Why tibet is burning

We use cookies to enhance your experience. Dismiss this message or find out more. Forgot your password? Don't have an account? Sign up here for discounts and quicker purchasing. Since the uprising, nearly Tibetan monks have set fire to themselves in protest at the Chinese occupation of their country.

Most have died from their injuries. Then we visited another monument, this one recognizing a pair of Tibetans who self-immolated during protests in India. Past them we saw a looming bronze statue of a monk in flames, his face turned skyward in an expression of defiance. Next to the monastery, we entered a museum dedicated to Tibetan history.

In one room, a short video of Tibetans burning alive loops over and over. But I checked myself, because I was glad they were witnessing a truth about Tibet that the brochures and travel magazines gloss over.

Since China absorbed the country, Tibetans have endured rape, beatings, disappearances, imprisonment, theft of land, theft of language, and suppression of religion. This can be hard to reconcile when you hear media reports about how China has been so good for Tibet, modernizing an impoverished, feudal state with infrastructure and economic opportunity. China built a train connecting Beijing to Lhasa, making industrial goods easier for rural Tibetans to acquire.

Even remote parts of the Tibetan plateau have been modernized with paved roads and cell-phone service. Three days before the temple visit, Carole and I stood in the lobby of our hotel in Asansol, bowing and shaking hands with Nyima Yangzom, 64, and Thupten Tashi, 71, the parents of Dorjee Tsering, the year-old who self-immolated on February 29, Both died.

To get there, you pass a stable where local Indians take sick, injured, and abandoned cows, and Tibetans live in crude rooms above them. Many Tibetans migrate here from Indian cities far away to sell their wares, including sweaters. They try to sell them all in November and December. Then they head back to their home, miles away, in Dehradun, India. If you ignore the socioeconomic challenges Tibetans experience in India—such as their limited abilities to acquire property and passports—life in exile had been generally tolerable for Nyima and Thupten.

As of , two of their three kids had completed secondary school, and it seemed like their youngest, Dorjee, would follow. But Dorjee was different. When he returned home for a break, Nyima would scold him. His response might have pleased the Dalai Lama. So which person would you rather pick? Someone good at his studies or loving and kind? Dorjee kept giving clues, but they missed—or avoided—them. During one of his breaks, while he, Nyima, and Thupten were visiting his uncle at a settlement for elderly Tibetan refugees, he made a decision.

One morning as Nyima made breakfast, Dorjee hovered near her in the kitchen. She thought he was talking about his return to school. He asked for money, and she gave him some, thinking it was for a haircut. He left and was gone several hours. I love you, pala. That evening, Dorjee hugged his mother. The next morning, he hiked away from the camp. Out of sight, he hoisted a can of kerosene out of some bushes, poured it over his shoulders and torso, and lit himself with a match.

Something burning! She threw her arms around him, to protect his head from the rising fire, but someone pulled her off. She and others helped Dorjee to an outdoor faucet. They assume he was educating himself about the atrocities China has inflicted on Tibetans. Both listened somberly when the Dalai Lama told them, in person, to be proud of Dorjee, that he was no longer their son but a son of Tibet. That night in our hotel room, as traffic screamed by and our jet lag finally crushed us, I swam in the bottomed-out devastation of what Carole and I had just witnessed.

She rocked on the ground and slapped her forehead as she seemed to relive every moment. At one point, when describing her burns, she mimed the skin under her arms melting.

And as she spilled the story into the room, Thupten sat opposite her on the floor, silently crying. Not in all my of years of reporting had I witnessed such visceral pain, nor had Carole in her decades of research.

In our room, clutching a yellow legal pad, she tried to explain how interviewing Thupten and Nyima had been different. Two days later, we escaped the heat of Asansol and entered the cool air of Dharamsala, a city perched on the edge of the Himalayas at 4, feet.

On the winding streets, weaving between startled-looking tourists shopping for dashboard statues of Shiva, Tibetan Buddhist nuns and monks walked with intention, some holding malas —Buddhist prayer beads—and others carrying bags of chicken.

The mala holders slipped beads through their fingers in time with their prayers for all sentient beings, while the chicken keepers pulled chunks of raw bird from beneath their robes and fed them to packs of dogs that range this steep-hilled city freely. And the Tibetans living in the diaspora are friendly to a fault. Every morning just before dawn, streams of them walked past my teahouse window, chanting on their way to do kora meditation while circumambulating around the temple.

The sound started as a low hum in the purple light of predawn, then formed into words— om mani padme hum —as the crowd drew closer. On four mornings, I left the comfort of my bed and joined them, greeted by smiles and quick bows from the devout. Hip Tibetan youth also work out, post disappearing videos on WeChat the Chinese social-media service , dream of both returning to Tibet and immigrating to the West, and uphold their devotion to their religious and spiritual leader. One morning I spotted a group of them doing squats and stretching near the temple path, decked out in track pants and sweatbands.

