Have the media missed the real Tibet story?

Here’s an interesting column written by a best-selling author and journalist, published in an Australian newspaper. After written an article against the Dalai Lama, the journalist has received death threats that assure him the next time he’s India he’ll be killed.

Western media miss the real Tibet story

The first Starbucks in Lhasa is probably only one or two years away. This is a tragedy, too, particularly for the many rich Western travellers who would rather Tibet stay stuck in the Middle Ages for their own personal enjoyment, much in the same way economic sanctions have preserved Burma as the world’s largest living museum.

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I have always felt that the coverage accorded to the Dalai Lama in the Western media has been excessively favourable and uncritical, just as the media coverage in China of the Dalai Lama is appallingly biased but in the negative.

Clearly, in the past few weeks, ethnic Tibetans have been killed by the Chinese military. This has been widely reported.

But it is also clear that ethnic Chinese have been murdered by ethnic Tibetans in racially based attacks. This has not been made as clear in the Western media. And yet, the Western media were rightly appalled in 1998 when ethnic Chinese were raped and murdered in Jakarta for similar reasons — perceived excessive economic control at the expense of non-Chinese locals.

Another article by the same journalist: Behind Dalai Lama’s holy cloak

Rarely do journalists challenge the Dalai Lama.

Partly it is because he is so charming and engaging. Most published accounts of him breeze on as airily as the subject, for whom a good giggle and a quaint parable are substitutes for hard answers. But this is the man who advocates greater autonomy for millions of people who are currently Chinese citizens, presumably with him as head of their government. So, why not hold him accountable as a political figure?

No mere spiritual leader, he was the head of Tibet’s government when he went into exile in 1959. It was a state apparatus run by aristocratic, nepotistic monks that collected taxes, jailed and tortured dissenters and engaged in all the usual political intrigues. (The Dalai Lama’s own father was almost certainly murdered in 1946, the consequence of a coup plot.)

The government set up in exile in India and, at least until the 1970s, received $US1.7 million a year from the CIA.

The money was to pay for guerilla operations against the Chinese, notwithstanding the Dalai Lama’s public stance in support of non-violence, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

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