'Shameless' pact backs China's Tibet stance

'Shameless' pact backs China's Tibet stance

By Bill Smith

BEIJING (DPA): The Dalai Lama was just 15 years old when his envoys signed the 1951 pact that sealed Tibet's "peaceful liberation" from "feudal theocracy" by Chinese Communists.

The adolescent spiritual head of Tibet heard the news in a Tibetan language broadcast by Radio Beijing.

"I half expected bad news, but nothing prepared me for the shock when it came," the Dalai Lama wrote in his autobiography Freedom in Exile.

"A harsh, crackling voice announced that a Seventeen-Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet had that day been signed", he said.

He returned to the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, telling Tibetans he met on the way "how we had been invaded by a foreign army but how the Chinese were proclaiming friendship".

Fifty years later, the state-run Tibet Daily called the May 23 anniversary of the signing of the agreement a "rare chance" for "broad and penetrating ideological education".

Tibetan officials, community groups and schools have been given "an important political responsibility" to join the celebrations, the London-based Tibet Information Network says.

Heavy security is likely in Lhasa and other Tibetan towns as China marks the 50th anniversary of the agreement which the Dalai Lama calls a "shameless invention".

Signed under duress in Beijing on May 23, 1951, the agreement guaranteed Tibet's cultural and political autonomy.

But even this protection evaporated after a 1959 uprising against Chinese rule prompted a military crackdown, and the Dalai Lama fled to India.

"Tibet was at the very least a de facto independent state when the Agreement on Peaceful Measures in Tibet was signed in 1951, and the repudiation of this agreement by the Tibetan Government in 1959 was found to be fully justified," the International Commission of Jurists, a Geneva-based human rights organization, said in a 1960 report which examined the legal status of the Tibetan government.

"In 1950, there was a people and a territory, and a government which functioned in that territory, conducting its own domestic affairs free from any outside authority," the commission said.

Exile support groups estimate that 1.2 million Tibetans have died at the hands of Chinese soldiers and police in the past 50 years, many of them during the "ten lost years" of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) when troops sacked Tibet's Buddhist monasteries.

The repression has driven the public face of the Tibetan independence movement outside the Chinese region.

The Dalai Lama, who won the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize for advocating non-violence in seeking freedom for the Tibetan people, lives in exile in Dharamsala, India.

He now favors greater autonomy for Tibet, rather than independence from China.

"The Dalai Lama is close to China", having sent his brother to Beijing last year, and "he has a calming influence", said a Tibetan scholar who did not want to be identified because, like many pro-independence Tibetans, he fears arrest by China's State Security police.

"Some people say they are willing to die for the cause (of Tibetan independence) but they are willing to listen to the Dalai Lama", the scholar said.

Yet Chinese state media last month accused the Dalai Lama, of continuing "to make political deals in a religious robe, collecting funds for the purpose of splitting the motherland".

This year China began an ambitious project to link Lhasa to the national rail network by 2005, a move which would almost certainly accelerate the pace of migration into the remote area.

The number of non-Tibetans living in the Tibet Autonomous Region more than doubled from 1990 to 2000, reaching 205,200 out of a total population of 2.6 million according to census results, though Tibet also has a large number of Chinese military personnel who are not counted in census figures.

The US$2.4 billion rail project has "great significance for the acceleration of economic and social development in Tibet, (and) for the increase of economic and cultural exchanges", Premier Zhu Rongji said when China's top leaders approved the line.

The government hopes the railway, first proposed by Mao Zedong in the 1950s, will help Tibet's GDP grow 12 percent annually to 2005.

Tibetan exile groups and other critics say it will only hasten China's economic and cultural assimilation of Tibet.