By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson, International Coordinating Committee
International League of Peoples’ Struggle
20 April 2008
The movement represented by the Dalai Lama is utterly reactionary. It is for the restoration of a despotic and extremely exploitative theocracy in Tibet. Worse, it is an instrument of US imperialism in its dual policy of containment and engagement against China and the Chinese people. It is condemnable.
The repressive and bloodsucking theocracy represented by the Dalai Lama has long been overthrown by the Tibetan people themselves, causing his flight from Tibet together with his ultra-reactionary retinue. Since then, these relics of the past have been used as anti-China lackeys of US imperialism in the Cold War and thereafter. They have been financed by the Central Intelligence Agency and other insidious state agencies of the US as well as by certain nongovernmental organizations and funding agencies of monopoly capitalist groups.
Some progressives have argued that the level of oppression, exploitation and discrimination against the Tibetan people has risen because of the growth of capitalism in China and that therefore the Tibetan people are justified to assert and exercise the right to national self-determination up to the right to secede. But the main contradiction to deal with first of all on the issue of Tibet is between the Chinese people of various nationalities, including the Tibetans, who uphold China’s national sovereignty and the Dalai Lama’s pro-imperialist reactionary movement which demands the restoration of a backward social system far more reactionary and brutal than capitalism.
That the Tibet Autonomous Region belongs to China is a longstanding fact in previous centuries and in the recent decades of the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese people of various nationalities, including the Tibetans, concur on this fact. Even the Dalai Lama makes public protestations that he is not demanding the separation of Tibet from China.
But he and his ultra-reactionary kind and their imperialist handlers raise claims about “ethnic genocide” and “human rights violations” against China precisely to support the maximum objective of seeking the separation of Tibet from China and the intervention of imperialist powers and the minimum objective of discrediting and cutting down China to serve the purposes of the imperialist powers on time for the Olympic Games.
The multi-media owned and controlled by the imperialist powers play up and drum up the smallest protest pickets of the followers of the Dalai Lama in various capitals of the world and the hypocritical statements of Bush, Brown and other imperialist leaders about human rights. They do so to an extent far beyond the media coverage given to the continuing mass actions of the people against the war of aggression in Iraq and to the massive violation of international law and human rights by the imperialist powers and their puppets in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Turkey, India, Tamil Eelam, the Philippines, and elsewhere in the world.
The most interesting development in the Himalayas today is not the protest actions in support of the reactionary movement represented and headed by the Dalai Lama. It is the unprecedented resounding victory of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) in the elections for Constituent Assembly. This spells the abolition of the monarchy and establishment of the democratic federal republic and opens further the way to basic democratic reforms towards the completion of the new democratic revolution. But the multi-media of the imperialist powers play up the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan reactionaries and play down the progressive political victory of CPN (Maoist) and the Nepali people. ###
