Film reveals subjugation of Tibetan people

Press, 2 June 1982, Page 18

Film reveals subjugation of Tibetan people

By

JONATHAN MIRSKY

London Between 1979 and 1981 three separate delegations of Tibetans from the exiled Dalai Lama visited their native country 20 years after his flight into northern India. They were invited by the new rulers of Tibet, the Chinese, who were eager to demonstrate that after 25 years of what Peking admitted to be misrule, a new benevolent period of Chinese administration had begun. Each delegation spent three months in Tibet, travelling wherever it wished, accompanied by its Chinese hosts — and with an Bmm cine camera the delegation made a 70-minute film. When the film was screened in London, it showed the Chinese admission of near-cultural extinc-

tion in Tibet to be no exaggeration. What most staggered the Chinese hosts was the tumultuous welcome, the pandemonium, which greeted the Dalai Lama’s emissaries wherever they went. Thousands of Tibetans crashed through barriers, brushed Chinese guards aside and, shrieking and weeping, crowded about the visiting Lamas and lay people, begging for real Buddhist first names (forbidden by the Chinese), touching the visitors’ faces and hands, pressing small presents upon them, and finally bearing the delegates about on their shoulders. The emissaries for their part were stunned by the nearly total physical eradication of the Buddhist framework of Tibet. More than 3000 temples had been destroyed so thoroughly that the ruins appeared to be the result of carpet bombing.

Only 15 temples remain. Icons' faces were chipped off during the cultural revolution, thousands of stone figures were tipped over and crumbled, and holy plaques used as paving stones, forcing devout Buddhists to defile them by walking on them. As the post-Gang of Four Chinese nervously allow some aspects of Tibetan religion to re-emerge, pilgrims crawl hundreds of miles to the holy city of Lhasa, measuring the journey with their prostrate bodies, and holy men chant the Sutras in the streets of the capital. The film's makers concede that under the Dalai. Lama, Tibet was an authoritarian theocratic State, reserving its privileges for a few hundred elite families and thousands of monks. But what the film shows is the ability of Tibetan life to sustain itself during the even crueller years of Chinese rule. Clocks are set at Peking time, although Tibet’s sun rises two and a half hours later. Barley, the traditional crop, was forbidden until recently in favour of wheat, which grows badly at high altitudes, but is preferred by the 500,000 in the Chinese occupying force. With grain reserved for the conquerors, the Tibetans have gone hungry, and in the film they looked it. Tibetan clothes, the written language.

and all religious practices were forbidden. Yet in what must be spontaneous scenes in a film made under Chinese auspices, - when the delegation appeared even very small children clasped their hands and prbstrated themselves in traditionally devout. fashion, and thousands of the faithful tramped many miles across high mountains to catch a glimpse of Dalai Lama’s representatives. The Tibetans appeared ragged and bewildered. Even in the presence of the honoured visitors, including the Dalai Lama's sister, few could manage a smile. » The film shows foreign tourists who now whisk through Lhasa, haggling for the religious objects- that devout Tibetans had secreted for 25 years, and which, ironically, they now sell to eke out their meagre wages. The film includes interviews with the Dalai Lama in his north Indian exile. Compassionate, and not bitter, he was little concerned with sovereignty. What interested him walS “an improvement in the atmosphere” in Peking which may mean a somewhat improved life for Tibetans. It was the Chinese rulers who pointed out in the film that “the Dala Lama’s delegation are like white cranes who fly in and will fly away. The Tibetan people, like frogs, must stay where they are.”