A Short History of Tibet in Modern Times

Tibetan Chapter, after Michel Peissel

Documents from the Darjeeling Conference

John's Letter

The Darjeeling Conference : Aftermath

Heroes of Tibet

Later Heroes of Tibet

Tibetan Letters (John Westerberg, Kim, Doctor Sandy, Doctor Sun)

The Panchen Lama

The Tibetan Problem - a concise summary

What Is To Be Done About China? - by Doctor Sun

Talks in Kathmandu

It Happens in Lhasa

Concerning Buddhism

Letter from Calcutta

Concerning Hinduism

The Rules of the Buddhistic Order

The Ten Precepts

K2 - the Adventure

Shakespeare in Calcutta

Peter Fleming and the Great Game

The Murder of Panchen Lama

A Political Reflection

Second Thoughts on "The English Patient"

Problems in East Turkestan

Whatever Happened in Mongolia?

Heinrich Harrer's Return to Tibet

Successful Pilgrimage to Kailash

A Foreigner's View on Kashmir

Voices from China

Doctor Sun Concerning the Hongkong Issue

The Tragedy of Tibet

Concerning Genocide

Violence or Non-Violence? - a Tibetan Question of Destiny

Comments to Karmapa

Tibetan Seminar in Gothenburg, Sweden, May 6th 2000

Letter from Bihar

The Leh Conference

Tibetan Attitude Toward Death Not Mystical (Satori Foundation)

A Note of Warning, by Doctor Sun

The Situation

A Bureaucrat's Diary, by S. Shankar Menon: Road to Lhasa

Forced Abortion and Forced Sterilization (Human Rights Watch, Asia)

Remember Lithang! - by John B. Westerberg

Greetings from Darjeeling - by John B. Westerberg

Raoul Wallenberg and Tibet

The 27th Gothenburg Film festival - "The Cry of the Snow Lion"

The Himalayas Updated

The Defence for China

An Apology from China

China's Zombie Countries Bringing Dictators Back to Life

Anatomy of Political Communism

The systematical eradication of Tibetan religion, the genocide and the implant by force of Chinese in the country was commenced almost immediately. Already in 1956 the bombings of monasteries and mass sterilizations were a fact while innumerable Tibetan children were methodically evacuated by force into China to have a thoroughly Communist education and the monasteries were emptied of monks and nuns who were compelled to deadly physical labour and to marriage against their will.

In March 1959 Dalai Lama and his autonomous government professed that the Chinese had violated 13 of the 17 articles of the agreed-upon settlement, wherefore they declared the settlement no longer valid. The total independence and sovereignty of Tibet was proclaimed anew. The Chinese immediately took measures and intended to arrest and dispose of the entire Tibetan government, but Dalai Lama escaped and organized his exile government in India.

Nehru of India wanted Dalai Lama to return to Tibet and achieve a peaceful settlement with the Chinese, but Nehru's co-operation policy towards China came to a sudden end when China attacked India along two frontiers, in Ladakh and in Assam.

The Tibetan declaration of independence on March 1959 has never been retracted by Dalai Lama and his exile government and is consequently still valid after 34 years' indefatigable resistance against the Chinese occupation of Tibet. By right and by law, Tibet has been independent since 17 March 1959 and has in this century only belonged to China during the years 1900-1912 and not even during eight full years from 23 May 1951 to 17 March 1959.

At the time of the proclamation of independence in 1912, Tibet, apart from its official area nowadays, also comprised all lands up to the Altyn Tag Mountains and to the lake of Koko Nor (Tsing Hai) and to the east to the regions where the rivers of Hwang Ho and Yangtse Kiang run closest to each other. China not only transformed Tibet into an exploited and impoverished province but also truncated its geographical nature and natural limits.

Mention should be made concerning the remarkable position of the Panchen Lama. He is officially and traditionally the spiritual leader of Tibet while Dalai Lama is the political head of government. In reality they have changed parts: Dalai Lama has proved an unchallengeable spiritual leader while Panchen Lama has enacted some remarkable political turns. When the British came to Gyangtse in 1904 Dalai Lama (XIII) escaped to the neighbouring country of Mongolia in the north while Panchen Lama (IX) remained and came to terms with the British. When China assaulted Tibet in 1910, Dalai Lama escaped to India while Panchen Lama remained and came to terms with the Manchu dynasty. When Tibet declared its independence from China on the 16th of December 1912, Panchen Lama found himself in such a precarious political situation that he felt obliged to escape to China, where he lived protected by the Kuomintang and by Chang Kai Shek under vain efforts to return to Tibet. He was not enabled to return until he was in his coffin in 1935.

When China attacked Tibet in 1950 it was from the official reason that the new 13-year old Panchen Lama (X) had asked China to come and liberate Tibet. When Dalai Lama escaped from Tibet in 1959 Panchen Lama remained, continuing to co-operate with the communists, according to or against his will, which he already had done since 1952. His rival of the title had been disposed of while making a pilgrimage from Tashilumpo to India - no one has heard anything about him since the Chinese arrested him in Yatung. The remaining Panchen Lama candidate was established by the communists, but when he in a more mature age proved loyal to Dalai Lama, he was obliged to come to Peking to spend some 20 years in isolation, at times badly tortured and unable to communicate with anyone outside China, until he agreed to co-operate again. Whether he was true or false as Panchen Lama, his position was most tragical. He died five years ago although several years younger than Dalai Lama. His death occurred under mysterious circumstances, and in that context a number of his family members expired from heart attacks, according to the Chinese. A new Panchen Lama has not yet been found.

China has violated 19 of the Human Rights in Tibet:

§3 The right to a private life, freedom and personal security has been violated by murders, rapes, imprisonments without trial and arbitrary executions.

§4 The prohibition against slavery has been violated by the fact that China, under the pretext of liberating the people of Tibet, has enslaved them instead.

§5 The prohibition against torture and against cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of people has been violated since this has been carried through against the Tibetan people.

§9 The prohibition against arbitrary arrest, detention and exile has been violated.

§12 The prohibition against interfering with people's private lives, family lives, home lives and correspondence and against defamation of character and the right to protection of law against such attacks has been violated by compulsory divorces, dispersion of families and the deprivation of children from their families against their will.

§13 The right to freedom of movement to and from and within one's own country and from any other country has been taken from the Tibetans.

§16 That marriage may be entered on only by the free will of both parties has been violated by compulsory marriages between monks and nuns and by that many Tibetan women were forced into marriage with Chinese.

§17 The right to property and the prohibition against arbitrary deprivation of property has been violated by mass confiscations as the Tibetans often were bereft of everything except clothes and household articles.

§18 The right to freedom of thought, of conscience and of religion was taken from the Tibetans.

§19 The right to freedom of opinion and expression was taken from the Tibetans mostly by the methodical destruction of their writings and the burning of their books.

§20 The right to peaceful assembly and association was forbidden by the Chinese as only meetings proclaimed by the Chinese were allowed.

§21 The right to take part in the government of one's country was forbidden by the Chinese.

§22 The right to social security was denied the Tibetans as 1) the economical resources of Tibet went to China, 2) the social changes in Tibet were disadvantageous to the Tibetans and 3) efforts were made to destroy the religion of the Tibetans.

§23 The right to work, free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to a fair salary was denied the Tibetans by forced labour under inhuman conditions without a salary.

§24 The right to rest and leisure with paid holidays from labour was denied the Tibetans.

§25 The right to a decent standard of living and to medical care and the right of all mothers and children to special protection was violated as all Tibetan economical resources were taken care of by the Chinese.

§26 The right to free education and upbringing was violated since the educational institutions of the Tibetans were closed and replaced by communist schools of propaganda and by the fact that the Tibetan children were taken from their parents to be indoctrinated in enforced propaganda.

§27 The right to participation in the cultural life of the home country was taken from the Tibetans by the Chinese effort to eliminate Tibetan culture by replacing it with atheistic communism.

§29 That personal freedom is to be limited only by appropriate consideration of other people was violated by the Chinese mostly through the bombings of Tibetan monasteries, which were built most of all to protect personal freedom and development.

The violation of Human Rights in Tibet has continued undisturbed for more than 40 years, since the systematical, methodical and well premeditated genocide against the Tibetans that was initiated in 1950 never has been interrupted although China is a member of the United Nations.

Development is now progressing in the right direction and has done so since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 but has constantly been disturbed and hindered by the Chinese (the Tiananmen Square in June 1989). The above-mentioned statements of violation of Human Rights in Tibet were ready and internationally known since 1960, and that was long before the Cultural Revolution. Nothing was done about it then, and practically nothing has been done about it ever since, except by the Tibetans themselves, who restore their monasteries by means of their own while the Chinese continue to abuse and expropriate their country.

Gothenburg, Sweden, March 17th, 1994.

The oldest son knows, that when he marries and inherits the father's home and property, it is the great honour of his nearest brother to become a monk. For those of us who live in countries where religion doesn't have much influence it is difficult to appreciate the very high level of desirability with which the inhabitants of the Himalayas regard the monk's life. We who are born to a mundane life do not understand the desires of a more spiritual life. The children of Himalaya are taught from the beginning to respect their teacher, to like books and venerate literature and to regard life as just a transient phase on the journey to fulfilment and perhaps consummation. The basis for all spiritual life in Tibet is the respect for the written word and that all things written are taken seriously, nearly as though all written words were the words of God. That makes the Tibetans like the Jews a people of the book, and the monk is responsible for this respect. To become a monk is to the boys a great privilege and a great social and spiritual honour. They also know that their uncle, who is a monk, leads a very interesting life. "A better life is not possible. I have no wife, no children to support, I don't have to work in the fields nor walk up the mountains to find some lost cow or horse. I have no temporal worries and am perfectly free; of course, I have no riches, but instead I have the greatest treasure of all, which is to understand the Buddhistic philosophy and its true nature. No kind of life could be compared with a life dedicated to Dharma (insight)."

The Chinese and some western scientists have called the monks of Tibet and Himalaya parasites. A sociological film about Ladakh, which was made not long ago, has even represented the monasteries of today as terrible instruments for exploiting the poor. Many have failed to understand that the reality is the direct contrary. The monasteries are economically advantageous to all. There is not much farm land which can be cultivated with artificial irrigation or farmed at all. If the farms were inherited and shared by all the children or just between the sons, in just a few generations the population would have increased so much that there would have been a compulsory choice between emigration and starvation. To an agricultural people with only limited areas of arable land it is absolutely vital to have some kind of birth control. Voluntary celibacy seems to be one of the best methods to stabilize the population. By receiving the second son from every family into their midst, the monasteries limit the growth of population in a most natural way. This is in fact the only natural method of birth control.

It is a fact that the tradition of creating gigantic buildings goes back to the ancient days, but a fortress of eleven storeys from the 7th century must have been one of the first skyscrapers in the world. We are all familiar with Potala, the palace of Dalai Lama in Lhasa, which was built in the latter half of the 17th century and which has something between 16 and 19 storeys. It must have been one of the highest buildings in the world for several centuries. In Europe it was not surpassed until 1922 by a skyscraper in Belgium.

The most important trait in the culture of the Himalayas is of an aesthetic nature, not economic. For an example, an old rotten door on crooked hinges may squeak but still be beautifully decorated with the most exquisite ornaments. In this case the aesthetic character of the door is considered as important as its practical function if not more. In our modern western world the contrary is generally preferred. We use more time and money on efficacy than on artistic embellishment. When this is used, it is generally for a sales argument to attract the buyer. Notions like efficiency, comfort and practical use are much more important than the notion of beauty. It has been like that ever since functionalism made a break-through in this century while we in the last century still preferred beauty to everything else. To a Tibetan's mind, happiness is synonymous with beauty, while we nowadays tend to replace beauty with comfort. Our sense of beauty is unfortunately almost reduced to nothing by the maladies of comfort, and aestheticism almost no longer exists as a clear subject. Here is one of the major differences between us and the world of the Himalayas.

A well-known and dubious phenomenon in Tibet is the so called Tibetan disease or mountain sickness, which above all mountaineers suffer from especially after experiences in Tibet. There is a related phenomenon in the far north of Scandinavia called the Lapponian disease. Everyone is familiar with it who has been living in Lapland. The symptom is an irresistible attraction to a geographical area which is stronger and more difficult the more barren and hostile this area is. In the Himalayas this phenomenon haunts the mountaineers to such an awful extent that they simply have to return and climb the same impossible mountains again even if they have to die for it; and the worse the mountains, the better. Many have sacrificed their lives for K2 in this manner. If you have visited the Himalayas only once, this phenomenon is all too true and stronger than reality. It is very rare that a traveller to the Himalayas does not feel the urge to return at any cost to the same desolate mountains or even worse and more hostile ones. To Sven Hedin, the famous Swedish explorer, (the Indiana Jones prototype,) this illness mounted to an obsession which constantly drove him back to "his cold bride of Asia" of the Tibetan mountains and deserts. You are simply hopelessly lost forever from the moment you place your foot on the Tibetan plateau. Yes, even Darjeeling or Kathmandu will do, and you are stuck.

- after Michel Peissel.

Nevertheless, our Darjeeling conference became a decisive success. Everyone was inspired and contributed with his best. Here are the main concluded issues:

1) Representatives of China (5), India (3), Thailand (2), Burma (2), Vietnam (2), Japan (2), Kampuchea (1), South Korea (1), Taiwan (1), Mongolia (1), Nepal (1), Bhutan (1), Laos (1), Malaysia (1) and Indonesia (1) acknowledged His Holiness the Dalai Lama as the supreme leader of Buddhism in the world since he has no competitor or equal historically or at present, and his holiness is regarded as more perfect than that of his only colleague in the world, His Holiness the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. No human perfection can ever be supreme, though, although that of Gautama Siddhartha was next to it. All Buddhists and all Buddhist countries are advised to acknowledge His Holiness the Dalai Lama as the supreme spiritual leader of Buddhism. (The Panchen Lama was almost totally disregarded.)

2. In consequence of the problem of Muslim fundamentalism, all religious fundamentalism was unanimously condemned as being inhuman, destructive and insane. That includes all fundamentalists within Islam, Hinduism, Christianity and Communism. Islamic fundamentalism is considered the worst and most perilous, Hindu fundamentalism comes next to it, while Christian fundamentalism was considered less aggressive nowadays and Communist fundamentalism to be waning. One must not compromise with any form of fundamentalism or deal with fundamentalists as if they were rational and reasonable people, which they definitely are not. You can't argue with lunatics either.

3. It is advised to all countries in the third world who can't afford to deal with the epidemic of Aids to refrain from doing anything about it. It simply doesn't pay.

4. The greatest problem in the world today is considered the intolerable occupation of Tibet since 44 years now by the Chinese communists or, more realistically, the Han imperialists, resulting in the third genocide of this century, a genocide worse than the two previous ones, because the world should have learned something from the slaughter of 1,5 million Armenians in the first world war and of 6 million Jews in the second. On these two previous occasions the world did nothing. When it happened the third time in Tibet the world again did nothing but acquiesced and sanctioned the genocide in silence. The chief responsibility (after that of China of course) rests with India, the first nation to acknowledge the communist regime in China in 1949. When Tibet was invaded by China the following year, India did nothing but hoped that "Tibet would solve the problem peacefully". That was only the beginning of the tragedy. The genocide has been going on for 44 years, a greater part of the Tibetans have been exterminated than the parts of the Armenian and the Jewish peoples on the previous occasions, and today China is still supported by the US to continue the genocide, the oppression, the exploitation and the suppression of human rights in Tibet. All the free democratic world is helping the intolerable Han imperialism to continue and expand, while Tibet, Sinkiang and Inner Mongolia remain as illegally occupied by China as the Baltic states were by Russia. It is advised to all the world never to compromise with or further the Han Chinese, the world's most hopelessly imperialist, egoist and expansionist people, which is proved by all history, as the neighbours of China always have suffered from Chinese inhumanity. The only possible remedy for China would be 1) complete destruction of the communist party, 2) reinstitution of Buddhism and Taoism in all China.

"Dear Christian, I am writing this to you with a heavy heart. Cry with me if you feel like it. I am confronted with the first defeat of my life, and I don't know how to cope with it.

That I write to you at all about this depends on Kim's having revealed to me that he has written to you about doctor Tsering's diagnosis in my case. I allowed him to examine me with the utmost reluctance. I can't however just ignore his expert knowledge, so I have to take his advice seriously.

In parts his negative diagnosis is flattering: "You have a Tibetan's constitution. You are not fit for the plains. If you wish to maintain your health you have to remain in the mountains." He has seen tens of thousands of his countrymen perish because of the Indian climate, which is the opposite of the Tibetan. Tibetans can well withstand Arctic conditions but not the tropical bacteria of India. Indians can resist any bacteria but catch colds for nothing. I have lived too long among Tibetans and become even physically like one of them. That is why Kim's doctor advises me against going to Indonesia.

There is a positive alternative, though. Here in Darjiling and Kalimpong I have made contacts with several interesting Tibetan refugees and also Khampas. They have invited me to join them in a venture inside China. It's an invitation to counter-revolutionary activities against China, but why not? My plans in Indonesia would also have been counter-revolutionary against the Indonesian military dictatorship. The aim of the Khampas is to overthrow the communist dictatorship party in order to restore Tibetan freedom and independence. What could possibly be more constructive?

My decision is made. I dress up as a Tibetan again, my hair has grown out to Tibetan length again, so it's just to colour it jet-black, and my Tibetan outfit will be perfect. Rabbi Yohanan was always pleased with my disguises. Maybe it pleases him in his grave that I am still an actor. The only difficulty is the dialect of the Khampas. I learned Tibetan in Ladakh and Ngari which is almost an entirely different language, but I will probably get used to it."

