The world's youngest political prisoner
At the age of five, Gedhun Choekyi Niyama was abducted by the Chinese from his remote Tibetan village and has not been seen since. His crime? He was identified by the Dalai Lama as the reincarnation of one of the most important figures in Tibetan Buddhism. As he reaches adulthood,
Yesterday, somewhere in China, a boy became a man. Exactly where, only the Chinese authorities can say, and they are not telling. What he looks like now we have an idea but only an idea: the only photograph of him, reproduced here, was taken when he was still a young child, around the time the Dalai Lama announced he was the reincarnated Panchen Lama.
That was 12 years ago, in 1995, and for five-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, son of the headman of a village in central Tibet, the announcement meant the end of a normal childhood. He and his parents were seized by Chinese security forces and taken to a secure and secret location. None of the three has been seen in public since. They are believed to be somewhere in the Beijing area. The government recently denied they are in custody and insisted Gedhun leads a normal life. But it is the life of a shadow, a ghost, a man whose destiny, China decrees, can never be fulfilled, for the safety and stability of the Chinese state.
Gedhun, who turned 18 yesterday, menaces China because, as the attested reincarnation of the second most important Buddhist teacher in Tibet, he could become as important as the Dalai Lama is now and has been for the past 30-odd years as a symbol of Tibet's culture, its traditions, piety and identity: a figure around whom all those who yearn for Tibet's independence, and struggle for its cultural survival, can gather and focus their hopes and efforts; a lightning rod for Tibetan nationalism.
The Dalai Lama made his announcement and the Panchen Lama vanished. It was as if he had never existed. In his place the Chinese found another lad, and quisling monks loyal to Beijing declared that this was the true Panchen Lama, this and none other. About Gedhun's age, he was a child, conveniently, of Communist Party members. Gyaltsen Norbu was his name.
They installed Gyaltsen Norbu in a heavily guarded villa near Beijing. And now that he, too, is approaching manhood, the Chinese roll him out from time to time to test the waters. When he was nearly 12 he made his first visit to Tibet, to the monastery of Tashilhunpo that is the traditional seat of the Panchen Lama, in the town of Shigatse. Security was heavy; evidence of popular devotion was absent. A year ago he made his debut before an international audience, speaking at the World Buddhist Forum, a government-sponsored jamboree devoted to the theme, "a harmonious world begins in the heart" (and from which the Dalai Lama was absent). The authorities describe the lad as "Buddhism's most senior leader".
"Defending the nation and working for the people is a solemn commitment Buddhism has made to the nation and society," this child of the Party told the gathering.
The abduction of Gedhun and his substitution by Gyaltsen was the way the Chinese authorities sought to hijack the Tibetan Buddhist church once and for all, to set it running on Communist Party rails and to a Communist Party timetable.
The plan is simple. In the Tibetan system the Dalai Lama is the sun, the Panchen Lama the moon. The Dalai Lama is 71. His health is good but he cannot live forever. Once he goes, the most senior figure will be the Panchen Lama, whose duty then will be to identify the next Dalai Lama. That's the way it has worked for at least three centuries, a sort of holy leapfrog down the ages. A puppet Panchen Lama will name a puppet Dalai Lama and, just as the current Dalai Lama has been the incarnation of Tibet's aspirations for an independent or at least autonomous future, by putting his reincarnation in their pocket the Chinese will kill off the Tibetan independence movement for good. They hope.
Gedhun Choekyi Nyima thus became the world's youngest political prisoner for a powerful political reason, one which has only gained in significance as the Dalai Lama's profile and popularity have continued to rise. "China's detention of the Panchen Lama," says Matt Whitticase of the Free Tibet Campaign, "represents a crime not only against a child but against the entire Tibetan people who regard the ongoing detention of one of their most important religious leaders as a source of great distress. It is a clear demonstration of the lengths to which China is prepared to go to control, and ultimately crush, both Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan identity."
Tibet enthusiasts often conjure up a picture of this remote country before the Chinese invasion of 1959 as a Shangri-la. It was a "land of lost content" where happy farmers were governed bybodhisattvas [leaders motivated by compassion], far above the vicious politics of less fortunate parts of Asia.
It's a fanciful image with little basis in fact. Tibet was as bedevilled by poverty, filth, illiteracy and disease as any other benighted corner of the world. The mass of the people were serfs, tied by lifelong obligation either to the great monasteries or to the lay aristocracy. Education and learning was limited to the monasteries - which, as in other Buddhist societies such as Burma and Sri Lanka - provided the only means of social mobility. Many high lamas emerged from ordinary families, chosen like the Panchen Lama by a combination of divination, dreams and astrology.