We exchanged waves, and I asked what they were doing. One mimed running. Dharamsala is the administrative center of the Tibetan government in exile. The Tibetans have their own parliament, court system, schools, and hospitals. In recent years, Tibetans lucky enough to obtain foreign visas have begun migrating to cities around the world. But those who stay relish the fact that the current Dalai Lama, who they believe to be the 14th reincarnation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, lives among them.

For many Tibetans, though, no resolution will be achieved until their countrymen inside Tibet are free to worship as they please, the Dalai Lama can return as their spiritual leader, and they can return to their own country. Two days later, Carole and I met Gyaltsen Rangzen, a year-old dressed in a traditional Tibetan wool jacket, at a crowded Dharamsala restaurant.

He and his year-old sister, Yepo, caught a ride from Amdo to Lhasa. There, through family friends, they met a driver who transported them miles to the Nepalese border. Though they slept on the ground and ate food that made them sick from both ends for seven days, they were lucky and survived.

When Gyaltsen and Yepo finally reached the border, Nepali guards stripped off their clothing, searched their belongings and bodies, and stuffed them in a jeep driven by a soldier.

They spent nine weeks in a Tibetan reception center in Kathmandu, then made their way to Dharamsala. Gyaltsen now works at the Indian headquarters of Students for a Free Tibet, where he earns enough to barely support himself, Yepo, and a family member new to Dharamsala, an ex-political prisoner who Gyaltsen helped escape. His crime? Owning a CD recorded by a Tibetan artist who writes pro-independence lyrics.

His punishment? Arrest, beatings, and an month imprisonment, during which he was forced to sew Tibetan prayer flags for a business. Which is why he sometimes wonders why his cousin, Lobsang Jamyang, lit himself on fire. Gyaltsen and Lobsang grew up together. It was a place free from Chinese influence, where the little boys, ages ten and eight, could play. After Gyaltsen escaped to India, he kept tabs on Lobsang through his own brother. As a boy, Lobsang had entered a monastery to become a monk.

But that meant a smaller life for Lobsang during a time of great political upheaval. In , during the lead-up to the Olympics in Beijing, hundreds of monks and other Tibetans took to the streets of Lhasa to protest Chinese occupation.

At least other Tibetans have self-immolated since then. Of these, did so within Tibet, while the remaining five were living in exile. According to the best information we have, have died including within Tibet and three abroad.

Most of these individuals are men, though some are women. Many were parents who left behind young children. The oldest was sixty-four, and the youngest was sixteen. Seven underage Tibetans have either self-immolated or attempted self-immolation; two of them died, and two were detained and their fate is unknown. The numbers include three monks of high rank tulkus , or reincarnated masters , along with thirty-nine ordinary monks and eight nuns.

But many were ordinary people: seventy-four were nomads or peasants; among the others were high school students, workers, vendors, a carpenter, a woodworker, a writer, a tangka painter, a taxi driver, a retired government cadre, a laundry owner, a park ranger, and three activists exiled abroad. All are Tibetan. These events constitute the largest wave of self-immolation as a tool of political protest in the modern world—yet there is no such tradition in Tibetan history.

How did we get here? This oppression is primarily manifested in five areas of Tibetan life. First, Tibetan beliefs have been suppressed, and religious scholarship has been subjected to political violence. Outside of the temples, the people of Tibet face regular searches of their residences: images of the Dalai Lama are confiscated from their homes, and there have even been cases of believers being imprisoned simply for having a photograph of His Holiness.

Second, the ecosystem of the Tibetan Plateau is being systematically destroyed. The state has forced thousands to leave behind the sheep, grasslands, and traditions of horseback riding with which they have practiced for millennia to move to the edges of towns, where they remain tied to one place. In their wake, a sea of Han workers has arrived from across the country armed with blueprints, bulldozers, and dynamite.

They have immediately gone to work on the empty grasslands and rivers, mining copper, gold, and silver, building dams, and polluting our water supply and that of Asia as a whole in particular, the upper reaches of the Mekong, Yangtse, and Yarlung Tsangpo rivers.

Third, Tibetan-language education has been systematically undermined. The grid divides neighborhoods into multiple units with corresponding government offices, which are benignly advertised as expanding social services. What happened in ? However, on the fundamental issue, there has been no concrete result at all. And during the past few years, Tibet has witnessed increased repression and brutality.

The Dalai Lama suddenly acknowledged what Tibetans living in Tibet had long known: not only had there been no progress, but life in Tibet had only become more oppressive.