"The following day. It is now the 13th November, a Sunday, the anniversary of our meeting at doctor Singh's in Benares two years ago. In vain I have waited this week for any sign of life from you, but I will just have to continue waiting, while nothing makes waiting more unbearable than loneliness. I do not suffer from want of company, but no company here is Swedish. My only touch with the Swedish language is through you. I usually almost get to learn every issue of your magazine by heart.

This day and its memories fills me with volcanic eruptions of thoughts as if the soul would explode. I have to begin, however, by explaining something about the Khampas to you.

A short history. When Mao Zedong became supreme ruler of China in October 1949, he almost immediately declared that Tibet and Sinkiang would be brought by force if necessary under Chinese control to be sinofied. The world was still paralyzed by the effects of the second world war, and after the general collapse of all empires the coast was clear for new tyrannies to break through, and Communist China was lucky enough to immediately be generously backed up by the recently released India of Nehru's, which became the first nation in the world to acknowledge the regime of Communist China. So Nehru in fact paved the way for Mao to do whatever he liked.

When Tibet was occupied the following year, nothing was done about it, since the Korean war was a much more important matter than anything else in the world at the time. China was also very careful about not having Tibet making any sound while she was raped, which was why China from the beginning saw to it that the victim was carefully gagged before she was raped, so that nothing would be heard about it in the world. Every case of individual resistance was immediately muffled by death. But Tibet was a cultivated and peaceful nation which desired to co-operate peacefully, why in the beginning there was not much resistance. The Chinese occupation of Tibet became incredibly simple especially since neither India nor England would do anything at all to question the swallowing up of a vast nation with a culture and identity of its own by the formless gigantic amoeba of China.

Gradually followed the sinofication of Tibet. Those who first discovered the real intentions of China - the extirpation of the Tibetan people and culture - were the inhabitants of Kham, the eastern part of Tibet. This people, the Khampas, was a strong and warlike tribe who had never forgotten the proud traditions from the days of king Srongtsen Gampo 1200 years ago. In 1956 they commenced their bloody revolt against China which continued until 1974. During the course of this war the whole region of Kham was methodically devastated and its population exterminated and substituted with Han Chinese. During the heyday of this uprisal these Khampas could organize the escape of the Dalai Lama from Lhasa in March 1959. Then they controlled the whole of southern Tibet and had support both from Taiwan, America and Russia. This support continued until 1972, when the most dishonest American president of this century, Richard Nixon, (who probably was the ultimate schemer of the conspiracy against the brothers Kennedy with two of them murdered and the third dishonoured, since Richard Nixon more than anyone else benefited from these tragedies,) made peace with all the crooks of Communist China and abandoned Taiwan. After that the interesting guerrilla war of the Khampas gradually ebbed out, and most Khampas were betrayed and killed to the last man.

This eighteen-year guerrilla war is probably the most heroic and least known war in this century. China succeeded skilfully in suppressing all knowledge about it. No reports were let through anywhere. A handful of Khampas could for years keep a number of Chinese armies checked in terror. When China launched their great invasion of Tibet in 1959 they sent an army of 120,000 men against 8,500 Khampas. China succeeded with her intentions to transform all of Tibet into a severely restricted concentration camp where all the prisoners had to gradually languish to death from starvation and oppression, but China never succeeded in controlling or defeating these my friends the Khampas.

The Tibetan genocide, which has been going on now for 44 years, in which some billion Chinese have set their heart into eliminating a higher educated and cultured people of half a percent of the Chinese population, and during which 44 years they have actually succeeded in exterminating 20% of this one half percent, was made possible by the treason and lack of responsibility against Tibet by India and England. Not until 1962 did Nehru wake up from his blind faith in Mao's China when this paragon of nations suddenly without warning invaded India. During the 50s nothing was done to help Tibet. The world was as indifferent then as it was during the Turkish genocide against the Armenians and during the German genocide against the Jews. Later on in the 60s China released the full holocaust of the cultural revolution which devastated all of Tibet. By then it was too late to start emergency programs to help Tibet when already 20% of the population was exterminated, and their culture, 95% of their monasteries and schools, were destroyed.

Who then is able to stand forth to accuse the Khampas for not refusing any means in the overthrow of the Han Chinese? Who can hold it against them that they can't respect Chinese more than rats and flies and locusts? And who can fail to admire and love these Khampas for not having given up after 44 years but still are anxious to do something about it, still keeping the initiative and carrying on?

Their cause is mine. We are a lonely few, but our morale is greater than all the world. In a matter of villainy one person's resistance against it is more worth than 1,2 billion Chinese.

This does not make me an idealist. On the contrary. Don't worry. I am a realist taking no chances, and I know what I am doing. I am aware of powers within the WES which turn the heads of certain members so that they imagine it is enough for them just to enter into Iraq or Indonesia in order to make these dictatorial governments fall, and of course it is not altogether impossible that certain people may have such influence. I prefer not to confuse reality with wishful thinking, though. I happen to be a thoroughly educated theologian, but that still only makes me a man.

On the other hand, I don't think that the Tibetan tragedy would have happened if the British Empire had remained in office. If India had not broken away from England, China would never have dared to occupy Tibet. India was the first brick to drop off the wall of the British Empire, and the fall of that brick made the whole wall collapse, morally first, and then totally. England, the most realistic and romantic nation in the world, was realistic enough to realize that she could not trust the world and age any more when even India let her down. If India had stayed on, on the other hand, a constructive world order could have maintained itself and some control over such monster nations as the Soviet Union of Stalin and the Communist China of Mao to check their destructive expansion in time and maybe put an end to the cold war at a much earlier stage. Instead, the eternal cold war goes on against tyrannies like many Moslem states, Indonesia and above all China, which no one so far yet has managed to interfere with in its methodical genocides in both Sinkiang and above all in Tibet."

"Your November issue has now arrived. No comment. Instead, I would like to comment on Kim's summing up of our Darjiling conference. I guess that item 3 would seem the most remarkable one to western eyes. No comment on that either. The arguments about the matter were presented as confidential, and my only allowed reference is to the published case of Isaiah Demner, Haifa, Israel. This illness is so abnormal in its psychological monstrosity, that it can not be regarded or treated as an ordinary illness.

Our conference document is carried forth in the world by the 25 delegates with careful instructions that only key personalities in governments and societies should be informed. Thus also this conference has received my personal stamp of mysterious secrecy and exclusive elitism - the fewer that are chosen, the surer the calling and its consequences, and the greater, hopefully, the results.

Nothing new at the moment, but I hope to return soon."

J.B.W.

The Darjeeling Conference : Aftermath

"My dear son, Kim has kindly forwarded your "Free Thinker No. 2" by Special Delivery, that is, smuggling. Earlier he has kindly forwarded your generous thoughts in my imprisonment. This was not as dangerous as one could have expected. I was carefully interrogated and kept in custody for a few weeks but never tortured. Since then I have been under surveillance. That is all. I never lost contact with our common friends. For natural reasons I was not able to travel to this conference in Darjeeling. Instead I succeeded in sending a few others. These were permitted to leave China on condition that they would act as "spies" in Darjeeling, in India and of this conference. They were allowed to enter Darjeeling by the Indian authorities since these were informed that they were actually traitors of China. It's the usual Asian chess game of double crossing and triple crossing all around.

My reason for writing to you is that you have published John's dangerous letter about the Khampas. He knows my view, and I have to let you know it also. This is a very difficult problem for China.

The nature of the problem is not easy to define. In order to make it clear I have to start from the beginning of things.

Of course, the annexation of Tibet by Chairman Mao in 1950 was illegal. The chief fault in the Chinese reasoning about Tibetan matters is, that China persists in disregarding historical facts, which leads her to deny that Tibet was ever independent. The historical fact is that Tibet was independent from everyone else whenever it could. But once China has expressed a lie she has to stick to it in order to maintain her dogma of impeccability. China simply can't be wrong. That's the main thing wrong about China.

The occupation of Tibet was not protested against by neither Tibet, India nor England. Everyone agreed to it and even Tibet. Dalai Lama welcomed Chinese involvement, because Tibet was backward already, all English support had vanished since the English were ousted from India, and the Indians could not even rule their own country. As soon as India got her independence she used it to make war on Pakistan. I entirely agree with John's views on the tragic breaking up of the British Empire.

The trouble in Tibet started in 1956 when the Khampas made rebellion. If Tibet had maintained her peace and her wise doctrine of non-violence (the same as that of Gandhi) there would never have been any trouble, probably. The rebellion of the Khampas forced the Chinese to become tyrants.

Things might have turned out better if Dalai Lama had stayed on in Lhasa. His escape was the crown of his immaturity and cowardice, and by abandoning Tibet he politically ruined and sacrificed his home land by denying his responsibility. It was a most traumatic crisis. By giving up to the Khampas, abandoning himself to their will, he abandoned the pacifist cause of wisdom to the tragic cause of violence. We do not know what would have happened if he had stayed on, but escaping was certainly more desperate than wise.

This is the turning point of Chairman Mao's career. From the moment of this crisis he turns from a good leader into a savage monster of unhuman cruelty. He encourages criticism against the government only in order to get hold of the critics and eliminate them. He denies the failure of his industrial revolution, and to him 45 million casualties is just a handful of dust. But the more inhuman he becomes, the more frightened he becomes. But he has no one left in China to fear, except all those who are wiser than he is. Those are the traditionalists, the Buddhists, the Taoists, the Confucianists. So in his life's greatest effort he lets loose his holocaust against the past and all wisdom of China in the Cultural Revolution, the greatest human catastrophe since the second world war, instigated only by the madness of one single man.

Letting loose this holocaust also against another nation, another people, another culture like Tibet, thus destroying this most delicate and intact of ancient civilizations utterly, must of course be considered unpardonable for ever. But the Khampas were not extirpated only by the Chinese. John mentions the culpability of President Richard Nixon, but he was not alone. Everyone helped in the destruction of the Khampas, the only defenders of the Tibetan cause. The matter was practically organized by the foreign secretary Henry Kissinger, who also saw to it that the Christians of East Timor were eaten up and sacrificed by the autocrat regime of Suharto. Even Dalai Lama helped in destroying the Khampas. The final slaughter was not even in Tibet. The government of Nepal was being pushed on by Dalai Lama, India and Henry Kissinger to perform the operation of eradicating the Khampas from their stronghold in Mustang in northern Nepal. The idea was Nixon's. The freedom fighters had to be sacrificed if there was to be a deal with China. And they were sacrificed to the last man. Those who didn't languish to death in Nepalese dungeons fled back to Tibet where they were executed by the Chinese.

The problem for China is that these Khampas are still riding. When China invaded Tibet they did not know what kind of a country they invaded. They judged the matter materialistically and strategically and ignored all the ghosts. These ghosts have been multiplying in a most awful manner.

You see, by eliminating people you don't get rid of them. What happens is that they are just transferred into a timeless zone. This zone of timelessness is outside history and can not be located. Once you have transferred someone into that zone you never get rid of him. He will eat your back in eternity, and you can't reach him. This is the problem with Tibet for the Chinese.

The Khampas are still riding. The Chinese have done a thorough job in exterminating them to the last man, but the higher they ride against them. A ghost is much harder to get at than a living man.

You see what is going on in China today. It is a reeling merry-go-round where all the dwindling profits of the world's greatest monkey business is just vanishing in an ever-increasing monstrous inflation. "Forget about Beijing, Deng Xiaoping is already a mummy," the Chinese are saying. No one believes in the communist party any more. This has defended itself by pointing a warning finger at the unfathomable poverty of democratic India, but things might become worse in China than in India.

The generous slogan of China today is that "everything is possible and everything is allowed in Deng Xiaoping's China" - except disloyalty. And this is of course a most laughable matter. The only loyalty ever in China was hypocrisy, and today that lie is greater than ever. The bubble will burst - and that deluge might become the salvation and rebirth of Tibet, Buddhism and Taoism.

Yours, Doctor Sun, now resident in Chungqing."

Why was the conference not in Kathmandu? It was planned to take place there, and we were set on going there - we already had a visa. In the last moment plans were changed, and the conference moved to Darjeeling because of the elections in Nepal, the consequences of which were not surveyable. While the communists won the elections, the conference was undisturbed in Darjeeling. That's why we couldn't attend. We had already booked an air ticket to Kathmandu for just £425.

Doctor Sandy immediately contacted us on receiving our latest communication and demanded an explanation of §3 in the Darjeeling declaration, this remarkable Buddhist stand-point on the question of Aids. We instantly contacted Kim and gave him doctor Sandy's anxious request. Kim offered an explanation. It was not just economical.

It has long been known that an increasing number of development countries simply can't afford battling against Aids. These countries are usually overpopulated, why they can better afford to lose a few million sick people than to nurse them till they die anyway. But this is not the frightening prospect for the Buddhists.

The Buddhists of Darjeeling have noticed the steadily increasing economical proportions of the issue of Aids in the west, so that Aids doctors confidently can count on steadily increasing responsibility for ever increasing numbers of patients with consequently also a constantly growing budget. This implies a rather appalling power position of life and death with a so far unavoidable death guaranteeing ever increasing economical resources.

This development the Buddhists of Darjeeling consider a mistake. Above all in India numerous non-medicinal methods have been tried against Aids with partly fantastic results. The Buddhists believe more in such methods in the war against Aids than to rely solely on AZT and other medicines with only effects of slowing down the illness and with destructive side effects as well, at least as long as there is no efficient vaccine; and the distance to finding that pot of gold beyond the rainbow seems still to be but a long up hill without a visible crest.

Doctor Sandy has accepted this explanation and is brooding on it over Christmas.

In the history of Tibet there are some personalities quite impossible to overlook who at the same time are of universal interest outside Tibet as well. There are very few such personalities of China. There is Confucius and the far more interesting and more universalistic but totally anonymous Lao-Tzu, who both are excelled by the Indian Buddha. Then we have the dreadful emperor Shih-Huang-Ti, a Chinese equivalent to Ivan the Terrible, only worse, who not only sacrificed a fifth of the Chinese population in building the Chinese Wall but who also was the first in a long line of emperors who in a vain effort to make history begin with themselves tried to destroy all previous literature. Bonfires of books have been burning in China since then (the 3rd century B.C.), and the latest who tried to blot out all previous Chinese history was Mao Zedong, who 18 years after his death is still venerated and worshipped as the father of the country after having made greater damages to China than any previous emperor in the long history of the celestial empire.

The topic is encyclopaedic in its follies, disasters and devastating mistakes, it's a perpetuum mobile of fiascos all dependent on the incurable tyranny, where no tyrant during 3000 years ever wanted to learn anything from the mistakes of any predecessor but rather preferred to hide them and brush them away under a constantly more lumpy mat. The history of China does not consist of personalities but of signatures of dynasties. No individual is ever made responsible for turbulences of Chinese history, and the dynasties are too extensive and complex to have individual reigns sorted out. Everything in China is lost and drowned in this ocean of human anonymity and irresponsibility.

Conditions are the opposite in Tibet, where the people consists of personalities and where there is a higher individual regard than anywhere else on earth since the days of glory of the Egyptian Pharaohs. Already 700 years before the ascent of the Dalai Lama we find the greatest personality of Tibetan history, king Songtsen-Gampo, the 33rd king of Tibet, who ruled 617-649, about the same time as the fabled king Arthur ruled in Cornwall. This Tibetan king was not only a conqueror but also an organizer and administrator comparable with Augustus and Charlemagne. He introduced Buddhism in Tibet and established Tibet culturally as a bridge between India and China especially by his two favourite wives, one from Nepal and the other from China. Like Augustus he is just the introducer of the empire, which like that of Rome then lasts for some 200 years. He is also responsible for introducing the Tibetan alphabet and literature, which is derived from Sanskrit with letters written from left to right.

Our next great Tibetan personality is Padmasambhava, an Indian Buddhist monk and teacher, who is invited to Tibet by king Trisong Detsen to organize the Tibetan religion. He is the founder of the first great Tibetan monastery of Samye on the northern shore of the Brahmaputra southeast of Lhasa in 779, and that commences the epoch of the greatest monasterial culture in the world.

Tibetan history is not only full of noble kings and heroes, though. One of the most dramatic incidents occurs when the wicked king Langdarma persecutes Buddhism trying to exterminate it 836-842. One monk decides to do something about it and takes the law in his own hands, colouring his horse and his clothes jet black, approaching the king masked as a dancer and killing him off with one good shot from his bow during a religious festival, after which feat he escapes across the river, which washes off the colours of his horse and clothes, which turn white - an excellent camouflage, when he flees to the monastery of Yerpa, since everyone bear witness of the murderer and his horse having been black. The name of this hermit assassin was Lhalungpa.

The most sympathetic of all the prominent personalities of Tibet is the poet and mystic Milarepa (1040-1123) who roams around the country as a bard and beggar and becomes famous during his stay at the holy mountain of Kailash and in his cave closer to Mount Everest, where he produces his greatest poem of a hundred thousand hymns. If anyone, he speaks directly to the heart of everyone in all ages to all men.

Marco Polo did not visit Tibet but passed through southern Turkestan by the town of Khotan to then north of Koko Nor follow the Hwang Ho down to China. Tibetans in the far west of Tibet maintain, though, that Alexander the Great built a bridge across the Indus in Ladakh which still remains. It is not very probable though that Julius Caesar had anything to do with the origin of the great poem of the hero Gesar, a legendary Tibetan Hercules kind of person of probably purely Tibetan origin.

Another most important monk besides Milarepa is Atisha from India, who died in 1055 after having founded the order which later gave rise to the second oldest order of Tibet, Reting, northeast of Lhasa.

