by Tibetans in exile which will reconstruct the circumstances surrounding the making of ‘Leaving Fear Behind’ as well as its consequences. The project will be overseen by Wangchen’s cousin Gyaljong Tsetrin.  He runs an organization called ‘Filming For Tibet’ that organizes the annual Tibet Film Festival in Zurich.

Meanwhile, a massive international campaign runs online for the release of Dhondup Wangchen who was not provided medical treatment after contracting Hepatitis B in prison. Supporters of freedom of expression are shooting off petitions to politicians in China and messages to Wangchen in prison.

“Films are an effective way for the Tibetans to fight against Chinese propaganda.  They want to tell the Tibetan side of the story to fight back against China’s attempts to control the truth,” says Piozet.

Wave of Tibet immolations among history's biggest

BEIJING (AP) — Dozens of Tibetans have set themselves on fire over the past year to protest Chinese rule, sometimes drinking kerosene to make the flames explode from within, in one of the biggest waves of political self-immolations in recent history.

But the stunning protests are going largely unnoticed in the wider world — due in part to a smothering Chinese security crackdown in the region that prevents journalists from covering them.

While a single fruit seller in Tunisia who lit himself on fire in December 2010 is credited with igniting the Arab Spring democracy movement, the Tibetan self-immolations have so far failed to prompt the changes the protesters demand: an end to government interference in their religion and a return of the exiled Dalai Lama.

Still, experts describe self-immolations as, historically, a powerful form of protest, and the ones in Tibet might yet lead to some broader uprising or stir greater international pressure on Beijing.

The Tibetan protesters have burned themselves in market places, main streets, military camps and other symbols of government authority in western China, mostly in a single remote county. Most of the protesters have been members of the Buddhist clergy. The latest were two monks, aged 21 and 22, on Friday.

"In scale, this is one of the biggest waves of self-immolation in the last six decades," said Oxford University sociologist Michael Biggs, who studies politically driven suicides. "Particularly that it's in one small area of China and in one small ethnic group, definitely, in terms of the intensity compared to the population, it seems to be much greater."

The pace of 32 self-immolations in little more than a year is more rapid than the suicide-by-fire protests that punctuated the Vietnam War and the pro-democracy movement in South Korea, experts say. It is surpassed only by the more than 100 students in India who burned themselves to protest a caste-based affirmative action proposal in 1990, Biggs said.

Shocking to most people's sensibilities, self-immolation is calculated, desperate and powerful, Biggs and other experts say. Its effects can be far-reaching, evoking sympathy in people unrelated to the cause and calling the like-minded to action.

For Buddhists, as most Tibetans are, burning the body is seen as a selfless act of sacrifice, especially in defense of religion, and it carries a resonant history.

In the 6th century, the Chinese monk, Dazhi, used a red-hot iron and a knife to burn and then peel the flesh from an arm then removed the bones and set them on fire to protest limits on the Buddhist community ordered by a Sui dynasty emperor, said James Benn, author of "Burning for the Buddha," a book about Buddhist self-immolation.

Sometimes the distinction is blurry between political protest and suicide. In Afghanistan, for example, self-immolation is a common way for women to commit suicide. Many self-immolations have been reported in Tunisia since fruit seller Mohammed Bouazizi's act, but experts say most of them were likely suicides for personal reasons, not protests.

As a modern protest tactic, fiery suicide was effectively invented by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, who sat in a lotus position on a busy Saigon street in 1963, had other monks pour gasoline on him, then struck a match. Reporters had been called beforehand.

The monk was protesting the South Vietnamese government's discrimination against Buddhists and his act touched off anti-war sentiments in America and undermined support for the U.S.-backed regime.

"When someone stands up to violence in such a courageous way, a force for change is released," Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh later wrote about Duc's immolation in a book about nonviolent social change. "Accepting the most extreme kind of pain, he lit a fire in the hearts of people around the world."

So far, the Tibetan protesters have failed to get what they want.

