The other side of triumph

The TYC statement reads; “We request responsible citizens and governments worldwide to stand up against China’s appalling human rights record in Tibet and not commit moral violence by remaining indifferent to the sufferings of the Tibetan people.”

Buddhist monks from Tibet lie on chairpois, day after day, without food or water in the monsoon heat. Lay Tibetans, and Asha Reddy, a beautiful wife and mother from Chennai, join the fast. You can see dehydration and exhaustion in their eyes and limbs, but their resolve transcends all pain. Their mission has summoned them to a feat of physical endurance to challenge every athlete in Beijing.

Reports from Tibet describe a chilling military crackdown. PLA soldiers stationed on every corner, in every temple. Every day another body and soul broken by torture. Lucrative payments for anyone willing to inform on friends and relatives. Above the TYC tent, banners show the faces of hundreds shot, tortured, killed by the PLA five months before the Olympics. Students and monks, carrying the Tibetan flag through the streets of Lhasa. An act of astonishing courage, a plea for justice, met with bullets, jail, death. No Olympic parties for the citizens of Tibet.

The Olympic Games were to be the baptism of China’s global ascendancy, but the tidal wave of global support for Tibet tossed an arrow into the heart of Politburo, exposing the rigid totalitarian mindset that clenches the Chinese Communist leadership in a vice. The IOC and their corporate sponsors have steadfastly refused to comment on China’s violations of all its sworn agreements on “openness” for the Games, whilst China’s Tibet policies have caused organisers considerable vexation. Chinese authorities tried to block to use of all iPods in the Olympic Village when they discovered that athletes were listening to Tibetan songs. Last week a senior British television journalist has his hands, face and camera smashed by Chinese security agents when he attempted to film a non-violent Tibet protest in Beijing.

The Chinese Communist Party, victorious in the Summer Olympiad, will surely accelerate its savage persecution of the Tibet people, in their psychotic determination to destroy Tibetan civilisation, especially the Buddhist faith, which the Politiboro has officially deemed “an evil cult which is a threat to national security”. Refugees in the TYC tent at Jantar Mantar describe how Communist “work teams” subject young monks and nuns to Cultural Revolution-style thought control sessions, with vicious beatings and torture, punishment for refusing to denounce the Dalai Lama, the distinguish Nobel Laureate, who has ever extended the olive branch towards Beijing, only to be slandered and shunned.

Here in India the Tibetan flag flies, safely. Delhi’s official protest zone at Jantar Mantar is filled with citizens agitating for One Language One Law, Down with Dowry, Fair Representation for Cooch-Bihar, and The Tibetan People’s Mass Uprising. In the first week of the Beijing Games, a man from Southern China travelled to Beijing to protest corruption by local Communist officials. He obtained a permit, entered the designated Olympic protest zone and was promptly arrested.

The Tibetan Youth Congress, founded in 1972, is committed to ahimsa and satyagraha, in the tradition of its model, the Indian Congress Party. The Chinese Communist Party has labelled the Tibetan Youth Congress a ‘terrorist organisation”, as it launches vicious attacks on the TYC in the international press. Why is the mighty People’s Republic of China so petrified of an unarmed band of monks, students and housewives? Why is the Chinese Embassy sealed by armed commandoes? What do they so fear?

Monks on a hunger strike in the monsoon heat. Banners with faces of the tortured and the dead. Citizens of the world calling for justice for Tibet. This is what the Chinese Communist Party fears. The truth.

Late into a rainy night, I bade farewell to the TYC volunteers and wandered into the Imperial Hotel, where a sumptuous lobby is filled with tales from the Raj. Redcoats in battle, the Sepoy Mutiny, Queen Victoria upon the throne, sultans, nawabs, maharajas on bended knee before their sovereign. Near the doorway, a small photo of Gandhi and Lord Mountbatten.

Around the corner, the people of Tibet surrender their bodies to the truth, as did the Mahatma to win India’s freedom struggle.

Empires rise, and then they die.

Maura Moynihan first lived in India in the 1970’s when her late father Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan served as the United States Ambassador in New Delhi