In the 13th century Tibet becomes of vital political interest by the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan's great fascination of Tibetan Buddhism. Djinghis Khan was a Moslem, but through Kublai Khan, also emperor of China, the deep alliance between Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhism is created which continues still today. At this time the dominating sect is that of Sakya in the south of Tibet. The first thing that was done in Mongolia after the introduction of democracy a few years ago was the restoration of Buddhism as a state religion, which hasn't been done in China yet.

The Sakya monastery was founded in 1073, in 1179 the monastery of Tzurpu, where the first reincarnation traditions occur, is founded; in 1189 the monastery of Drigung Ti between Lhasa and Reting is founded; and this magnificent medieval development of Buddhism and monasterial life in Tibet is then capped by the activities of Tsongkhapa, who lived 1357-1419. He is the great reformer of Buddhism in Tibet and the founder of the Gelugpa sect, the most influential sect in the centuries to come. The first Dalai Lama rises in its shadow in 1391, and the three great Gelugpa monasteries are then created in the 15th century, Ganden ("the felicitous") in 1409, Drepung ("the wealthy") in 1416, and Sera ("the rose garden", that is "the beautiful") in 1419. The title Dalai Lama means "Ocean of Wisdom" and was first bestowed on the highest abbot of the Gelugpa sect by Altan Khan of Mongolia in 1543.

The most famous of these first Dalai Lamas was the great fifth (1617-1682) who constructed the Potala palace (1645-94) and instituted the office of the Panchen Lama at Shigatse in the monastery of Tashilumpo. His age was dominated by difficult crises which he could help the country out of with some help from the Mongols. The sixth Dalai Lama was more liberal, a poet and lover of women. When he is overthrown in 1706 the Manchu dynasty of China claims the suzerainty of Tibet, and the sixth Dalai Lama perishes in Chinese captivity the year after. Only from this time China could be said to have some influence and dominance in Tibet, and politically for the next two centuries Tibet becomes the object of a tug-of-war first between China and Mongolia and later between England and Russia.

The first Europeans to enter Tibet were Jesuits. Ippolito Desideri and Manuel Freyre came from the west in 1715 and were the first westerners to set eyes on Kailash. They were allowed to start a mission in Tibet and even to build a church, which no longer remains, until they were recalled by the pope. There were more Jesuits and also Englishmen. The most conspicuous of these was a veterinary from Lancastershire, William Moorcroft, who was much of an adventurer. He nourished a passion for horses and wild plans to import blood-horses from Turkmenistan to India, which fantastic project made him hazard an expedition through Tibet to open up and chart convenient roads. Here begins the classical Tibetan romanticism full of espionage and masquerades with false documents, often on the run and not seldom ending in disaster. This pattern dominates the fates of all Europeans in Tibet in the 19th century. Those who were spied on were the Russians, but not a single Russian seems ever to have been located. Moorcroft reached the lakes of Manasarovar and Rakkas Tal and seems to have shown a lot of interest in the question of whether Ganges, Indus and Brahmaputra had their sources in these lakes or not. He discovered the small channel between the lakes and the outlet of Sutlej from the Rakkas Tal, which lake he deemed dangerous since some of his yaks perished in the swamps along the shores, so that he had to return to India, encountering bothersome Nepalese as he travelled in disguise with false papers and even found himself with his fantastic high Asian projects eventually also in trouble with the British government. Officially he died in misery in 1825, but the Jesuit Abbé Huc claimed to have spotted him in Lhasa the following year, where he continued to dwell for twelve years until he returned to Kailash and Ladakh. He would then for convenience to avoid further trouble with authorities, whether British or Nepalese, be content with being regarded as dead and continue living happily ever after as a free independent wanderer in Tibet. The great romance of this heaven-storming horse-lover's strange career from a daring pioneer at Kailash in 1812 to a legendary pilgrim of doubtful ends is still waiting to be written.

The English in Tibet in the 19th century then move along the wide scale from romantic idealists with fantastic projects to unbearable bullies and scoundrels, who didn't do much else in Tibet than flog lazy servants and end up badly. Lieutenant Henry Strachey, who visited Kailash in 1846, was a good artist though, who was the first to render these incredible landscapes some justice. In his view the holy mountain had its most favourable aspects from Rakkas Tal, and he could never tire of studying the environments. His brother Richard launched the first geological expedition to Tibet two years later.

The problem about Sven Hedin was his egocentricism and vanity. He might very well have been the greatest traveller and expert of Tibet ever, but he had difficulties with human relationships and was apt to deceive himself. He was as good a geographer as he was a diplomatic failure. He not only made August Strindberg his enemy but the whole English-speaking world, when he took sides with the Kaiser in the first world war and with Hitler in the second, like the even more pathetic Norwegian national novelist Knut Hamsun. It is difficult to understand the case of such a brilliant explorer behaving so utterly without sense in other fields.

He was not at all opposed by the British from the beginning. On the contrary, men like Kitchener and Younghusband stood by him and encouraged him with all their heart in India. His difficulties with England started when he was to meet the Royal Geographical Society in London to defend his theories and discoveries and claim his rights and honours, which the Society was not quite ready to bestow on him without arguments. This Society already had a very long tradition and experience of phoney explorers and of carefully investigating the feats of everyone trying to claim something, from Burton and Speke to Stanley and Scott, and they couldn't see why Sven Hedin was to be an exception from being grilled like all the others. Sven Hedin could never forgive the Society the treatment which they offered him. He was actually wrong in certain conclusions, and the fact that the Society questioned his infallibility he never could forgive the British Empire.

The illustrious Younghusband-expedition against Lhasa became partly notorious for its brutality, using modern automatic weapons to slaughter thousands of Tibetans armed with bows and javelins. The purpose of the expedition was to thwart the Russian and Chinese plans to obtain a monopoly of trade in Tibet. Instead the British secured this monopoly for 40 years. Even this heroic expedition had another side to its dashing stalwartness though. As the handsome British officers were to ascend the Potala to sign the treaties of trade, the giant steps to the palace were rather slippery, the temperature in autumn often being below zero. The steps were also quite large, so the elegant officers had some difficulty supporting themselves, ascending slowly with care. After the solemn ceremonies it was even trickier to get down. Many were the stylish officers who bounced along hundreds of stairs at a time while all the monks of Potala stood above them laughing their sides off. Peter Fleming, the brother of Ian, has written a gallant book about this swashbuckling expedition.

A most original lady has also given a special performance in Tibet. Alexandra David-Néel (1868-1969!) was a celebrated opera star harvesting triumphs at the opera house of Hanoi especially in the role of La Traviata, when her voice at the age of fifty began to waver, and she as a remedy decided to cure her anguish of getting pensioned off by making a trip to Tibet. This proved to be the wisest thing she could have done. As an exotic Tibet voyageur writing books about her ordeals she became even more famous than the opera primadonna. She worked on constantly improving her books all her life until she passed away as a centenarian. Add to this figure her tiny length of only 156 centimetres, and you have the picture of one of the most incredible women of all times.

She spent years wandering about Tibet collecting impressions. Her first book, "My Journey to Lhasa", is not as remarkable as the second, "Magic and Mystery in Tibet", which will be a Tibetan classic for all times. Her first book is more like an introduction and adventure book, she too had to colour her hair, dress up in native costume and dirty her skin to make it swarthy in order to produce the right feeling of adventure, but in her second book she comes to the point.

Disguise and dyeing of one's hair were also necessary preparations to the Austrian Herbert Tichy's travels to Tibet in the 30s. He was a geologist and mainly interested in mountaineering, but he was the first to show the splendours of Tibetan landscapes to the world by the new technical art of colour photography. He has always returned to the Himalayas, climbed new mountains and published more books with ever finer photographs, but his greatest efforts have been in western Nepal.

His countryman Heinrich Harrer is maybe number one among westerners in Tibet. Escaping from British prison camps during the war from India to Tibet, his classic "Seven Years in Tibet" is the supreme masterpiece among true accounts from before the Chinese invasion. He remained in Tibet as tutor to the young Dalai Lama while getting to know the country more intimately than any other visitor ever. He grew attached to the country, its people and culture for life, and his life's work, breathing an irresistible freshness of health and good spirits, is mainly concerned about the Tibetan situation. His book is a must to everyone interested in Tibet. His later book, "Return to Tibet" from 1983, we have not yet been able to obtain and peruse.

In the same first room of Tibetan travellers we also have to place the Italian Giuseppe Tucci, perhaps the foremost of all tibetologists. Contrary to Sven Hedin, this nimble gentleman had a remarkable faculty for making friends with anyone. Wherever he wanted to go, doors just opened, and he never had any problems with documents or authorities. He was never hindered from collecting whatever he wanted to bring out of the country from sacred places and any sites, and as a scientist he was not only extremely meticulous and careful but due religious reverence impersonated. His oriental institute in Naples was the most highly regarded in Europe for years. It was later taken over by the second great Italian tibetologist Fosco Maraini, but since his days it has lost its supremacy. Tucci was probably the first traveller into Tibet who didn't have to trick his way through - probably because of his high sense of diplomacy and understanding of alien mentalities.

Lama Anagorika Govinda was born in Saxony in 1898, but his mother was Bolivian. His assumed name "Anagorika" means the homeless one. He became number one among pilgrims in Tibet. His wonderful book "The Way of the White Clouds" is a unique documentary of decades of pilgrimage throughout Tibet in its entirety and most beautifully written. There is no other such work, and it is a book which you'll never do without - it can not be reread too many times.

The chief expert among connoisseurs of the area around Kailash is an Indian though, Swami Pravananda, who spent more time making more careful studies of the Manasarovar area than anybody else. He first visited the most sacred of mountains in 1928, from 1935 he returned yearly, sometimes he has stayed by the lakes all the year around, he has accomplished 23 pilgrimages around Kailash and 25 around the Manasarovar Lake, but only one around the Rakkas Tal. His book is generously furnished with indispensable maps of the area and is the perfect guide for pilgrims. He was still alive in 1981 when the old pilgrimage route from India to Kailash was reopened to Indian pilgrims for the first time in 22 years, guiding new generations of pilgrims across the mountains, as he had done 50 years previously.

From 1950 no one is allowed to visit Tibet from the outside except reliable lackeys, like Madame Han Suyin, who could be counted on not to make any unfavourable observations of what the Chinese did to Tibet. When the country is opened up to visitors after 30 years, everything is ruined. Of about 6500 monasteries only 10 remain, and the number of monks has been reduced from 130,000 (after 1959) to 1,000. All travellers to Tibet after 1981 bear witness of total cultural and human annihilation, so it can't be doubted. At the same time there are many witnesses of how the Tibetan sense of humour, kindness and hospitality, so well-renowned before 1950, has managed to survive. The friendliest people in the world had survived its own genocide, preserved the soul of the country and started to reconstruct the more than 6000 destroyed temples and monasteries from the beginning.

Charles and Jill Hadfield spent a winter in Tibet in 1987 as teachers and wrote a book about their nine months' impressions of the country and people, a most genuine and touching book, which is rather close to the spirit of Heinrich Harrer. Let's conclude this chapter by illustrating the mentality of the greatest Tibetan heroes of all: the Tibetans themselves. It's about the Ganden monastery, the third greatest in the world before 1959, founded in 1409:

"In the fightings of 1959 the monastery was bombed, and the destruction was completed during the 60s. Not one roof-beam or wall was left intact, and our first terrified impression of the ruins was that the monastery must have been bombed by aircraft, because the destruction was so complete. Later we were informed that the buildings had been dynamited, axes and sledges had then been used, and most of the beams, planks and pillars had then been transported down into the valley to be used for other buildings. Now it looks like Warsaw at the end of the war, a most frightfully disheartening and depressing spectacle. But monasteries can be reconstructed, unlike, as Mao put it, heads, that do not grow out again. But worst of all were not the ruins but the utter uncontrolled violence and hatred which had resulted in this utter desolation.

The reconstruction was apparently commenced in 1982 by Tibetan initiative, and the truck used for transport of materials by the local people was "the first privately owned vehicle in Tibet". When we first arrived here a few years ago seven buildings were reconstructed. Now about ten are completed. Keeping this pace it will take about twenty years to restore everything.

Ganden is today a blend of past nightmares and future hopes. Here like everywhere else the pride which Tibetan youths demonstrate in doing works of clay, carpentry, frescoes and ancient architectural traditions fulfilled in the same way as innumerable past generations constructed their monasteries with the pure joy of creation is wonderful to behold. They grab hold of your hand and drag you along to make you witness their love's work. At the same time they learn the old handicrafts and perform a religious service. Something of our most wonderful experience was the reception which the monks had arranged for our visit. We were taken care of with overwhelming kindness, were offered butter-tea and shown around with inexpressible pride. There was a glorious feeling of optimism amidst all the banging and hammering, and we had a very distinct reality of something of the ancient Tibet in spite of the many hard years of terror surviving and now shooting new springs into the future."

The thirteenth Dalai Lama, Thupten Gyatso (1876-1933), the greatest Dalai Lama since the Great Fifth, guided Tibet to complete independence in 1911, which was guaranteed by the British and lasted up to 1950. He even tried to modernize the country, but in 1925 these efforts failed against the complacent conservatism of the leading sects. He realized the danger of Tibet in not trying to follow the technological race which made a monster state like Hitler's Germany possible and presaged that Tibet with her natural kindness, generosity and warmth of heart would not be spared by a reeling age which did not know where it was heading.

The fourteenth Dalai Lama, originally named Lhamo Doendrub, who is 60 years this summer, has had a more difficult position than any earlier Dalai Lama, as he in the capacity of theocratic ruler of his country with no restrictions to his powers and responsibilities has been obliged to follow closely the most serious tragedy which ever befell his country and people - the Chinese destruction of the Tibetan culture, people and religion. He was only 15 years when Mao Zedong invaded Tibet the first time (in preliminary strategic intention to in the course of time use Tibet as a nuclear weapon depot), between 15 and 24 he had to incessantly endure the demanding political necessity to find a peaceful compromise and avoid bloodshed in the one-sided conflict from the side of the Chinese, which policy finally suffered a total defeat as the Chinese opened fire in Lhasa on the 16th of March in 1959 at 16.00 hours, (two grenades were fired from the Chinese camp without any purpose ever having been explained,) which compelled Dalai Lama to take a decision to go into exile. He has always stressed the fact that the decision was entirely his own, no one influenced him except the hopeless political circumstances, and the Khampas who supported him in his escape and made it possible did it of their own free will without being asked to and without influencing him.

Under western eyes His Holiness the Dalai Lama appears as a fine and noble hyper-intellectualist of the most exquisite sensitivity. A visitor immediately notices how sensitive His Holiness is as he removes his famous spectacles and exposes his very shy and brittle but at the same time most humorous and wakeful eyes. As a unique leader of Buddhism in the world one must say that he constitutes a unique ornament of honour to his religion. Not even His Holiness the Pope holds a higher position in metaphysics and nobility than this personification of supreme tolerance, who claims that the Chinese can not be accused of their crimes as in a dictatorial state only those in charge of the highest command can be held responsible. The development of China and the countries she occupies suggests though that the Chinese in the future might be regarded as new Nazis - excepting refugees, Hongkong-Chinese, Taiwanese and other Chinese from outside China. But the Chinese of Communist-China have regrettably surpassed the Stalinists of the Soviet Union in compromising communism forever.

Many imply that the Chinese destruction of Tibetan culture and civilization still has to have brought some benefits and point out the hospitals, schools, roads and bridges built by the Chinese for Tibet. But Tibet used to have its own medicinal science and had no need of getting its main institution bombed out on Shakpori Hill and replaced by an alien science wholly based on unnatural medicines with harmful side-effects, which Tibet earlier had been spared. In the new schools built by the Chinese the Tibetans were forced to learn Chinese and communist propaganda and not even to write their own language, which is why many adult Tibetans today know how to speak and write Chinese but only to speak and not to write Tibetan. The roads were constructed to transport Chinese military forces. Across the bridges carefully guarded by armed soldiers, mainly Chinese were let across while Tibetans needed permits and were only welcomed with obstacles. These hospitals, schools, roads and bridges were chiefly financed by taxes imposed on the Tibetans. Part of the reality is also the fact that the Tibetan economy was totally destroyed by Chinese inflation. Summary: the Chinese have achieved humanly nothing positive in Tibet, what "progress" they have artificially imposed on the country has only benefited the Chinese while the Tibetans only have been exploited, what material benefits the Chinese have brought to Tibet have been undone by the fact that almost only Chinese were given the possibility to benefit from them, and the good things that existed before their arrival they have fortunately failed in ruining - although they made hard work out of deliberately destroying them to 95%.

The only positive results of this holocaust are instead to be found abroad. By the escape of the Dalai Lama in 1959 Tibetan Buddhism for the first time came to some international attention. Since then it has expanded everywhere. In all greater cities in the democratic world you find today Tibetan centres. Those who convert from Christianity and other religions to Tibetan Buddhism are an ever increasing number. The enforced exile of the Dalai Lama from Tibet to the outside world has resulted in a long term religious avalanche all over the world. This mental earth-quake has continued ever since and constantly doubled in strength, especially after the universal destruction inside Tibet became known to the world in the 80s.

One example is Thomas Lofstrom, Swedish writer, a child of his age, grown up during the 60s and the Vietnam war, when he unhesitatingly took sides with Mao's China and built barricades in Paris. To him it was obvious that Mao and China were right in Vietnam and that America was wrong. To him, like to so many others, it was consequently also self-evident that China couldn't be wrong in Tibet.

His visit in Tibet in the beginning of the 80s launched an earth-quake in his political views. He was completely reversed to the contraries of everything he had been, just by being shown what the Chinese really had accomplished in Tibet.