Buddhism preaches non-violence and transcending the illusionary ego, but Tibet's Buddhist schools were no more adept at avoiding power struggles than those of any other religion. The four traditional groups were frequently at loggerheads; the Yellow Hat sect, to which the Dalai Lama belongs, came to power when the Mongol army helped the fifth Dalai Lama to defeat the rival Red Hat sect. Bringing harmony to the four has been one of the present Dalai Lama's great achievements.
Nor was independence as clear cut as the Tibetans' more emotional supporters in the West like to imagine. China's rulers in the 20th century - both the republicans of the first half and the Communists of the second - consistently claimed sovereignty over Tibet. What varied was the clout of the Chinese in imposing what they claimed as their right. During the Republic, for example, when the Chinese state was very weak, Tibet achieved the de facto independence which most Tibetans now aspire to. But it was a function of Chinese weakness, not Tibetan assertiveness, as is proved by the failure of Tibet to seek a seat in either the League of Nations or the United Nations when it had the chance.
So the Tibet that the People's Liberation Army overran in 1959 was no Shangri-la and, had the Communists entered the country in a different spirit, it's possible to imagine a different result. The Dalai Lama, for example, applied to join the Communist Party; the 10th Panchen Lama welcomed the Chinese army.
The intensity of Tibetan longing for the old dispensation is a measure of the disaster wrought on the country by the waves of communist invasion. The successive fiascos orchestrated by Mao Zedong - the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution - struck Tibet more harshly than the Han Chinese heartland, accompanied by wanton destruction of monasteries and cultural treasures, and the pent-up fury and arrogance of outsiders convinced of their racial and cultural superiority. The promised benefits of revolution, such as health care and economic development, arrived at a snail's pace, and often to the benefit of settlers from the lowlands. Meanwhile, Tibetans saw everything in which their identity resided being systematically crushed.
And this is not a process that finished with the end of Mao and the Gang of Four; in different ways with different tactics the policy of colonisation and cultural homogenisation still continues. In 2002, for the first time, the Chinese agreed to open talks with the Dalai Lama - whose declaration that he wants the autonomy of Tibet rather than its independence goes back many years. So far, five secret sessions have been held - but no sign has emerged that they are going anywhere; many suspect they are no more than window-dressing in advance of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, designed to defuse protest and persuade critical foreign states that China is on a conciliatory track.
The actions of the government send a different message. According to a report released yesterday by the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), the campaign of repression continues in many fields. New restrictions have been placed on religious practice in the Tibetan Autonomous Region; religious institutions are being used more and more to inculcate patriotic spirit; the Communist Party is seeking to tighten further its grip on Buddhist organisations; the government continues to do all it can to suppress support for the Dalai Lama within China; and the monastic education system, which is the only means by which the Tibetan language and the noble and elaborate legacy of Buddhist studies in Tibet is preserved, is under renewed attack.
Above all, and symbolising the entire campaign, is the Chinese abduction of the Panchen Lama and the exploitation of a puppet substitute to say what the Chinese authorities want to be said. With only a year to go to the Olympics, China's big coming-out parade, the picture remains exceedingly bleak.
Elsewhere, meanwhile, the Dalai Lama's profile has never been higher. His adamant refusal to countenance violence in pursuit of his political ends has earned him the opposition and suppressed hostility of some factions in the Tibetan diaspora - but has helped to keep him enormously popular. He was cited in a recent poll in Germany as by far the most respected religious figure in the world. He has brought the formerly feuding sects of Tibetan Buddhism into harmony, and the extraordinary religion over which he presides has never in history been so successful, thanks to him, in getting its message out. Later this year, to the fury of the Chinese, he is to be presented in Washington with the Congressional Medal.
And, somewhere in China, waits a young man who is the symbol of a terrible impasse.
Lamas and lineage
* For more than 500 years the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, known as the Dalai Lama, and his deputy, the Panchen Lama, have been selected through a strict procedure whereby both lamas pick each other's successor. The Dalai Lama chooses who will be the next Panchen Lama who in turn will pick the next Dalai Lama. Tibetans believe Lamas do this via wisdom and divine enlightenment.
* Tibetans believe the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama are incarnations of the bodhisattva, the name Buddha gave to himself before he attained enlightenment. Both figures are held in the highest regard by all four schools of Tibetan Buddhism.
* Today's Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, is the fourteenth in line. He has spent much of his life in exile in the Indian hill town of Dharamsala after China invaded Tibet in 1950.
* The Panchen Lama, as chosen by Tenzin Gyatso, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, is the eleventh in line. He is thought to be under virtual house arrest by the Chinese government near Beijing.
independent