Each immolation has prompted authorities to heighten the security that has smothered the area since an uprising against Chinese rule in 2008. The security cordon has kept journalists out. Searches of Tibetans and Internet and mobile phone service suspensions keep the message from spreading.

Without the graphic images of a person ablaze, the immolations have yet to produce an iconic symbol the world can latch onto.

Also, China's emergence as the world's second-largest economy and its growing diplomatic clout make it less likely that foreign governments throw any substantial weight for the Tibetan cause.

"There's a real sense that Thich Quang Duc and the Buddhist monks who set themselves on fire in Saigon in 1963 were able to change American foreign policy and therefore bring down the government in South Vietnam," Biggs said. "But of course, there's no leverage that anybody in the West has over China that is comparable."

The protests are unlikely to sway a Chinese population that has come to associate the tactic with the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement after five of its members set themselves on fire on Tiananmen Square in 2001. China used the event — in which a woman and her 12-year-old daughter died — to support its claim that Falun Gong is an "evil cult" and justify a brutal crackdown.

The Chinese public, in any case, has little sympathy for Tibetan appeals. Many in the Han Chinese majority adhere to the government's position that Tibetan protesters want to split Tibet from China.

Still, in the Tibetan areas, the immolations have often been followed by mass demonstrations — underscoring the power the protest has in galvanizing a community.

In January, a 42-year-old monk named Sopa in Qinghai province drank kerosene and threw it over his body before setting himself alight. Radio Free Asia quoted a source as saying his "body exploded in pieces" before police took it away. Residents reportedly smashed the windows and doors of a local police station to get the body back, then paraded it through the streets in protest.

"Self-immolation is an extraordinarily effective psychological tactic," said John Horgan, a terrorism expert at Pennsylvania State University who is leading a project to compile a database of self-immolations in the world.

"Because self-immolation doesn't result in the killing of innocent bystanders, it is often characterized as an extremely noble gesture, borne out of frustration and helplessness," Horgan said.

Self-immolations don't have the same negative associations as suicide bombings, but tend to generate the same amount of publicity, Horgan said.

"When there's a really pervasive frustration and all options are used and not working, then self-immolation as a tactic or protest is taken seriously," said Ben Park, a Pennsylvania State University expert on self-immolations in South Korea between 1971 and 1993.

Park said around 70 people, many of them young rural migrants in the country's cities, set themselves on fire in protest against authoritarian rule in Korea over those two decades. "They don't want to die. They prefer living to death but they feel that they have to do it."

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Follow Gillian Wong on Twitter at http://twitter.com/gillianwong

MONDE Jeudi dernier à 0h00

«Lorsque 2000 Tibétains se seront immolés…»

Trois des quatre enfants du berger de 44 ans qui s'est immolé. (Photo Philippe Grangereau pour Libération)

ReportageLe 17 mars, un berger de Tongren, père de 4 enfants, s’est immolé. C’est le 29e suicide par le feu en un an. Rencontre avec ceux qui bravent la répression chinoise et se sacrifient pour un Tibet libre.

Par PHILIPPE GRANGEREAU Envoyé spécial à Tongren (Chine)

De la grande lamasserie de Tongren surgit soudain un étrange tumulte. Une masse désordonnée de pèlerins et de passants se projette vers un parvis balisé de stûpas d’où s’échappe une fumée âcre. «Quand j’ai vu ça, je me suis plongé dans la foule pour voir ce qui se passait, murmure Dorge, un commerçant de Tongren. Des gens bouleversés criaient, d’autres priaient. En m’approchant j’ai vu un homme à terre qui brûlait.»«Comme d’autres, j’ai pris des photos»,dit-il en sortant son téléphone portable. Sur les clichés flous, une forme humaine carbonisée gît au sol, entourée de tissus de soie jaune et blanc.