Others were never duped by Mao or China not even during the heyday of the Vietnam war. The most daring voice of all against all those in favour of the Chinese cause, just as the Vietnam war reached its most abominable heights of cruelty, and left-wing views were at their most popular, was that of Michel Peissel, probably the most notable of all Tibetan heroes from the west after 1950. By exposing himself to the worst conceivable hardships and political risks, he came into contact with the most remote parts of the Himalayas where nothing ever had changed and where resistance against China had found their last resorts, especially in Mustang in northern Nepal. Like Herbert Tichy he is a great photographer, and his most well-renowned book is probably "Kingdoms in the Himalayas" where he documents life in Zanskar (between Kashmir and Ladakh but beyond both of them,) in Mustang at the remotest northern parts of Nepal, and in Bhutan. He has lived together with Khampas and succeeded in compiling the only existent complete documentation of their guerrilla wars against China 1956-74, although the end of the war is missing, and this is probably his greatest achievement and his most important work. He was one of the first westerners to be allowed inside Bhutan (1970 after ten years' efforts to obtain an admission) and finally availed himself of the opportunity by travelling straight through the whole country under intolerable primitive conditions. One of his more eccentric projects was to go up through Nepal to Mustang by its rivers using hover-crafts, battling with constant adversities and shipwrecks. In spite of this he is one of the most clear-minded Tibetan travellers ever, and we must include some quotations of his views on Tibet and her problems:

"Too many Europeans imagine the Tibetans to be a placid people of meditating teachers of wisdom dwelling in remote contemplation in inaccessible monasteries far away from reality. This mistaken notion is founded on the western focus on just the Tibetan monks and their fascinating religion, ignoring ordinary people. Behind this curtain of religion is hidden the more warlike mentality of the Tibetans. In fact, the total dominance of the Tibetan religion in the country is explained by the martial mentality of the Tibetans: a people like this has to be ruled by priests preaching peace. Martial peoples, Christian as well as Moslem, often combine ardent religious feeling with bloodthirst and lust for war. Some of the greatest wars were fought in the name of religion, which not seldom became the basis for world empires. And the Tibetans have for generations fought the surrounding nations. Not until recently have they laid down their weapons and never completely."

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"How then does the Chinese pattern fit into this armed religiosity? The dogmatic atheism and materialism of the Chinese is surely contrary to the pattern. Only by supremacy in numbers the Chinese were able to invade and conquer Tibet - according to Mao China could always afford to sacrifice any number of millions of people - and by the total power centralization - one word from Mao, and the world's greatest steam-roller was set going which nothing could stop. But Mao is now gone, dogmatic materialism is now being questioned, and if someone sets another gear in the steam-roller in another direction, no one will be able to turn it from that direction either."

He is today 57 years of age, and we sincerely hope that he is still going strong. If anyone reading this has a possibility of communication with Michel Peissel, we ask him to deliver our sincere and personal greetings.

What first brought John B. Westerberg to the Himalayas was a rumour in Russian monasteries about there somewhere in some Indian monastery in Kashmir would exist a manuscript proving that Jesus had been active in India. Eager for research John went to India, and although he never found the manuscript, he was convinced that it had existed but had been carried away by some unknown traveller. He became so much interested in the country and the Tibetans, that he learned enough Tibetan to be able to get on and remained in the country until winter became too severe. He promised himself to return, which eventually he did many times.

His attitude as a religious researcher is the absolute contrary to that of Sven Hedin. The driving force of Sven Hedin was an insatiable appetite for glory and honours and the impossibility to prove to himself the superhuman excellence of an over-grandiose ego. He succeeded in a way by becoming the last person in Sweden to become knighted and generally regarded the world over as the last great explorer; but all this honour, which he justly deserved, he fumbled away by taking sides with Wilhelm II and Hitler. Humanly speaking he became nothing more than a grandiose and tragic fool.

John strives in the other direction. He also has a powerful ego additionally strengthened by a most unusually enduring and well-created physique; and his whole life has been like a striving away from all temptations which such a personal superiority could convey. Thus he has always tried to diminish himself by working for others. As long as the Russian church was persecuted, he was the most zealous of her servants, keeping dangerous contacts everywhere in Russia, inspiring good morals in all catacombs and indefatigable in his undermining of the regime, with the consequence that he was no longer needed in Russia after August 1991. Then he turned towards Islam and made himself at home in every persecuted church in the Orient.

The problem about him is that he never stays in one place long enough to be thanked. He refuses to have his activities documented, and he has never appeared in media. If I hadn't made his acquaintance from June 1979, perhaps nothing would have become known of his very widespread underground life.

As mentioned, it was in Ladakh he first met with Tibetans, and each time he has returned he has gone deeper into the Tibetan world. After the fall of communism in Russia he became interested in the communism of China and maintains stable contacts with Mongolia and East Turkestan.

Contrary to the exhibitionist Sven Hedin, John always disappears among the people and assumes the same ways as those he associates with as far as possible. What he can't do anything about are his blue eyes, which sometimes have given him some problems in Tibet. That's why he usually carries dark glasses. So if you see a tall blond westerner with his hair blackened and with blue eyes masked as a Tibetan Khampa in dark glasses, it could be him.

Besides practically all the monasteries of Tibet he is also familiar with most of all hippie communities along the Himalayas and in Nepal. He learned from necessity how to get around with false papers in the Soviet Union, which art he has mastered with such skill that he has never run any danger. The greatest peril he has so far encountered was in consequence of a small avalanche somewhere beyond K2, in which he had both his arms broken in an effort to save animals and luggage, after which accident he had to remain for some time in a monastery, which was visited by Chinese soldiers. He then had to stay for two days and nights like buried alive in a crypt before the Chinese left without having detected him.

The latest incident about his illness and blackout on the way to Darjeeling is remarkable since he has not had such problems in India before. This episode needs some attention.

Now (December 1994) he is riding with Khampas in eastern Tibet - where and how far we don't know yet.

Readers have observed the remarkable resemblance between his mentality and ways of thinking and the editor's, as if they were two pieces of a jig-saw puzzle fitting exactly. This is a phenomenon which even John and myself often have been puzzled with. Astrologically he has a conjunction between the Moon and Venus in Pisces, which to astrologers explain something about his personality. This conjunction is in exact correspondence with the editor's north node, and John's node axis falls in almost exactly with the axis of the editor's ascendant. We are also from the same country and of Swedish origin in Finland.

The summing-up of his religious research in northern Kashmir is also in accordance with his personality. He found clear indications of Jesus having been active there but no evidence. He was convinced to 100%, the indications were overwhelming, but a total lack of evidence makes it impossible to prove.

John's conclusions are decisively backed, however, by no one less than Swami Pravananda, who visited those places fifty years earlier, the consummate Kailash expert, who was never proved to have committed any mistake. He recounts, that in the Himis monastery some distance east of Leh there was a book called "Namthar", a Jesus biography about his "unknown years" in India. An old monk at Himis told Swami Pravananda in 1928, that according to this book Jesus had had a quarrel with his parents and then travelled to India (Gya-Kar) where he stayed at Chargotri (Gridhrakuta or Rajagriha), at Varanasi (Sarnath) and in several other places for some years, learnt Pali, studied Buddhism and even embraced that religion. Then he had returned home to start a religion of his own on the basis of what he had learnt. Thus the Christendom of Jesus would really have been a combination of Judaism with Buddhism.

What then had happened with such an important book? A Russian traveller called Notovich or something similar had once visited the monastery, found the book and brought it with him. Years later he had sent back a copy transcribed either to English or Russian, the monk didn't know which. Then this transcribed copy had been discovered by another alien traveller, who had taken it with him after having given a decent price for it, that is some cheap present. Then no one knew anything more about the matter.

The book is lost and also its Russian or English copy, but if this book "Namthar" once has existed in India there must be more copies somewhere.

(Since this was written some 8 years ago we have found the rest of the story. The Russian's name was Nicholas Notovich, and he later published the 'Tibetan Gospel' found in Hemis in Ladakh in French, which aroused some debate and controversy around the 1890s, was banned by the pope and was translated into many languages. It should be available in libraries still today and is very interesting.)

The problem with China is that far too many within her borders, and then especially in Kham, Turkestan, Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, have reasons more than good enough for wishing China 10,000 years of bad luck. This dilemma can only be sorted out by the Chinese themselves, and they are almost impossible to move, especially since so very few of them still have understood so very little about the nature of this problem, which brings me to your latest journal.

Doctor Sun's letter is indicative of how most enlightened Chinese are thinking today. Even they can but think that His Holiness the Dalai Lama did wrong in going into exile, which brings me to your concise history, where some points need some comments.

The two grenades fired from the Chinese military camp that fatal afternoon of March 1959, which signalled Dalai Lama's departure, harmed no one and landed at a safe distance from the city. This the Chinese have always pointed out as an argument for there being no reason why the Dalai Lama by this should be frightened into exile. But this was just psychologically the very fatal factor. The grenades were fired by the Chinese just to frighten the mass of Tibetan people protecting the Norbulinka. It was an open threat. The Chinese have never admitted to this themselves, since everything threatening them with losing some part of their faces makes them hide between lies and hypocrisy. Dalai Lama's exile was a protest against the Chinese coming with threats. A head of state must not tolerate that an alien power tries to frighten his people with grenades.

Most of all your note of the Younghusband-expedition, which you almost place within brackets, craves some attention. This expedition was maybe the parting line between the good old world with its perfect safety and the devastating deluges of twentieth century technological terrorism. Most interesting of all the expedition was to Sir Francis Younghusband himself, since it completely altered his personality from a bold egoistic imperialist to something of an enlightened guru. The consequence of the expedition was that he later founded "The World Congress of Faiths" with the specific purpose to unite Christianity, Jewry, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism, the same aspiration as that of Bahai and the whole of ecumenism, as if the British Empire by Lhasa in the person of colonel Younghusband lost her imperialistic ambitions to instead acquire higher aspirations, which brings us to your discovery of the Jesus book at Himis in the rare book of Swami Pravananda.

I knew of the existence of this book of Pravananda's but not the contents you refer to. I have myself had this book in my hands without noticing this most important paragraph, which in a wonderful way confirms my conclusions.

The problem about Christianity is that it became a continuity of the Roman Empire (the Catholic Church) instead of just a church. When Rome was turned into the capital of world Christianity, the derailing of Christianity unfortunately became an incurable fact. But many were the mistakes leading to this final mistake. The editors of the New Testament ruthlessly eradicated all texts and paragraphs which they did not understand and above all every detail and word referring to any idea of reincarnation. This thought was anathema in the Roman world but not in the Greek church headed by Origen. Maybe the doom of Christianity was sealed when Constantine the Great turned it into a state religion instead of allowing it perfect religious freedom. From the year 325 Christianity is lead more by political powers than by spiritual.

You write that one of your readers ask in which monastery I passed some nights with broken arms as the Chinese came by. I can't reveal this. It's a perfect secret between that monastery and me. "Somewhere beyond K2" is a wonderful and perfect preciseness.

Concerning my collapse in Delhi I think it was a sign by fortune that I would return to Tibet and not go to Indonesia - nothing else.

As you reach Darjeeling you will know where to meet me with Kim - we don't know it ourselves yet. It would be interesting to meet at the unknown grave of our friend Max Chablon in Imphal - if possible.

Welcome to India, and be certain that, if anywhere in the world, here nothing is impossible.

P.S. Concerning your quotation from Michel Peissel: This is the very problem. As the Chinese destroyed the Tibetan society by liquidating the monasteries they destroyed the one thing which could keep control of Tibet. Thereby they released terrific powers of hatred, which not yet have found expression. The Tibetans are without comparison in the world regarding self-control and mind control. If they are compelled to use their spiritual potentials in directions of hatred instead of constructive religion, the consequences might become worse than the whole Tibetan tragedy. The subdued hatred of Tibet is like an unexploded bomb which has to go off sooner or later. That was what the Darjiling conference was all about: returning this unexploded bomb to sender, that is China. The future will show if we in any way succeeded."

"Dear Christian, Please correct me if I am wrong. Your magazine, especially the Swedish edition, is invaluable, but every now and then there are a few mistakes. It is only reliable for its truthfulness to some 95%, which is an admirable rate of credibility. But I would advise you to make an effort to be more precise in your facts and figures. You have a tendency to easily let yourself be carried away.

To me the best part of "The Free Thinker" is its political assessments. You often display interesting political initiative ideas which you are never afraid to express however dangerous they might be. It is my pleasure to help you sail in the same ship.

The monasteries in Tibet destroyed by the Chinese red guards were 6246 in number. Not only were they destroyed. In this holocaust, 60% of traditional Tibetan literature was irrevocably lost. The library in Dharamsala contains some 50,000 volumes, which is the 40% that was saved. That means some 75,000 volumes of priceless original scripts in the Tibetan language being destroyed by the Chinese for no other reason than the pure delight of destruction. What was not destroyed with the 6246 monasteries, gold ornaments, statues and other valuables of art, were taken to China and molten down or sold by Hong Kong as antiquities on the international market.

The loss of this vast amount of original Tibetan literature is the more fatal since Tibet was the only country that had preserved the entire stock of original Buddhist documents. In other nations like Ceylon, Thailand and China the Buddhist original scriptures were polluted and dissipated by other traditions, evaluations and wars, but in Tibet everything was conserved in perfect piety. Since the Buddha himself was a Tibetan (since his mother was,) the country of the Tibetans and her people could rightly be regarded as the heartland of Buddhism.

The exact amount of Tibetan victims to the Chinese can only be roughly estimated to about some 1,2 million, but already in 1983, names of 1,207,487 victims and fates were documented. Only the Chinese themselves know exactly how many Tibetans they have killed and brainwashed and imprisoned for life and keep the figures secret. Only in the one year of 1959, according to secret Chinese statistics, 87,000 Tibetans were murdered, which the Chinese bluntly denied until they were shown their own records.

The Tibetans being a delicate race, living in a most vulnerable world exposed to the harshest climate on earth, dedicating a large part of the population to a life of celibacy, the damage caused by the Chinese to the Tibetan people was greater than that of the Germans against the Jews. A larger number of Jews were killed, but none of their literature was damaged. The Jews received a new country of their own after the 12 years' holocaust, while the Tibetan people still are concentration camp prisoners in their only possible home country. The Tibetans are still after 44 years a persecuted and oppressed people, and their very identity and future is still denied to them in their own country by the implant and tyranny of the Han Chinese. So much damage was not done to Poland by the Germans as to Tibet by the Chinese.

Concerning the end of the Khampas, this is the sole instance where the Chinese were without any immediate guilt. Dalai Lama encouraged them to give up without foreseeing the consequences, which frees him as well. But all the others were guilty, and, as you say, the chief responsibility was that of Nixon, Kissinger and their government. The Khampas were trained by Americans and supported by Taiwan from 1959 (under the period of Eisenhower), and their heroic war against China was an unrivalled epic all the way down to the American betrayal. Nothing could defeat the Khampas except betrayal.

China was to blame of course since only China was responsible for the whole situation. I will deal with them later. But India, Nepal and America were not obliged to make themselves traitors to Tibet as well. Nehru betrayed Tibet personally by tragically nourishing some idealistic faith in the good will of China in spite of Mao's actual terrorist regime, and the attitude of India is still that of indifference towards the fate of Tibet. In the negotiations with China in September 1993, Tibet was again sacrificed and driven over, as usual, to secure peace and co-operation between India and China. Nepal has followed the same course, trying to play chess with India against China and with China against India, ignoring and sacrificing the case of Tibet. Also Taiwan never recognized Tibetan independence. Chang Kai Shek in the 30s wanted to revive Chinese imperialism, and if Mao had not invaded Tibet, Chang Kai Shek would have been happy to do exactly the same. In fact, the greatest Chinese imperialists, with no mind to ever consider Tibet as a different nation, are still found in Taiwan. But the American betrayal was by far the worst.

Of course, China was an irresistibly tempting bait to American business. The coward policy of India was in exact consequence to that of the equally commercial Britain, which invaded Tibet in 1904 only for the sake of business. For the sake of business India abandoned Tibet, just like Britain. What is that kind of business worth, when you sacrifice the most basic and universal human values, even the cause of democracy and human rights, in order to make money, which costs blood and brings bad Karma and the curse of future generations?

The chief fault, though, was the incapability of Nehru, India, America and Britain to recognize the fundamental evil of materialistic China. The ways of China have always throughout history been sly flattering ambiguities with hidden goals, the ends always justifying the means. You can never trust any Chinese. That summarizes the historical experience of incurable Chinese imperialism.

Concerning the Khampas, their last fight was their bravest. When they were forced to give up in Mustang in northern Nepal by the earnest command of Dalai Lama and 10,000 Nepalese troops, with 20,000 Chinese troops on the other side, part of them decided to give up, while those 40 who refused to give up decided to head for Dharamsala some 400 miles away. Those who followed Dalai Lama's command and gave themselves up were sent to Nepalese prison dungeons for seven years, all their property being confiscated. Their three highest officers committed suicide by cutting their own throats when they discovered the treachery - they had been promised no retaliations. Those 40 who made a run for it almost got to the frontier of India 200 miles away but not quite. Chased all the way by the Nepalese and the Chinese, they were finally killed to the last man in an ambush 20 miles from the Lipulek La in India towards the end of August 1974. Their story is an epic comparable to that of Masada. Of those 40 no one survived, but they will live forever as the foremost Khampas of all, and there are still Khampas everywhere from Ladakh to Kham who train themselves to become like them. As John said, "Knowing the story of the sacred 40, it is impossible not to see one of them in every Khampa you encounter." In brief, their glory is infinite. You should write a book about it.

Please correct my English if necessary. I am very much in agreement with your editing principles, only the facts of reality are important, and the proper form to bring them forth I leave to you.

