Tibet's Next Incarnation

  • Photograph by Sumit Dayal for TIME

    Otherworldly Mist shrouds the Indian mountain redoubt of Dharamsala, home to the Dalai Lama and fellow exiled Tibetans

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    Old Conflict, New Anger
    For years now, the Dalai Lama has stressed that he wants only genuine autonomy for Tibet, not outright independence — an approach he calls "the middle way." Years of negotiations between Beijing and Dharamsala have yielded no common ground. I have never met a Tibetan who expresses anything other than adoration for the Dalai Lama as a spiritual leader. Nevertheless, an increasing number of Tibetans see his efforts at peaceful compromise with China as ineffectual and even counterproductive. A Lhasa businessman I cannot name says something close to heresy for ears attuned to praise of the Dalai Lama's every utterance: "His Holiness does not live in Lhasa; he does not understand. Negotiations will never work. China will never give us freedom unless we rise up."

    Anger and frustration boiled over in 2008 when demonstrations culminated in deadly clashes between Tibetans and Han migrants and a bloody crackdown by Chinese security forces. Since the unrest, hundreds of Tibetans have been jailed, and Chinese troops roam the region. Tension remains high. Hardly a month goes by without some dissent in an isolated monastery or encampment.

    On Sept. 26 two teenage monks from an ethnically Tibetan part of Sichuan lit themselves on fire to protest Chinese religious restrictions. It wasn't the first time. Next to the Dalai Lama's monastery in Dharamsala stands a slender black obelisk called the Tibetan National Martyrs' Memorial. Recently, the base of the memorial was plastered with pictures of Tsewang Norbu, a burly monk wearing sunglasses. On Aug. 15 the 29-year-old, also from Sichuan, set himself on fire. As he burned to death, Norbu shouted slogans calling for freedom in Tibet.

    The self-immolation, at least the fourth this year by a Tibetan monk in Sichuan, might seem a contradiction. Life has improved economically in these far-flung lands, whose major export prior to the communist takeover was yak tails used in the U.S. for Santa Claus beards. Some of the newly arrived Tibetans I meet in Dharamsala acknowledge that the living conditions back home were better than in this ramshackle Indian hill station, with its rutted paths and dreadlocked tourists. Even the climate takes getting used to for these high-altitude people: yak-butter sculptures, sacred Tibetan offerings, melt in Dharamsala's heat.

    Yet each year hundreds of Tibetans brave arrest or frostbite to cross the Himalayas into exile. In Tibet today, celebrating the Dalai Lama's birthday or downloading a picture of him invites imprisonment. Tibetan students have to attend patriotic-education sessions, and Tibetan civil servants cannot publicly practice their faith. After all these years, communist-ruled Tibet has never had a Tibetan party secretary, the top local post. "The idea of the middle way is fantastic, but given the current Chinese government, there's no way it will work," says Tenpa Dhargyal, a 30-year-old Tibetan who was jailed twice in China for his pro-Tibetan activities and later escaped to Dharamsala. "When I came out of jail the first time in 2006, people wondered why I wasted my life on this struggle. But when I came out the second time in 2008, young Tibetans' attitudes had changed. They understand we must all fight together."

    The Dalai Lama's commitment to peaceful resistance places the Tibetan movement on moral high ground and gives it international appeal. Now young Tibetans who were born in exile congregate in cafés in Dharamsala to discuss the revolutions unfolding in the Middle East and North Africa. There is much parsing of how South Sudan and East Timor achieved nationhood. "Until independence happened in these places, people would say, 'Oh, freedom is impossible,'" says Tenzin Jigdal, program director for Students for a Free Tibet. "But it happened because people gave their lives to the struggle. Our resistance has remained largely nonviolent, but there is no way we can make judgments on Tibetans inside Tibet because they're the ones facing Chinese repression."

    Kalon Tripa Sangay walks a delicate line. As a youngster, he was a leading member of the Tibetan Youth Congress, a growing proindependence group based in Dharamsala, which China's People's Daily has deemed a "pure terrorist organization." Now that he represents a government-in-exile bound to the middle way, Sangay has adopted a stance that is logically sound but politically unsatisfying. "I say that Tibet was historically independent and we have the right to self-determination," he says. "But pragmatically I'm not for independence." Many Tibetans in exile take this as a placeholder position. "When the Dalai Lama is gone, the fight will go on, because it's the struggle of a nation," says Tenzin Chokey, the Tibetan Youth Congress' general secretary. "It's up to the Tibetan people to push the cause of independence forward. It's our turn."

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