En ce matin du 17 mars, Dorge assistait à la 29^e immolation de Tibétains en l’espace d’un an. «Les gens ne tentaient pas d’éteindre les flammes… mais jetaient des écharpes de cérémonies autour du corps, en signe d’offrande», raconte-t-il, encore suffoqué. «Depuis peu, confie-t-il, il s’est répandu une rumeur à laquelle désormais croient beaucoup de gens. Elle dit que lorsque 2 000 Tibétains se seront immolés, le sacrifice sera tel que, par une sorte de miracle divin, le Tibet deviendra enfin libre.»

Écharpes. L’homme qui ce jour-là s’est transformé en torche vivante s’appelle Sonam Thargyal. C’était un berger de 44 ans, père de quatre enfants, qui effectuait des travaux de menuiserie dans la lamasserie de Tongren pour gagner de quoi nourrir sa famille. Celle-ci vit dans un petit village, Xiabulang, situé sur les hauteurs, à 8 kilomètres de là. Pour s’y rendre, des précautions s’imposent. Depuis que les suicides par le feu se sont généralisés dans les régions tibétaines - tant dans la province du Sichuan que dans celles du Qinghai et du Gansu - les routes sont barrées pour empêcher les journalistes de s’y rendre.

Le Tibet proprement dit - la «Région autonome du Tibet» - est, quant à elle, pratiquement en état de siège depuis le grave soulèvement antichinois de 2008 (1), et inaccessible à la presse depuis quatre ans. Cette technique permet à Pékin d’endiguer l’information et de minimiser la portée de ces inimaginables actes de défiance dont seuls les Tibétains exilés, en contact avec la population locale, se font le relais. Dans Tongren, comme tant d’autres villes tibétaines, une troupe chinoise dressée à l’attaque patrouille jour et nuit, tandis que des escouades de policiers en civil, Chinois et Tibétains, quadrillent les rues. Tous les journalistes qui ont tenté dernièrement de s’y rendre ont été refoulés. Mieux vaut emprunter les chemins de traverse.

L'épouse et la mère de Sonam Thargyal, qui s'est immolé le 17 mars. (Photo P.G.)

On accède à Xiabulang par un sentier. Ce village de 600 âmes est presque entièrement analphabète, car la première école n’a été construite qu’il y a deux ans. En novembre, les autorités ont néanmoins gratifié l’entrée de ce dérisoire village d’un pylône de surveillance directement relié à un commissariat de la ville : pas moins de quatre caméras vidéo scrutent les allées et venues. Il y en a beaucoup en ce moment. En voiture, en bus, à pied même, chaque jour amène un flot ininterrompu de centaines de pèlerins venus de tout le Tibet rendre hommage à la famille du berger immolé. Ils défilent solennellement devant le sanctuaire érigé dans la modeste demeure du martyr. Bien que proscrits, de grands portraits du dalaï-lama, ainsi que des écharpes de cérémonies multicolores, couronnent un petit autel où figure la photo du défunt.

listes. Celui-ci a été incinéré par les lamas de Tongren quelques jours après son acte, au cours d’une cérémonie rassemblant une telle affluence que les autorités ont renoncé à la disperser. Dans la cour de la maison, des femmes en chouba (manteau traditionnel) font tourner de gros moulins à prières munis d’une auréole de tissu multicolore. Un aka (moine) en toge pourpre et les quatre enfants de Sonam Thargyal, âgés de 6 à 23 ans, accueillent les visiteurs qui apportent leur obole, dûment répertoriée dans un cahier par le clerc du village.

Les plus démunis offrent des briques de thé ou des sacs d’orge qui s’entassent dans un hangar en bois. D’autres donnent jusqu’à l’équivalent de 1 200 euros - une petite fortune. «Papa ne nous a rien dit avant de commettre son geste, et rien ne nous donnait à penser qu’il y songeait», marmonne en tibétain l’un des enfants en croisant les mains. Le clerc, un des rares habitants à parler chinois, traduit d’un ton grave. La famille est-elle fière de son sacrifice ? «Nous ne pouvons pas répondre franchement à cette question, mais vous devezvous douter de la réponse», dit le clerc en décochant un regard inquiet.