Expecting you in Darjeeling, or elsewhere, yours truly, Kim."

(Kim is an Indian Buddhist from Bihar, closely associated with John B. Westerberg on his journeys.)

"My dear Christian, My warmest thanks for the presentation of Kim to me. The material he has provided me with, Tibetan literature of healing above all, has opened up a world of miraculous possibilities. In fact, I am positive that the evasive riddle of the inextricable Aids problem now has found its solution.

This solution however presents a lot of problems. The world establishment of hospitalization will never accept the Tibetan alternative. Its liability is of course the inevitability of quacks, and unfortunately the scientific establishment is prone to ban all forms of quackery even if one quack brings with him twenty successful experts of the same school. The scientific method demanding 100% waterproof results unfortunately normally excludes and disregards 95% ratios of success - until they become 100%. Only then are scientific research results accepted, when they no longer offer any challenge.

However, these possibilities of the Tibetan alternative are so overwhelmingly tempting and astounding, that without any second thoughts I will drive the whole scientific world over and boot the whole medical establishment concerning the issue of Aids. Both Luc Montaigner and Robert Gallo will prove mistaken. The virus they found and fought about does exist, but their mistake was their method. The scientific method is to locate the disturbance and attack it. The Tibetan method is to locate in the patient what caused the disturbance and remedy that flaw in the patient's mentality or personality. The basis of Tibetan medicine is that everything can be cured psychologically, and the more than a thousand-year-old practice of Tibetan medicine is to cure everything psychologically by physical means. Tibetan medicine is thus a wonderful compromise between body and soul functions, always aiming at a balance between them, healing body disturbances by restoring loss of spiritual capacity and healing mental disturbances by restoring body balances. The curious disproportion between scientific and Tibetan medicine is, that while western medicine refutes Tibetan medicine as a philosophy of quacks, Tibetan medicine does not refuse western scientific knowledge but offers just another dimension to it.

Curiously, one who is proved right by these evident possibilities of Tibetan medicine is James Hilton with his Shangri La theory. The healing power of Tibetan medicinal knowledge can prolong life almost immeasurably. There are herbs growing in the Himalayas with healing powers unique on this planet. I was never so surprised in all my life as when I learned that Tibetans actually practised brain and heart surgery already in the ninth century - more than a thousand years ago! All respectable Chinese medicinal knowledge also comes from Tibet or India or both. The only Chinese speciality is of course acupuncture, but some say even that has its origin in Veda, while all other Chinese methods and practice they definitely owe to the Tibetans (who often got them from India).

The HIV virus can't be cured with medicine, and this virus is only one of many new killer bacteria, as if all nature revolted against man, a suddenly most unnatural parasite causing havoc in the entire global echo system. The Buddhist method, so far the only sensible and certain one, is reserved to a happy few with proper insight, while it will probably be a matter of several decades before the world and its scientific establishment of hospitalization with its monopoly awakes to their gross mistake of their own infallibility. How many will die before then? Maybe 10 million, maybe a hundred, maybe a thousand, maybe several billion.

From the beginning, more than 2500 years ago, Buddhism had the good sense to adopt the ways of man to the ways of nature, dedicating a large percentage to celibacy, thus avoiding overpopulation and imbalances in nature. The only religion to make efforts in the same way was Christianity. All the others - Hinduism, Islam, materialism, communism - have failed completely.

We the happy few knowing this stand so far on our own, as I have done for the last twelve years. But we stand on solid ground, while the world is swaggering, and our responsibility therefore is almost unbearable."

Comment. Doctor Sandy's theory is fully in accordance with the scientific development during this century. During the last century materialism became constantly more dominating in human thought carried by leaders like Darwin and Karl Marx. The first to find new metaphysical paths of research were Freud, Rudolf Steiner and Einstein, whose theory of relativity turned all empiric science and materialism upside down. This theory put science into developing the atomic bomb, which definitely ended the illusion of science as something exclusively beneficial to mankind.

In 1950 China invaded Tibet expressly to "help" Tibet on the road of progress. This "help" became such an embarrassing enforcement that the Tibetans decided to resist it. This brought China to occupy and enslave Tibet by means of force and military violence in 1959. In connection with this forced conquest, the medicinal institute on Shakpori Hill, located there since 300 years, was bombed and utterly destroyed.

Already in 1960 the International Commission of Jurists presented their report of widespread genocide going on in Tibet. This report was out of tune during the 60s when the mode of the day was to extol China for her defence of Vietnam. Like in 1950, the universal reaction to the atrocities performed by China in Tibet was indifference and passive silence.

During the 60s, 6246 Tibetan monasteries and temples were systematically destroyed by the command of Peking while only 13 were left intact, mainly for the sake of tourism. Many of these monasteries were torn down by forced Tibetan labour, the Tibetans themselves were forced under armed threat to tear down what their ancestors had accomplished, and what couldn't be destroyed by hand was bombed by aircraft or dynamited. The red guards under the direct command of Chairman Mao were solely responsible. Since all victuals grown in Tibet were used to support the Chinese army (PLA) there was a famine in Tibet lasting from 1958 to 1979. Before 1950 Tibet had been self-supporting and had never experienced any shortage of anything while China was in a bad way. Through the Chinese invasion and occupation, Tibet was gradually reduced to the poorest country on earth.

Why did China do all this? Her only gain was access to Tibetan highlands with their minerals and strategic advantages - with strategic nuclear weapons placed in Kongpo Nyitri, Powo Tamo, Rudok, Golmud and Nagchuka, the whole of northern India and the south of Siberia is within reach of Chinese robots, while the elevation of about 5000 meters make these highlands with their weapons highly inaccessible to Russian and Indian weapons. This strategic advantage is the sole gain of China from her enslavement of Tibet.

This could be described as the supreme evil: to plan and execute a systematical genocide on a peaceful cultured people who only wanted to be left in peace with their religion in their monasteries, in order to use their country as a basis for nuclear weapons.

Now Doctor Sandy suggests that the Tibetan medicinal science with its eleven-year education probably has the means and correct knowledge to solve the Aids problem. And this traditional science the Chinese have tried to eradicate to substitute it with torture methods, sterilizations by force, electro shocks treatment and death concentration camps for tens of millions of prisoners around Golmud and other locations by the Gobi desert.

The genocide in Tibet has at least been documented and proved beyond doubt. A more massive implant of Han Chinese has taken place into Turkestan (Sinkiang) than to Tibet. What has occurred in this area much greater than Tibet has not yet become known, since no one has been able to document it; but here the Chinese nuclear tests were commenced and carried on until Tibetans started to observe strange mushroom clouds over northern parts of Tibet, which observations were later confirmed by new strange epidemics in the area with miscarriages and malformations, just like after Tchernobyl in that area, and especially around the great sacred lake of Koko Nor.

"My dear friend, Many thanks for your letter, which was successfully smuggled unopened to me, wherefore I dare write an answer, using the same smuggling system. I do not exactly know if this extreme caution is necessary, but it is better to be on the safe side. There are people who never get caught however flagrant risks they take, and there are people who get caught for nothing in spite of total discretion. It seems to be a most individual trait. All I know is that the authorities of this Chinese totalitarian world are losing control every day, the Chinese developing into the worst capitalists in the world. They have always been fooling the Americans, and they are fooling them still. People like Edgar Snow and Richard Nixon they regard as despicable idiots while only Pearl Buck among Americans is respected in China, since she worked with Chinese for many years and got to know them well.

Writing to you I feel again as if our conference in Lhasa is going on forever. Those days in the city and outside at Ganden and in our most important meetings at Nechung are forever still in my mind. When I met with John in a secret encounter (I will not tell you where) he was well and full of initiative power, but he told me of his sickness at Delhi. He also told me, that a doctor from Tibet had told him, that his only enemy, that could do him any harm, was his own over-empathy. This is a both promising and dangerous prospect.

In his person he combines a deep Christian philosophy with expert Buddhist knowledge (actually Tibetan) which makes him doubly explosive as a spiritual peril in China. Actually this might be the correct formula for breaking the Chinese difficulties. The Chinese are the most racist people in the world, taking for granted that all other peoples, and especially neighbours like the Tibetans and Burmese, are barbarians, who do not even deserve the worst treatment they can get. They look on their bad treatment of other nations as acts of grace. This Chinese conceit is the greatest curse of China. But if Jesus, combining in himself deep Jewish traditions with the knowledge of Buddhism, could upset the Roman Empire so completely for ever, maybe something like that would be the proper formula also for breaking down this world environmental menace of the totalitarian state of China. There might be no greater human force in existence than Jesus and Buddha acting together.

Yours with compliments, Doctor Sun."

Our friend in Chungqing belongs to an old Mandarin family of Canton, actually related with the Ming dynasty. He is an agent of an underground opposition movement challenging the communist party and willing to allow independence to Tibet, Turkestan and (Inner) Mongolia.

Gothenburg, March 14th, 1995.

The position of the tenth Panchen Lama was however dubious and tragic from the beginning. He was not the only candidate for the office but the candidate of the Chinese; and there was another more trusted Tibetan candidate, whom the Chinese succeeded in eliminating - he was arrested at Yatung on his way on an Indian pilgrimage and probably murdered - the body was never found. He was just a small boy.

When the Chinese invaded Tibet in 1950 it was done on the pretext that Panchen Lama, then 13 years old, had asked China to come and liberate Tibet. Already then they had the boy firmly under their control, and they turned him into their best collaborator in Tibet. His universal reputation as a phoney Panchen Lama and the chief lackey of the Chinese occupation army was founded in the 50s; but in the face of the resolute rebellion of Kham from 1956, the atrocities following the escape of the Dalai Lama in 1959 and the looting of his own monastery Tashi Lumpo a few years after, his loyalty towards China started to vacillate.

His great moment of truth came in March 1964. He had then been forbidden to speak in public for two years by the Chinese, but they now decided to give him a chance to improve his conduct. At the great prayer festival celebrated for three weeks he was on one occasion to make a propaganda speech before an audience of 10,000 people. The Chinese had commanded him to once and for all officially denounce the Dalai Lama. If he pleased the Chinese by doing so, he was to be reinvested with all his authority and privileges.

Conventionally he started his speech and advocated diplomatically the necessity of freedom of conscience and religion and for Tibet to be developed by her own people in their own way.

The moment came when he was supposed to denounce the Dalai Lama. He fell silent looking around at all his fellow Tibetans seemingly meeting every one of them with his eyes and sighed audibly. Everyone held his breath. Then he spoke the most carefully considered words of his life:

"His Holiness the Dalai Lama has been brought from his country into an alien nation. While he is away it's in the interest of all Tibetans that he meets with no harm. As long as Dalai Lama is safe, the happiness of the Tibetans will also prosper and continue. Today as we all are gathered here I must express my firm belief that Tibet soon will regain her independence and that His Holiness the Dalai Lama soon will be restored on his golden throne. Long live His Holiness the Dalai Lama!"

Of all affronts thinkable that any Tibetan could have insulted China with, this took the first price. The highest respected and positioned Tibetan in the country spat China right in her face in front of the whole Tibetan people. The dramatic effect was tremendously extreme and should have its place in world history.

The Chinese unfortunately have no political sense of humour, and this was not even a joke. The consequences became vast and unsurveyable. The Panchen Lama was arrested and forbidden to leave his house, where he was totally isolated. After some comprehensive conferences in Beijing behind locked doors among only the highest chiefs of the communist party like Mao Zedong, Chou Enlai and all the great bosses, a massive campaign of calumny against Panchen Lama was launched all over Tibet.

The trial against the Panchen Lama then took place during 17 days in August. Chinese trials all have the same procedure, soon degenerating into lynching of the accused, which everyone present must take part in if he doesn't want to become an accused himself. This trial was no exception from general Chinese routine, and the well organized public trial enabled everyone present to approach the accused Panchen Lama to beat him, kick him, spit on him, denounce him and abuse him in every conceivable way, though many were those who refused to participate in his official lynching.

The verdict had been decided in advance. Directly after the trial, the Panchen Lama, his parents and all those of his family and household who as yet had not been murdered or brought into concentration camps, were put in irons and brought in an armoured car as very dangerous criminals to an unknown destination. For fourteen years no one knew where the Panchen Lama was being held. Not until February 1978 news came that he had been kept in the number one prison for top party members, where they had constantly tried to brainwash him, which he constantly had protested against by trying to commit suicide. Neither brainwash nor suicide efforts had succeeded.

In 1982 he was allowed to revisit Tibet after 18 years of imprisonment under extreme and inhuman conditions outside Beijing. His freedom to act and move about was very much restricted mainly to restoring and rebuilding monuments destroyed by the command of the Chinese. Just after finishing the great stupa at Tashi Lumpo, the mausoleum for the last five Panchen Lamas, one of the most beautiful monuments in Tibet, made in the same architectural style and timeless harmony as all traditional Tibetan architecture, he died of a heart attack 52 years old. During the course of massive adversities and inhuman sufferings, he ultimately succeeded in defending his title, his own and all the integrity of Tibet and the honour of his ancient office.

Now the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama has been confirmed by the Dalai Lama. As all the world wished the eleventh Panchen Lama "tashi deleg", that is good health and happiness, the Chinese authorities sought the six year old child out, kidnapped him and brought him to China together with all other possible candidates for the office in order to start again from the beginning in the vain efforts of deprogramming and brainwashing out the 2500 year old Buddhist faith, which the Chinese communists feel to be the greatest threat and peril to their ideal state.

Of the Human Rights, as established by the United Nations, China has violated 19 in Tibet:

§3 The right to a private life, freedom and personal security has been violated by murders, rapes, imprisonments without trial and arbitrary executions.

§4 The prohibition against slavery has been violated by the fact that China, under the pretext of liberating the people of Tibet, has enslaved them instead.

§5 The prohibition against torture and against cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of people has been violated since this has been carried through against the Tibetan people.

§9 The prohibition against arbitrary arrest, detention and exile has been violated.

§12 The prohibition against interfering with people's private lives, family lives, home lives and correspondence and against defamation of character and the right to protection of law against such attacks has been violated by compulsory divorces, dispersion of families and the deprivation of children from their families against their will.

§13 The right to freedom of movement to and from and within one's own country and from any other country has been taken from the Tibetans.

§16 That marriage may be entered on only by the free will of both parties has been violated by compulsory marriages between monks and nuns and by that many Tibetan women were forced into marriage with Chinese.

§17 The right to property and the prohibition against arbitrary deprivation of property has been violated by mass confiscations as the Tibetans often were bereft of everything except clothes and household articles.

§18 The right to freedom of thought, of conscience and of religion was taken from the Tibetans.

§19 The right to freedom of opinion and expression was taken from the Tibetans mostly by the methodical destruction of their writings and the burning of their books.

§20 The right to peaceful assembly and association was forbidden by the Chinese as only meetings proclaimed by the Chinese were allowed.

§21 The right to take part in the government of one's country was forbidden by the Chinese.

§22 The right to social security was denied the Tibetans as 1) the economical resources of Tibet went to China, 2) the social changes in Tibet were disadvantageous to the Tibetans and 3) efforts were made to destroy the religion of the Tibetans.

§23 The right to work, free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to a fair salary was denied the Tibetans by forced labour under inhuman conditions without a salary.

§24 The right to rest and leisure with paid holidays from labour was denied the Tibetans.

§25 The right to a decent standard of living and to medical care and the right of all mothers and children to special protection was violated as all Tibetan economical resources were taken care of by the Chinese.

§26 The right to free education and upbringing was violated since the educational institutions of the Tibetans were closed and replaced by communist schools of propaganda and by the fact that the Tibetan children were taken from their parents to be indoctrinated in enforced propaganda.

§27 The right to participation in the cultural life of the home country was taken from the Tibetans by the Chinese effort to eliminate Tibetan culture by replacing it with atheistic communism.

§29 That personal freedom is to be limited only by appropriate consideration of other people was violated by the Chinese mostly through the bombings of Tibetan monasteries, which were built most of all to protect personal freedom and development.

The violation of Human Rights in Tibet has continued undisturbed for 45 years, since the systematical, methodical and well premeditated genocide against the Tibetans that was initiated in 1950 never has been interrupted, although China is a member of the United Nations.

The above-mentioned statements of violation of Human Rights in Tibet were ready and internationally known since 1960, which is long before the Cultural Revolution. They were published by the International Commission of Jurists of Geneva, which in 1959 carefully documented an overwhelming number of individual cases with precise statistics, which China negated and still denounces as lies and fantasies.

The cultural revolution, which was given free reins in Tibet 1966-76, added a number of 6246 monasteries destroyed out of 6259 possible to the list of crimes against human rights in Tibet. The only monasteries to be spared were such that could be of advantage for tourism. Of this universal destruction amounting to 99,5%, not much is seen today, since all prominent and noticeable monasteries have been rebuilt since 1979. As a rule, the restored monasteries only form a tenth out of the original size and area of the real monasteries, and only about 5% of the original number of monks and nuns are permitted to live there.

Besides monasteries, also a vast number of temples and other traditional monuments were destroyed, even the oldest one of Tibet, which for the sake of tourism were restored to form a conspicuous façade of the Chinese fashioning of Tibet.

How many Tibetans that were killed by the Chinese is not known, but in 1983, the names and destinies of 1,207,487 Tibetan victims were documented, who all met with death because of the Chinese. Of these about 480,000 were from Kham, who fought a heroic guerrilla war against China 1956-74 until the Americans betrayed them by the deal of president Nixon with China.

Furthermore, in this Chinese holocaust of Tibet, 60% of all Tibetan literature was destroyed. Those 40% that were saved are represented at the library of Dharamsala by about 50,000 volumes, all written in longhand or printed by hand. This means that about 75,000 volumes of priceless original manuscripts in the Tibetan language are lost forever in the Chinese destruction. About 85% of all existing Tibetan books and manuscripts were destroyed in all. What escaped destruction in the 6246 ruined monasteries, that is objects of gold, statues and other items of art, were transported to China, melted down or sold by Hongkong on the international market for antiquities.

In Tibet China maintains an army of 500,000 men posted close to the Indian border of which 200,000 are permanent.

In Tibet China has constructed 17 secret radar stations and 14 military airfields.

In Tibet China has established 5 bases for nuclear weapons, in Kongpo Nyitri, in Powo Tamo, in Rudok, in Golmo and in Nagchuka.

In Tibet China has stationed 8 ICBM (long range missiles), 20 intermediate and at least 70 short-range missiles reaching all of northern India and southern Siberia.

Koko Nor is the greatest of the four holy lakes of Tibet. The "Ninth Academy" at the Koko Nor is a nuclear power station for among other things store of nuclear waste.

In Manchuria the original population has almost been exterminated. Only 3 million Manchurians remain in their own country while the Chinese immigration amounts to 75 million.

The corresponding figures for Inner Mongolia are 2,6 Mongolians against 8,5 immigrated Chinese.

The corresponding figures for East Turkestan ("Sinkiang", in Chinese "the new province") are 3 million Uigurs against 7 million Chinese settlers.

The corresponding figures for the Tibetan province of Amdo are 900,000 remaining Tibetans against 3,5 million Chinese colonialists.

In the Tibetan province of Kham it is not known how many Tibetans remain, but during their resistance against the Chinese 480,000 Tibetans lost their lives. Since then 3,6 million Chinese have been established in Kham.

In the autonomous province of Tibet there are at the moment 2 million Chinese increasing all the time while the Tibetans are constantly reduced in their own country.

One Chinese in Tibet costs as much as 4 Chinese in China. These Chinese in Tibet the Tibetans are forced to pay for by taxes and inflation.

Before 1959 there were 592,558 monks in Tibet. Today the Chinese allow only about 35,000 since the monks, who live in celibate, are considered a dangerous threat to the Chinese control society.

The world did nothing in 1950 as Tibet appealed to the United Nations for help against the Chinese invasion.

The world did nothing when China let loose the holocaust of the cultural revolution over Tibet, which was a calculated effort to extinguish all Tibetan culture and national identity.

Even today Tibet is of no interest to the world being so remote and without economic attractions, while China as the fastest growing economy of the world is of vital interest, why the world for economical reasons gladly close their eyes to the Tibetan case, as it likewise has refrained from doing something decisive about Kurdistan, Indonesia and Bosnia, other genocide stages, since these remote mountain and jungle places are not economically interesting. The world did not hesitate to interfere with the occupation of Kuwait by Iraq, however, since Kuwait had oil resources, no matter how dirty that business is.

Only the happy few are aware of the enormous importance of Tibet to the world. Among other things, Tibetan medicine offers the only cure to the world epidemic of Aids. But who cares about curing Aids when there are so many medicines to make money on, for instance AZT, which only can be applied to Aids patients as long as they remain ill?

In brief, the Chinese have committed the greatest genocide since the Nazi holocaust in Europe (surpassing Indonesia, Turkey and Pol Pot in Cambodia), the vastest ecological destruction of the environment which ever has been committed by a nation in another nation, (the Chinese desolation of forests in Tibet has resulted in ecological disasters in all adjacent countries,) and they have tried to utterly destroy the Tibetan civilization and culture, and they are getting away with it, the world closing their eyes, refusing to learn the truth, profiting by the crimes of China, while China just tells all those who know and remember anything about the holocaust of the cultural revolution and the multi-decennial destruction of Tibet to try to forget all about it.

The Tibetans are not Chinese. As a people they are completely unique and find their nearest kin in the Navajo and Hopi Indian tribes of Arizona.

Tibet is historically an independent nation which not only has been recognized by China but to which China even sometimes has paid tribute.

The Tibetan language, written like Sanskrit from left to right, has no connection whatsoever with the Chinese language.

The Tibetan Buddhism is originally Indian and not Chinese.

We introduced this issue stating the case of His Holiness the Pope Pius XII and his cowardice in the Jewish issue in the second world war, doing nothing and not even mentioning the Jews during the whole war although he was completely aware of what was going on. The genocide of the second world war was followed by other genocides against the Tibetans, against other peoples suppressed by communists, against minorities in Moslem countries and by Serbians against other people. If you fall silent in the face of any of these genocides you are as much of a coward as His Holiness the Pope Pius XII in the second world war. The least you can do is to take sides by at least saying a word. If you can do more it is even better, but it has to begin with a clear declaration of which side you are on. If you don't even take this preliminary step of the least reaction and spread the word of knowledge about the truth of the world's greatest crimes against human rights going on today, then you are by your silence quietly acquiescing to what the Chinese are doing.

by Doctor Sun.

This issue is very difficult. The root of the problem is the megalomania of the central government as established by Chairman Mao. In the 1950s he had the golden opportunity to bring forth a new China as a paragon of modern states politically and militarily. Instead he marched into the trap of megalomania, occupying Tibet by force and launching a Chinese atomic bomb program. That was his most unpardonable mistake. Without a nuclear program of military purposes, China could together with Japan have constituted the most powerful political peace force in the world, leading a pacifist course against nuclear politics, which would have resounded with universal acclaim all over the world. Instead, China lead by Chairman Mao embarked upon a military nuclear program and launched the devastating cultural revolution, wasting all the prestige of China, ultimately ruining her economic possibilities and politically committing suicide, pulling the entire communist party with him into the abyss.

What then is to be done? The communist party and the military forces must be dismantled. In the beginning of the 1980s, Dalai Lama of India presented a very reasonable suggestion: total disarmament of Tibet, dismantling all the atomic bombs and missiles, on condition that China retains her suzerainty and her control of the administration. This was so reasonable and opportune that only madmen could have objected. Unfortunately the Chinese communist party mainly consisted of madmen and does so still.

We have to wait for the madmen to be cured or to be done away with. An old Chinese proverb says, that if you wait long enough by the river, your enemy's corpse will come floating by. That is all we can do: patiently wait, at least praying, if we can do nothing more concrete.

Tibet has experienced 20 years of a winter nightmare 1959-79. Tibet is not alone. Many millions in China are still also waiting for the first ray of spring, and we have been waiting since 1949.

This letter is smuggled out of China by clandestine ways, because if it was to be published in China, many good people would lose their very small amount of freedom in China.

- Doctor Sun of Canton, June 4th, 1995.

No one made any notes, the meeting had no secretary, so I transmit only the headlines and the atmosphere of our conversation. Copy the document, make editions and abbreviations as you will, and then destroy it according to our normal procedure.

(It should here be noted, that all conferences and political talks which John ever participated in were possible only on the condition that nothing was taken down in writing. That's why I always have to destroy all of John's documents, so that he never runs the risk of being blamed for any written reports of such secret talks.

I imagine our talks should be of special interest to you since you were being discussed. What was said could be of some guidance to you for the future.

Our talks were held in English, Nepali and Chinese. Most of what the Chinese said between themselves in Chinese I could not understand, but Doctor Sun gave me detailed accounts afterwards, which I trust. Nothing was said in Swedish, which is why my translation sometimes may seem a bit artificial. I didn't write it all down in English, since I would rather concentrate it all in Swedish, since no one else here understands that language, and since I enjoy practising my Swedish. Of course, no microphones or tape-recorders are possible on occasions like this.

Doctor Sun acted as our host and chairman. I will try to render it all as Max Chablon would have handed it down.

Sun I am very happy to have you all here together under the same roof, so that we can discuss important matters, which concern not only India and China but the whole world. These my friends from China are Mr Ho and Mr Ping. Mr Ho is a member of the communist party and has some influence. Mr Ping is a diplomat and is mainly here as a spectator. Mr Kim is a Buddhist representing India, while our friend Mr John, who is a westerner, is deeply concerned in both Tibetan, Buddhist, political and religious issues.

Ping What religion does he represent?

John I was born a Christian in the Orthodox Church, and my education is Greek-Russian; but I have now been here in India for almost four years and know Ladakh as well as Tibet.

Ping (to Sun) So he does not represent the western world?

John I represent the western world only as a democrat.

Ping A most important political marking.

Sun But we all represent peace. We all desire peace, and we have here a golden opportunity to meet across the borders, India with China and democracy with communism.

Kim India feels the continued Chinese occupation and sinofication of Tibet as a constant and growing threat against India.

Ho India has nothing to fear from China, we assure you.

Kim How can India have faith in the insurances of China when China has placed so many nuclear weapons in Tibet pointing directly at the most populous states of India?

Ping (in Chinese) Undiplomatic, Mr Ho.

Ho (in Chinese) I don't care. India can't threaten us.

Ping (in Chinese) That's why we shouldn't threaten them either.

Ho (in Chinese) Don't you think I know that? But that fellow (pointing at Kim) tries to be rude and impertinent.

Ping (in Chinese) Let him roar. He has no teeth.

Kim We have nothing to put against you, but the world opinion is growing against you without the help of India.

Ho (to Ping) Just listen to him! He dares to threaten us! - Mr Kim, are you trying to threaten us? Are you part of the international conspiracy against China? What do you think we have the communist party for? To safeguard China and save her! We don't want western decadence and corruption in China! We don't want American barbarity with video violence, pornography and drugs! We want to keep our China intact and well organized as a state! The whole western world is disintegrating especially morally! It is our moral duty towards our country and people to protect us against all that!

Kim Why then do you persecute Buddhism?

Ho We do not persecute Buddhism.

Kim It is almost extirpated in China. In Tibet you destroyed almost all Buddhistic monasteries and books.

Ho That was a mistake committed by the gang of four. Since then we have restored the monasteries.

Kim You have restored a tenth of all the ruined monasteries and only such monasteries that could be visited by tourists. The rest of the monasteries you allow your impoverished Tibetans to rebuild at their own cost, like for instance Ganden, one of the three greatest monasteries in the world, which you forced the Tibetans to tear down brick by brick, beam by beam, by hand, to transport all the loose stones down into the valley. Now without your help they have to carry up every one of those stones again.

Ping (in Chinese) Leave this to me, dear colleague. (to Kim) Buddhism is being restored in all China. It has been subject to gross injustice not only in Tibet but in all China.

Sun Is it not even so, Mr Ping, that you, knowing well the state of affairs in China, quite coolly reckon with the possibility that Buddhism could regain so much influence that it could replace the communist party in China if necessary?

Ping (with a shy glance towards Ho) As a matter of fact, that is so, Doctor Sun.

Ho (in Chinese) What is this? The communist party can not tolerate Buddhist conspiracies.

Ping (in Chinese) This is no conspiracy, my friend. It is rather like an insurance.

Ho (in Chinese) Dear colleague, I don't understand you. Are you loyal to the party or not?

Ping (in Chinese) Of course I am.

Ho (in Chinese) How then can you be a Buddhist?

Ping (in Chinese) Mr Ho, our party has existed for fifty years. Buddhism has existed for one half of five thousand years. It has survived all crises. Not even the communist party has succeeded in destroying it.

Ho (in Chinese) Comrade, your superstition amazes me.

Sun My friends, let's speak English and not depart from the subject.

Ho (in Chinese, pointing at John) For the sake of that imperialistic westerner?

Sun (indicating Kim) We are not only Chinese here, and English is the one language that we all understand.

Ho (turning to John) Well then, Mr Westerner, for your sake we will speak English. You haven't said much. We would like to know what you are doing here. We can't identify your colour.

John I am neutral but very much here to learn and understand. I respect your arguments. I myself consider the American vulgarity culture and capitalism as perhaps the greatest evil in the world. The one thing which perhaps is even more evil is your treatment of the Tibetan people.

Ho They were barbarians. We civilized them.

John With atom bombs? By destroying their schools and universities?

Ho No. They were fortresses of corruption and exploitation.

John They contained only books and works of art. (interrupting before Ho starts to speak) And to this evil is added your treatment of the Uigurs of East Turkestan and the Mongolians of Inner Mongolia.

Ho You mean the barbarians of Sinkiang. They are only muslims.

Kim But you explode your atomic bombs in the land of this people which you occupy.

Ho Sinkiang has always belonged to China.

John No, it has been independent whenever it has had the possibility, just like Tibet, Manchuria and Mongolia.

Ho So, Mr John, you desire to bereave China of Tibet, Sinkiang, Inner Mongolia and Manchuria?

John Unfortunately the Manchurians are now only four percent in their own country. The rest of the people there are implanted Han Chinese.

Ho Emigrants and pioneers!

John Call it what you will. They were placed there by you. The other peoples, that is the Tibetans, Mongolians and Uigurs, don't want to share the same destiny of being swallowed up and naturally exterminated by Han. They want to survive. And they see no other possibility of survival than by freeing themselves from China.

Ho They can only survive within the civilization of the People's Republic.

John They themselves say the direct contrary.

Ho They can't manage on their own. Not even the Russians could manage on their own after their fall from socialism.

John Because socialism had destroyed the environment of the whole Soviet Union. Do you want the same thing to happen in China?

Ping It has already happened in many places.

Kim Koko Nor for instance.

Ping Not only Koko Nor.

Ho (in Chinese) Comrade, you amaze me more and more with your low morals.

Ping (in Chinese) Comrade, China is no longer infallible in the eyes of the world. Sooner or later all our secrets will become known.

Ho (in Chinese) Through spies! How do we know for certain that these westerners are not spies, who have come here only to get something out of us?

Ping (in Chinese) Doctor Sun assured us of their neutrality.

Sun Gentlemen, I assure you that Mr Kim only represents Indian and Buddhist interests. Mr John has taken sides against America as much as you.

Ho (in Chinese) America is not the only dangerous party! It's the whole world capitalism! How do we know that Mr John does not represent some secretly false humanitarian organization which only serves capitalistic interests?

Ping (in Chinese) Comrade, I must warn you against your lack of diplomacy. Your way of thinking can only lead into blind alleys and civil wars.

Kim Speak English!

Sun (in Chinese) Gentlemen, please co-operate. That's why we are here. His Majesty the King of Nepal gave us his special permission to gather here for the sake of peace.

Ho (in Chinese) How can the world be so blind and seduced by capitalism so as not to see how communism only desires to propagate peace!

Sun (in Chinese) Say it in English.

Kim If it only wants to propagate peace, why then does it use violence?

Ho China does not use violence. Our only method is friendly persuasion.

Kim In Tibet that friendly persuasion has always only consisted of violence.

Ho You are wrong.

Kim Mr Ho, you are extremely naïve.

Ho (to Ping, in Chinese) He insults me!

Sun Mr Ho, a theoretical question. If there would be a civil war between the communist party and the army, which side would you take? Would you defend the order and security of the country and support the army, or would you defend your country's freedom and the communist party?

Ho Such a situation can never occur.

Sun How can you be so certain?

Ho It is simply impossible.

Sun And you, Mr Ping?

Ping I admit that the situation could occur. Doctor Sun's question is important. The communist party defends positions which are becoming obsolete while the army is constantly becoming more corrupt. These two developments work against each other. If a crisis would occur, I would abandon both and join a Buddhist party.

Kim Why not a democratic party?

Ping China is not yet mature enough for thorough democracy.

Ho (in Chinese) This is the first sensible thing you have uttered today, comrade.

Ping (in Chinese) I wish you the same wisdom.

Sun Mr Ho, in what respects do you think the communist party has succeeded?

Ho In all respects.

Sun Give an example.

Ho Birth control. In that field China has succeeded while the whole world has failed, (turning to Kim) and especially India.

John Do you then consider it human and natural to force families into having only one child?

Ho It is necessary. It is necessary in the whole world. The uncontrolled growth of mankind is a threat to all life. The natural epidemics, which formerly limited the growth of mankind, have been eliminated by medical science, and Aids is spreading too slowly. That's why compulsory measures have to be used.

John So you desire a faster epidemic of Aids?

Ho Yes, especially in Africa, South America and India. Look what life has become in cities like Calcutta, Säo Paulo, Mexico City, Cairo and Delhi! It would be pure charity to let 90% of all the poor people in the world die, so that the others could have a safer future!

John More than half of humanity are living in extreme poverty. So you would suggest that half of humanity would perish so that the other half would survive?

Ho Yes. That would be reasonable.

John And would you then also sacrifice half of all Chinese?

Ho China would only benefit if more than half of all Chinese didn't exist.

John At least you are consistent.

Ho And what are your views on the development of the western world? There you find the worst destruction of the environment in the world.

John I have always been of the opinion that man should return to nature since only nature can save her. The great cities of eight figures I have always considered as death traps.

Ho Then we lean in the same direction. That pleases me. You are sensible after all. But on my part all cities with more than a million people should be done away with.

John In the western world we think that the population explosion is only due to poverty. If the standard of living was increased beyond poverty and distress, families would no longer have many children, and uncontrolled population growth would cease. But we don't believe in communist compulsory measures. Only capitalistic freedom could accomplish the desired results.

Ho What differences do the methods make, as long as we have results? I believe our methods to be more efficient.

John But they are inhuman.

Ho Is Aids, prostitution, drug abuse and suicide more human?

Sun The problem is whether the results could be reached by human means.

Kim Gentlemen, your alternatives are equally inhuman, while the voluntary celibacy of Buddhism and Christianity could be the correct solution and even more efficient than dictatorial force.

Ho China is democratic!

Ping (in Chinese) Don't start all that again!

Ho (in Chinese) He is insulting me!

Sun Gentlemen, I think we have come through our most important matters. May I now invite you for dinner?