Dans le Tibet barricadé, où disparitions, emprisonnements et tortures font partie du quotidien, mieux vaut rester circonspect. Mais cette répression stimule aussi, plus que jamais, les actes de défiance. «Nous sommes un peuple de conscience qui ne peut pas vivre sans dignité, sans religion, sous la coupe d’un gouvernement chinois qui insulte ce que nous avons de plus sacré»,dit Kelsang, un poète Tibétain. Le prestige du dalaï-lama est tel, dit-il, que de longues listes portant les noms des défunts de tout le Tibet lui sont constamment envoyées en Inde où il réside, par messager ou par courrier électronique, afin qu’il les bénisse. Selon lui, «le simple fait qu’il lise ces patronymes suffit à les consacrer».

Dans la maison du martyr, à Xiabulang, un sanctuaire a été érigé en son honneur. (Photo P.G.)

De son côté, Pékin, qui accuse le grand lama exilé de «séparatisme», oblige les moines à renier par écrit leur saint-père - par ailleurs constamment stigmatisé par la propagande. Alors que le dalaï-lama dénonce la politique d’immigration massive de Chinois de souche dans les régions tibétaines, l’agence Chine nouvelle l’accusait cette semaine d’être «aussi cruel que les Nazis» et de préconiser contre les colons chinois un «holocauste similaire à celui d’Hitler contre les Juifs»…«La répression qui sévit depuis les émeutes de 2008 est devenue plus intolérable que jamais»,s’exclame une écrivaine tibétaine en soulignant que, depuis deux ans, l’enseignement en tibétain est proscrit dans toutes les écoles, même pour les enfants de primaire.

«Avant 2008, complète un fonctionnaire tibétain, on pensait, comme nous le répète sans cesse la Chine, que nous étions un peuple arriéré qui devait se siniser pour entrer dans la modernité. La ténébreuse répression chinoise nous a désormais tous fait comprendre, du simple berger aux intellectuels en passant par le clergé, que l’intention des Chinois est de nous couper le cou pour s’emparer mort ou vif de notre Tibet. Cette prise de conscience identitaire est sans précédent dans l’histoire de notre peuple.»

Agonie. La résistance prend de nombreuses formes. «De plus en plus d’entre nous font attention à n’utiliser que des mots tibétains, et à remplacer les mots chinois que nous utilisions auparavant par des mots tibétains nouvellement forgés», dit une enseignante en évoquant le sacrifice d’une lycéenne de Maqu (province du Gansu) qui voulait protester contre l’interdiction de l’enseignement en Tibétain. C’était le 3 mars : Tsering Kyi, 20 ans, s’est recouvert le corps de couvertures imbibées d’essence qu’elle a fixé sur son corps avec du fil de fer, avant de sortir s’immoler sur la place du marché de la ville. Son agonie n’a duré que quelques minutes.

La police a immédiatement bouclé la place et confisqué les téléphones portables de tous les passants pour effacer les clichés du drame. «Le bouddhisme interdit le suicide, souligne un écrivain de Tongren, mais dans une situation où on ne peut même plus pratiquer librement notre religion, l’immolation est justifiée. Ce sacrifice ultime pour la cause tibétaine me rend fière d’être Tibétain.» Il ajoute : «La non-violence prêchée par le dalaï-lama est entrée dans la conscience des Tibétains, et le suicide par le feu est l’expression d’une résistance la plus intense qui soit, tout en restant dans le cadre de ce principe.» Beaucoup de Tibétains soulignent que ces suicides par le feu ne sont pas des gestes de désespoir, bien au contraire. «Après tant d’années de tourment et d’abattement, assure le poète Kelsang, ces immolations ont redonné aux Tibétains un incroyable sentiment d’espérance. Ces sacrifices ont forgé une conscience commune et réveillé une volonté de résistance.»

(1) Cette révolte a fait dix-neuf morts selon le bilan officiel, 150 selon des sources tibétaines.