Ho Doctor Sun, this was the first sensible thing you have said today. I wanted to end these meaningless discussions all along.

Ping Before we finish, I have still an important question. Doctor Sun, it has come to my knowledge that you have written an article in a western English-speaking journal published by a close friend of Mr John's. We agreed to accept your invitation here for these discussions on condition that they would not come out. How do we know that our talks will be kept secret?

Sun I wrote an article about the future of China in a small insignificant cultural journal, the editor of which I know personally. He works with music and research in literature and is completely harmless.

Sun Gentlemen, you just have to accept it, like Kim has to accept that your nuclear guns are pointed at India.

Ho So you will write nothing of this in that journal or any other journal?

Sun I give you my word that I will not. I am under obligation of silence.

Ping (in Chinese) And what about these two? (indicating John and Kim)

Sun Mr John and Mr Kim, my friends demand of you that you will write nothing in English about our talks here today.

John We promise not to transmit any single English word of what has been said here today.

Ping Or Chinese.

John Or Chinese.

Sun Are you satisfied, gentlemen?

Ping We shall have to be. Perhaps China after all here today has come one step closer to India and the western world.

Kim Only one question: what are your plans concerning Hongkong and Taiwan?

Ho The conference is finished.

Doctor Sun brought us smoothly over from our explosive debates to dinner. We did not get anything more interesting out of the Chinese. Mr Ho was silent and sullen during dinner, while Mr Ping was all superficial politeness. I think both felt they had said too much and at least more than they had intended. Doctor Sun was admirable all through by keeping a perfect balance. He is an invaluable asset to us.

Next day we had a completely different kind of conference, which I have not been able to reconstruct in the same way. Instead of the Chinese we had a Buddhist monk from Tibet who is close to Dalai Lama, and a tough Khampa, an incorrigible fighter of the Chinese, who belonged to the last who openly fought the Chinese, who has never given up and who still moves about in Tibet as he wishes without ever having been caught by the Chinese, since he knows the roads and paths better than they do. It is maybe superfluous to add that he is an old close friend of mine and one of my best guides. Doctor Sun was also present.

Instead of Chinese a lot of Tibetan was spoken, but neither Doctor Sun nor Kim interrupted when the Tibetans spontaneously passed their intensive discussions over into Tibetan, since they always afterwards explained everything to us.

The only important point of this almost equally enduring conference was, that my friend the Khampa succeeded in making it quite clear to Doctor Sun, that he personally had no intention to ever rest or give up until not only Tibet was completely independent and restored to its natural and ethnic borders, but also East Turkestan, Inner Mongolia (restored to Mongolia) and Manchuria. He also made it quite clear to Doctor Sun that the Chinese, after the restored independence of these nations, could count on being thrown out from all parts where they had succeeded to plant themselves at the cost of the original population, and with greater consequence and brutality than the Russians were bereft of their rights in the Baltic states. He implied that it was quite realistic, when Turkestan would become independent, to count on that the Muslims there would not hesitate to massacre every single Chinese who had helped in ruining their country. Concerning Turkestan he also made it plain that the Muslims there had massive support to count on from all Muslim nations in Central Asia, since all these countries including Turkey had received hundreds of thousands of refugees from Turkestan, the so called Sinkiang, which in Chinese only means The New Province. Further, he warned Kim especially against leniency and compliance towards the Chinese from the part of India and the western world. He pointed out the western indifference concerning Hongkong and its future after 1997:

"The Chinese have no soul and no integrity. They are a vast spiritless mass constituting a kind of ethnic amoeba swelling and spreading and swallowing everything up which it gets into contact with. Hongkong and the western world can not rely on Hongkong being permitted to keep any kind of individuality after July 1997. The way we know China, it is probable that all things personal in Hongkong then will vanish, like in Taiwan, if China is allowed to take care of this island too."

Of course, the representative of Dalai Lama protested against such an uncompromising attitude and considered the policy of my Khampa both dangerous and unwise. The Khampa answered, that his attitude was no policy, but simply the manner in which every Tibetan, Turkestanian, Mongolian and Manchurian was thinking all over Asia, who had ever had any contact with any Chinese. They had learned this implacable attitude from 46 years of oppression. The monk maintained that the attitude was dangerous, unwise and most un-Buddhistic but resigned.

Doctor Sun said very little but listened very carefully. When my Khampa seemed to have won the field, he said: "God help China," as if he had given up and thought that nothing could save China.

Afterwards I asked him more privately what he really had intended. He presented a very interesting train of thought: "China suffered terribly under western imperialism from 1850 and under the Japanese and Kuomintang up to 1949, but no evil coming from the west was worse than communism. Karl Marx based his life's work and philosophy on an envious hatred of higher classes, and this hatred was the only drive in his whole life. Communism was from beginning to end based only on hatred, and this hatred all Chinese have been forced to swallow during the whole period of Chairman Mao and even longer. This hatred was allowed to furiously hit also other people and especially the Tibetans, perhaps the least hating people in the world. But hatred always returns to itself. It has to strike back on the Chinese themselves; and this hatred, which the communists have scourged China with for 46 years, will not hit the communists, who like in Russia will simply vanish and change colours, as hard as it will hit the vast innocent mass of the ill-fated Chinese people."

These memorable days were the first and second of November in Kathmandu. A few days later an Israeli shot his Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to death. This gave me much to think of. There is however nothing that unites this Israeli right-wing extremist with my Khampa. They come from two different worlds. I was reminded, though, of your analysis of the equally extremist doctor Baruch Goldstein, who in February last year in madness shot down, was it 29 Palestinians? Your analysis with a cautious explanation of the madman's way of thinking must have given rise to misunderstandings and bad blood. You must denounce such terrorism, because it is nothing else. No Tibetan or other person branded by Chinese oppression has ever gone so far as to terrorism. The terrorists in China are only Chinese; and unfortunately there are many resemblances between individual Chinese commissars, soldiers and guards who kill from sheer panic or madness, and such as those two senseless Israeli murderers, who only do their utmost to destroy Israel. That at least is my opinion.

While I sympathize with Doctor Sun and his compassion, I must at the same time declare my Khampa to be in the right. When Chinese perish through national convulsions you are never informed of the exact number of casualties. An example: at Tiananman Square in Peking June 4th 1989, the communist party published casualty figures of some hundred who had been "killed by mistake" or had died "under self-inflicted circumstances". In brief, Deng Xiaoping was of the opinion, that it was all their own fault who died on Tiananman Square, since they stood in the way of the tanks; while the whole world could watch on television, how these brutally drove over and killed off thousands. The actual figure of death is estimated to some 10,000, possibly 12,000. It's impossible to find out the exact figure. In the concentration camps around Xining some 10 million prisoners are reputed to be held. No one knows exactly, and even less does anyone know how many have died there or been killed under the communist regime, but it should be more. During the "great leap forward", when China was industrialized by force during the 50s, about 40 million people died from starvation. No one knows exactly. They were forced from the countryside into vast industrial collectives where only worthless junk was fabricated, while millions were organized to kill little birds in madness for nothing. During the cultural revolution about 100 million people perished or vanished - no one knows exactly. The human dignity is non-existent in China and has only been developed in Taiwan and Hongkong, which these oases naturally don't want to lose, and which is the first thing they will lose if they are incorporated into China. No human dignity can be developed in China as long as the communists run the country. Their regime has from beginning to end been characterized by empty promises that were broken - the Chinese have never given any promise without breaking it. Of all the unreliable peoples of the world, this is the most consistent."

(All this has been translated from the author's Swedish original. We have reason to assume, that the discussions as recorded above never took place, since what was actually said never was taken down in writing except in another language afterwards. The facts and figures, only, should be considered truthful, while the wordings certainly must have been different in reality.)

A young Tibetan threw two stones at an armed guard. A vice-platoon leader asked: "Shall we beat him?" As the stone hit a vice-battalion commander in his leg, he ordered: "Beat him!" Then he led three armed policemen to chase the Tibetan who had thrown the stones. The Tibetan ran into the house of an ordinary Tibetan family. The armed policemen crashed upon the door and raked the residents with gunfire. All six members of the family were killed, among whom the youngest boy was only eleven years old. But the Tibetan who threw the stones climbed a wall and ran away. The armed policemen followed him and shot him in the leg. One armed police then rushed forward and hit the Tibetan's head with his rifle. The rifle went off accidentally, and an armed policeman behind him was struck in the neck and died instantly. When the vice-platoon leader saw his fellow die, he angrily hit the Tibetan with his rifle and smashed the brains out of the Tibetan's head. When the policemen hit this young Tibetan with their guns, six Tibetans from another family stood in their doorway not far away and cried: "Murderers! Murderers!" The vice-platoon leader then picked up his machine gun and raked them with gunfire. All six Tibetans died.

This is a quotation of a Chinese cadre who witnessed the whole thing. This was not during the difficult days in the 50s but as late as in March 1989. The same Chinese reported to Amnesty International of a massacre in Lhasa in the same month in which 256 Tibetans were murdered.

As you see, the situation in Lhasa is somewhat different from the case of the poor Palestinians throwing stones in the Intifada.

We shall present similar incidents from China's occupied territories in following issues.

It could be discussed whether Buddhism is really a religion, since it is rather the supreme philosophy. Religion has been defined as "a conviction about a higher power which rules the life of man", which indicates a belief in one or more gods or in destiny. Those are the very things that Buddhism denies. Instead it professes, that each individual is himself responsible principally for the whole universe and his connections with it, which includes his relationship and all his business therewith. Buddhism is in fact so scientific, that its founder from the beginning makes all dogmatism impossible, as he instead encourages his disciples to never take anything for granted but to carefully investigate everything and never accept anything which hasn't been proved to be valid and true by testing. Each one should carefully find the right way by himself alone and one step at a time.

So there is no god in Buddhism, and the one who least of all is any kind of god is Buddha himself, whose real name was Siddhartha Gautama Sakyamuni Tathagrata, which names stand for Christian name, surname, clan name and a title which means "Truth-sayer". This last name was the only title which the man gave himself. It means more exactly: "the teller of the truth, as others have told the truth, as it will always be told" or "the speaker of the timeless truth". An absolutely exact translation of the word is not possible in English.

The man, who was born a Hindu in a royal castle, broke radically with the Hindu traditions, all the established gods and the whole caste system. The one thing he developed instead was the teaching of Karma, which is close to our sense of "destiny" or "fate"; but the Asiatic way of taking the idea of reincarnation for granted gives Karma an infinitely more profound significance. What Buddha consistently sought and found was a total liberation from all vanities and unimportant things in life - all disturbing thoughts, all desires and sufferings and, in brief, all things evil. The Buddhist ideal is then to acquire a perfectly pure mind which is free from every kind of desire, which necessitates a perfect celibate. This supreme peace of mind has a higher status in Buddhism than all the knowledge and education in the world.

To reach this ideal you have to clean up your Karma, which is the burden of all evil subconscious memories from the past and notably from past lives, which then could be infinite in number with infinities of burdens. This process is achieved by a moderate life of asceticism and meditation. According to Buddha, each one could only do this by himself and alone.

You could also call Buddhism a high ethical moral philosophy, which goes further than anything else in realizing the Greek god Apollo's command: "Know thyself!" A consequence of this commandment would seem to be a slight risk for egoism, which risk is eliminated by the great Buddhistic commandment of love and charity, which even involves the prohibition against killing animals, and by the establishment of the human phenomenon called Bodhisattvas.

There is a third school within Buddhism which at the same time is the newest, the most remarkable and definitely the most controversial. This is the Tantric school of Tibet, which evolves Buddhist meditation to such extremes, that the breath-taking exercises may lead to perfect control not only of one's own body (enabling you to survive a Tibetan winter naked outside keeping warm all the time) but even of the laws of nature (enabling you for example to dispose of the law of gravitation, calling forth hail-storms as Milarepa did, and to run wild at tremendous speed almost weightlessly, a phenomenon described in detail by Alexandra David-Néel, etc,) and even of world politics (enabling you to predict incredible events which actually occur.) The controversial element in these extreme Tantric practices is, from our point of view, that they seem to be nothing else than super-egoistic trips, with an ugly stress on ego and egoism. In such extreme Tantric exercises there seems to be no room left for love and charity. Typical of lamas of the Tantric school is, though, that they consistently dissuade others from following that way, simply because it is so utterly perilous, demanding a Buddhist sense of what is right which transcends this world. The higher up you get, the more easily you go wrong and fall down the whole way to the bottom.

Buddha was himself against such supernatural practice. On one occasion he met a guru by a river who had spent forty years trying to learn to walk on water. Buddha deplored him and said: "Forty years he has thrown away on this vanity, when it would have been so much easier for him just to go to the ferry-man down the river, who would have brought him dry-shod across for almost nothing!"

Buddhism has dominated the major part of eastern Asia for 2500 years and is still expanding, nowadays also in the west. 1500 years ago it also dominated all Central Asia up to Persia, all India and large parts of Indonesia; but Islam replaced it with violence, while Hinduism regained all India. How could Hinduism, which Buddhism almost universally had replaced, recover almost totally and regain almost all lost territory?

The answer is threefold: the Indian climate, Buddhist moral strictness with never popular celibacy, and the irresistible sensualism of Hinduism. In the long run the Hindus preferred a sensual religion to the opposite, which has much to do with the warm sweet climate of India. Buddhism has almost only survived in India in the cooler mountains. However, Buddhism is now expanding in India again, since so many Hindus born out of caste find this religion a better alternative than a life born outside society, from which you automatically become an outcast forever. That brings us back to Buddha's radical and in those days heroic overthrow of all barriers between different castes, classes and races.

"The biggest crime we are facing today in the world is, that only 10% of all people are enjoying 90% of the global resources, and that 90% of all people in this world are starving because they only get 10% of the resources of this world. The 10% rich people are polluting the environment by 90% while the rest of humankind, 90%, are only polluting it by 10%. This situation can not go on any longer, and these problems of universal injustice you can't write about without receiving threats to your life."

The most resounding approval our dear friend in Calcutta would probably have from Greenpeace, who justly point out the great oil companies as the chief polluters of the planet almost without anyone to match them; and the heroic Greenpeace crusaders make it their indefatigable aim to stop all new oil fields from exploiting new grounds and from continuing to accelerate the already disastrous imperilment of the planet.

At the Kyoto conference, the United States showed the least interest to impede the global environment destruction and the global warming while they at the same time are the leading destroyers of the atmosphere. Significant for their double standards is also the fact that they produce the films "Seven Years in Tibet" and "Kundun" about the Chinese oppression of Tibet while at the same time they allow themselves to be duped by Jiang Zhemin to sell nuclear technology to China for tens of millions of dollars, while the communists in Peking laugh at their naïvety.

- old Chinese proverb.

A faint glimpse of hope started to appear as the ancient civilizations in the Indus valley around Harappa started to be unearthed by archaeologists. These ruins of a high ancient civilization have been dated to around 3000 years B.C. In vain, however, were any clues sought to the origin of the Indian literature. In this field no one got any wiser while many got more confused.

The Indian literature of the Vedas, which is completely religious and the basis for all Hinduism, has apparently then from the very beginning taken a position outside the dimension of time. It is impossible to date, it is without historical marks, it will have nothing to do with historical reality, it is a complete outsider to this world from beginning to end. This makes it unique. All other world religions are firmly tied to a historic reality and to exact dates. Hinduism is the great and brilliant exception.

The next great problem concerning Hinduism is whether it is monotheistic or polytheistic. This problem is also impossible to solve, because it is both. It beats all other polytheistic religious records by having no less than 33 million gods, but all these uncountable gods are at the same time just different manifestations of the one and only universal divinity.

In this matter you could at least try to bring some order into the welter. In the oldest Veda scriptures the different gods are rather like the divine personages of the ancient Greek and Nordic myths. It is here important to recall that the Hindus are as much an Indo-European people as the Greeks and the Northerners, and that there are direct links and grammatical relationships between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. But the oldest Indian mythology is constantly refashioned while it evolves. During the bringing into existence of the four parts of Vedic literature the divine personalities are transformed, so that for instance Indra and Rudya soon disappear to give place to something like a trinity consisting of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Brahma is then the creator, Vishnu the maintainer and Shiva the destroyer. Shiva's wife is Kali, the godess of death, who is often portrayed with a long bloody mouth hanging outside her mouth. The Suttees, the sacrificing of widows, with or without their permission, were performed to the honour of Kali, and also the sect of the Thugs, (a society of stranglers who probably murdered some one million people just for the sake of killing, until the English put an end to it around 1830,) were in the service of Kali. She is the chief divinity of Calcutta and the general stumbling-block in Hinduism, although her husband Shiva should share her responsibility. These two divinities represent that element of open and demonstrative eroticism, which is so alien and repulsive to all other religions.

Typically enough, the great organizer in Indian mythology is a poet of prehistoric times, quite impossible to date, even more obscure than Homer, who performs some kind of gigantic editing of the whole Vedic literature and in addition to this writes the entire "Mahabharata", the longest epic poem in the world, which consists of more than 100,000 verses. (For comparison, the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" contain together only 27,781 verses.) Now you may consider, that the "Mahabharata" is not altogether up to Homeric standards, but then you also have to confess, that the "Bhagavad-Ghita", which is a chapter in "Mahabharata", must be considered one of the highest quality masterpieces in world literature. Gandhi found greater solace in the "Bhagavad-Ghita" than in the whole New Testament, and he is not the only person educated in the west who came to that conclusion. Many, who were asked what book they would bring to a desert island if they only were allowed one, did without hesitation choose the "Bhagavad-Ghita".

This great editor of all the Vedic literature was called Vyasadeva, and although you don't even approximately know when he lived - (awkward western efforts have placed him somewhere before Alexander the Great and Chandragupta, but that age is long - ) we do know exactly where he was busy. He moved around the parts north of Delhi approximately between the river Beas and the Nepalese border, where many of the geographical names in his epic are to be found even today. Kurukshetra, the battle scene of the "Bhagavad-Ghita", is half way from Delhi to Simla.

In the "Bhagavad-Ghita" a new divinity in Hinduism climbs up to the first rank and stays there to in some ways even replace all the earlier ones. This is Krishna. In a way he resembles Christ, since he is a god who incarnates himself in a human body and has many all too human traits to his character. The Brahmins, the highest caste and class in Indian society, affirm at the same time that Krishna is only another incarnation of Vishnu, which they later on also affirm that the Buddha is.

That brings us to make a closer investigation of this Vishnu. To many Hindus he is the same as Brahma while he is never confused with Shiva. Vishnu is a highly constructive divinity, both creator and supporter of all things created, an upholder of life; no evil or destructive tendencies are to be found here but only creative and positive forces. That both Krishna and Buddha are regarded as incarnations of Vishnu gives Vishnu an undeniable status in Hinduism as a kind of highest universal divinity and a perfectly good divine ideal.

We earlier touched Buddha's reformation, his radical annulment of all barriers between castes and races and how his new form of religion dominated India and Asia from Afghanistan to Indonesia and Japan for more than a thousand years. The great reviver of Hinduism was the reformist Shankara, who defeated Buddhism by reinstituting Shiva. Hinduism in its prebuddhistic, populistic and primitive forms had completely vanished from all India, and by appealing to those very emotions and instincts of the Hindus which were personified by the dubious, partly destructive and impertinently erotic Shiva, the young Shankara succeeded in urging an irresistible Hinduistic renaissance all over India. He died only 32 years old in the year 820.

Two remarkable revivals of Hinduism have occurred also in modern times and that by European initiatives. Madame Blavatsky was seized by such an interest in Hinduism towards the end of the 19th century that she founded her theosophical movement directly on Hinduism. The second great European discoverer of Hinduism was the author, the music expert and the Nobel prize winner Romain Rolland, who preached Hinduism to all Europe especially during the 20's and became a Hinduist himself.

Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore are other names which must be mentioned in the context of the modern dynamic life force of Hinduism together with Mahatma Gandhi.

The irresistible vitality and explosively constructive dynamic qualities of Hinduism have in our time, however, brought us into something of a theological crisis, which also comprises Buddhism. This problem has risen from the population explosion. Within these religions it has always been regarded as self-evident, that life consummation only can be accomplished by the human being. Today the human being appears suddenly like a monster worse than any animal, since he is devastating the planet by environment destruction and the annihilation of living species, whole races of plants and animals and all living things. Suddenly leading Hindus therefore start to regard certain animals as higher creatures than man, since these animals are being martyred by man. This is an increasing theological dilemma to all religions that embrace the reincarnation way of thinking, since man by his uncontrollable multiplication is losing his special standing and status by a sort of flooding homeopathic dilution, that imperils all life, whereby other life forms than man emerge as more important than man. To the Hindus this is the evil and self-destructive time of Kali.

Finally a clearance of the great Hindu mistake. The name is wrong from the beginning. The river Indus was originally called Sindus, as the desert Sind still maintains its correct original name. The Persians got the name wrong and called the river Indus and the people Indians from the river, while others instead of an "s" placed an "h" in front of the word, so that the people were called Hindus. Correcting it now seems to be difficult, although you can try, like mr Thackeray of Bombay tries to change the name of the city to "Mumbay", which some people claim was its original name. Well, a dear child gets called by many names.

Here are the four rules about the offences that deserve expulsion. They should be recited every fortnight.

1. If a monk should have sexual intercourse with anyone, down to an animal, this monk has fallen into an offence which deserves expulsion, and he should no longer live in the community.

2. If a monk, whether he dwells in a village or in solitude, should take anything not given, he should no longer live in the community. This, however, only applies to thefts for which a king or his police would seize a thief and kill, imprison, banish, fine or reprove him.

3. If a monk should intentionally take the life of a human being or of one like a human being with his own hand or with a knife or by having him assassinated, then he has fallen into an offence which deserves expulsion. And this applies also to a monk who incites others to self-destruction and who speaks to them in praise of death with such words as, "O man, what is the use to you of this miserable life? It is better for you to die than to be alive!"

4. Unless a monk be actuated by excessive self-conceit, he commits an offence which deserves expulsion if, vainly and without basis in fact, he falsely claims to have realized and perceived superhuman states or the fullness of the insights of the saints.

Here are the thirteen offences which deserve suspension, and which should every fortnight be recited. These forbid a monk:

1. intentionally to emit his semen, except in a dream.

2. with a mind excited and perverted by passion to come into bodily contact with a woman; he must not hold her hand or arm, touch her hair or any other part of her body, above or below, or rub or caress it.

3. with a mind excited and perverted by passion to persuade a woman to sexual intercourse, speaking wicked, evil and vulgar words, as young men use to their girls.

4. with a mind excited and perverted by passion, in the presence of a woman to speak highly of the merit of the gift of her own body, saying: "That is the supreme service or gift, dear sister, to offer intercourse to monks like us, who have been observing strict morality, have abstained from intercourse and lived lovely lives!"

5. to act as a go-between between women and men, arranging marriage, adultery, or even a brief meeting.

6. to build for himself, without the help of a layman, a temporary hut on a site which involves the destruction of living beings and has no open space around it, and that without showing the site to other monks, and without limiting its size to the prescribed measurements.

7. to build for himself, with the help of a layman, a more permanent living place on a dangerous and inaccessible site, which involves the destruction of living beings and has no open space round it, and that without showing the site to other monks.

8. from anger, malice and dislike to accuse falsely a pure and faultless monk of an offence which deserves expulsion, intent on driving him out of the religious life. That becomes an offence which deserves suspension if on a later occasion he withdraws his accusation and admits to having spoken from hatred; and likewise if-

9. he tries to base his false accusation on some trifling matter or other which is really quite irrelevant.

10. to persist, in spite of repeated admonitions, in trying to cause divisions in a community which lives in harmony, and in emphasizing those points which are calculated to cause division.

11. to side with a monk who strives to split the community.

12. to refuse to move into another district when reproved by the other monks for habitually doing evil deeds in a city or village where he resides, deeds which are seen, heard and known, and which harm the families of the faithful.

13. to refuse to be admonished by others about the non-observance of the Rules.

These are the thirteen offences which deserve suspension. The first nine become offences at once, the remaining four only after the third admonition. The offending monk will be first put on probation, then for six days and nights he must do penance, and thereafter he must undergo a special ceremony before he can be rehabilitated. But he can be reinstated only by a community which number at least twenty monks, not one less.

I undertake the rule of training to refrain from taking that which is not given.

I undertake the rule of training to refrain from unchastity.

I undertake the rule of training to refrain from falsehood.

I undertake the rule of training to refrain from liquors which engender slothfulness.

I undertake the rule of training to refrain from eating at wrong times (i.e. after noon).

I undertake the rule of training against (attending) dancing, singing, music and stage plays.

I undertake the rule of training against adorning the body with garlands, perfumes and cosmetics.

I undertake the rule of training against using a high or large bed.

I undertake the rule of training against the accepting of gold and silver.

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These rules are perhaps the only testament of the Buddha. That's the closest we can get to him, and they are perhaps the oldest and only preserved original wordings by himself. They have been of inestimable significance to all Asia and remain so still, since this simple Rule, which concerns monks and nuns, could be said to have been the most civilizing factor of Asia. It was drawn in the fifth century B.C. and has never changed.

In those days the Greek drama and classical music had not yet been developed, and he would probably not have had anything against such advanced and disciplined forms of art, in spite of his seventh precept.

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These articles have been selected from the Swedish issues of "The Free Thinker" numbers 41-48, December 1995-July 1996. All have been translated from Swedish, except the Rule of the Buddhist Order, which we owe to mr Christmas Humphreys and his excellently informative and concise book "The Wisdom of Buddhism", Harper & Row 1970.

Gothenburg, Sweden, July 1996.

The expedition leader was a millionaire of about 60 years, who paid for everything and continued climbing impossible mountains although he really was too old for that already. His second mate was a young self-sufficient macho hero called Dallas. Number three was his girl and number four a Japanese veteran. To these were added our two chums, one of them a professor of quantum physics with an incredible capacity for always calculating the risks correctly and thereby how to avoid them, married and father of one child; and his pal, an invulnerable dreadnought, who could venture on anything and always be sure to come out all right.

The nature of K2, however, has the disadvantage of refusing half of its climbers to return alive. As our expedition embarked on the attempt in spite of rebellious porters and other unsurmountable difficulties, they met with another expedition on its way down after some evident catastrophes: one among them was mad, and another was dead. A few extra members of the party had been left behind dead up there somewhere in the vast deepfreeze. Our expedition continued, however, its two main characters, Dallas and Dreadnought, having an argument on the way and fighting it out with proper fisticuffs.

This was just the beginning. The old leader soon suffered from emphysema and could go no further, so he ordered Dallas and the Japanese gentleman to continue alone towards the top, while our two chums would remain as reserves: this was not according to the bargain or the program, so violent protests took place but were of no avail: the millionaire decided everything, because he had the money. In the morning the Jap returned from above alone and dying: he and Dallas had lost their tent as they had been taken by surprise by a snowstorm. Dallas was still up there somewhere, and the Jap had at least succeeded in returning alive. After telling so much of a story, however, he expired.

But the two chums decided to dare an attempt as the weather cleared next day. They happily reached the top, but the way down is always much more difficult than the way up, especially on such a mountain. The weather became worse again, soon they could see nothing, and the next moment they lost their footholds and met with disaster. The professor broke his leg in a fall of some fifty meters. He ordered his partner to leave him and save at least himself. The Dreadnought reluctantly agreed to this and not without the wildest protests.

In the meantime the old expedition leader decided to abandon the base camp since his life was in peril and since the weather up there was so bad that the four climbers had to be given up as lost.

But on the way down our dreadnought encountered the frozen body of Dallas. Here the story took its most interesting turn: Dallas had with him all the equipment, such as ropes, vitamins and adrenalin capsulas, which the chums had lost in their fall. Our Dreadnought decided to return with this equipment to his dying comrade. He found him all right, gave him adrenalin injections and put him on his one functioning foot, and with solemn carefulness they started to come down together, while the weather still was the worst imaginable and they didn't even know where they were.

Meanwhile the millionaire and the girl left the base camp by helicopter. The pilot insisted on going round the mountain just to have a last look if any survivor would come in sight for a last chance. Fortunately they thus found the two chums, who could be saved, while only two of the six in the expedition thus had perished.

The greatest losers in the expedition then had been Dallas (dead) and the millionaire, who never again would be allowed on any mountain. Already in the beginning, when Dallas proved so arrogant that it came to fisticuffs on the way up, it was certain that the expedition could not succeed. As an experienced traveller expressed it: If there is trouble between members in an expedition, the expedition should be cancelled immediately. Here the two leading heroes had an almost deadly row and still enforced the enterprise, in which two people died, one completely innocent of any fracas. Was it worth it?

The message of the film was maybe something like: money and power is necessary but never sufficient, while consideration and humanity outlasts death.

At the same time the film was an excellent lesson in sportmanship. Nothing is more important in demanding expeditions than the maintenace of good sportmanship. Intrigues, going behind the backs of others, withholding information, backbiting, betrayal and overrunning - all such matters are purely destructive and the opposite of sportmanship. If such superfluities can not be avoided, it is better to cancel the expedition.

Calcutta has always been the centre of Indian quality films with such a man as Satyajit Ray for a dominating figure, while Bombay more has been the manufacturer of glittering soap operas. The small film "36 Chowringhee Lane" is a typical Calcutta production in its heart-rending realism and sharp expressive down-to-earth humanity and so true to life and conditions in Calcutta that it is almost overwhelming.

Miss Violet Stanhope is a small aged teacher in a girls' school, where she teaches Shakespeare to her girls. The play which she always uses is "Twelfth Night". She lives with a cat at home which she calls Sir Toby (Belch), and her entire world consists only of her tiny old beautiful apartment on Chowringhee Lane, the school and the girls, Shakespeare, and a dying brother in a hospital, whom she visits every thursday. The only other place she visits is the cemetery with the tombs of her relatives from the times of the second world war. Like her dying brother, she is English.

This small world of hers is kept up with a consistent humorous courage by the small lady, and the camera compliments her life with illustrating shots from the life of Calcutta - the poverty, the beggars, the slums, the rickshaw runners, the permanent congestion on Hooghly Bridge, (then still the only bridge across the river,) and the lost splendours from the times when Calcutta was the second city of the British Empire.

The monotony of her life is interrupted one day as she meets an old pupil who necessarily wants to introduce her fiancé to her old teacher. The old lady then insists on inviting them both to tea, and the young couple is charmed by the perfect coziness of her small but wonderful home. They get the idea that it would be the ideal meeting place for them as lovers. Through guile they succeed in persuading the old teacher to allow them to use her home while she is away at school - she is led to believe that the fiancé is a great writer who needs a place to work in peace and quiet for his great books. Miss Stanhope with her fine literary education can not resist this idea.

That's where the tragedy begins, which never fully becomes a tragedy, because nothing can perturb miss Stanhope. At school she is overrun by a younger teacher who takes over her Shakespeare class while miss Stanhope is reduced to teaching grammar. Her brother dies in hospital without her being present, since she is then lured out by the young couple to have some fun with them. Gradually she realizes that they have borrowed access to her apartment merely for their love meetings, but it doesn't matter - she still believes in the young couple as her friends, she continues to encourage them and help them, - and she is present at their wedding. For a wedding present she gives them her old funnel grammophone with records from the 40's of the old fast kind. She wants to invite them home to her on Christmas Day to please them with a real Christmas Pudding, but they decline the invitation, stating that they will not be at home during Christmas. That's how she gets the idea that she will give them her Christmas Pudding anyway, by going to their house and leaving it on their door-step, while they are away.

The Calcutta Christmas is illustrated with overwhelmingly objective pathos. You see all the beggars and homeless, who just lie about in the streets in heaps everywhere, the endless poverty and slum conditions, while a vulgar arrangement of "Silent Night" booms ironically in the air. And miss Stanhope arrives at the house of the young wedded couple to leave her Christmas Pudding. She is encountered by a house full of lights and guests who are having a gay Christmas cocktail-party, and the guests are all young and rich and vulgarly noisy having drinks and luxuries galore. Not until then she understands.

She returns home with her Christmas Pudding undelivered, and she quotes Shakespeare. She recalls two of the most remarkable characters that Shakespeare ever invented - Malvolio and king Lear, the two greatest clowns of all - "Pray, do not mock me: I am a very foolish fond old man, fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less; and, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind..."

And she returns to her old world of only memories - a young handsome lover who died in the second world war, her only relative the brother, who died completely gaga at the hospital, and what else besides Shakespeare?

What is it then she understood? Suddenly she realized, that no one cared any longer for an old English maid in Calcutta thirty years after Indian independance. She has fallen outside time. At the same time she has witnessed the contrast between the brave new world in India with the young rich generation only laughing at history and her cultural inheritance, unless they could use it for their own selfish satisfactions, and the world she still represents of high educational standards, morals and ideals. And the contrast is too striking.

The remarkable thing is that this film was made in India by Hindus. Both Bengali and English is spoken, and the two pathetic main parts - the old teacher and her dying brother - are also in reality an English brother and sister who have stayed on in India after 1947.

This brother of Ian Fleming wrote his most renowned book "Bayonets to Lhasa" about the Younghusband expedition 1904 to Tibet, in 1960 directly after the Tibetan rebellion in 1959 and the escape of Dalai Lama from Lhasa. No wonder then that the book is much more than just a documentary on the Younghusband expedition.

Peter Fleming is really the first one to realize what the Chinese actually have done. He makes his book the instrument to sound the alarm of what is going on, in a most literarily proper way, thereby directly catching on to "the Great Game" of the 19th century and opening the scene for its continuation.

"The Great Game" in the 19th century was the competition between Britain and Russia for domination in central Asia. It almost amounted to a frontier between the two super powers going right through Persia and Afghanistan, since the British were very much afraid of the Russians gaining a foothold in Kashmir and Himalaya. To prevent the Russians from entering Tibet, the Younghusband expedition was launched, which practically led to Tibetan independance until 1950. Colonel Younghusband reached Lhasa and achieved some trade agreements with the Tibetan government, which excluded both China and Russia from Tibet. At the same time, the British left Tibet as untouched as Nepal.

In 1947 India separated from Britain and made it impossible for Britain to assist Tibet in any way. Instead the Chinese were given free hands to do whatever they liked in central Asia. 1949 Mao seized power in Peking, and he immediately planned an invasion of Tibet, which was carried out the next year. The Tibetans were forced to sign an agreement in 17 paragraphs under the threat of war if they didn't, and during the years that followed every single one of these paragraphs were violated by the Chinese, until the Tibetans had had enough of it and rebelled in 1959, which made it possible for Dalai Lama to escape to India.

Peter Fleming very percipiently points out the greatest harm in all this, which is an upset power balance in Asia. China was given the whole field alone to do whatever they liked with almost all Asia without anyone being able to interfere. Peter Fleming's perspicacity reaches a climax as he reveals the immense strategic importance of the Chinese occupation of the Tibetan plateau, from which heights long distance missiles can reach almost any object on the planet or at least every city in Asia, since Tibet is in the middle. Neither Britain nor India realized this possibility and danger in 1947 when India broke loose, which only Winston Churchill reacted against, who then was bereft of all possibilities to do anything about it.

The last year even Dalai Lama has voiced the opinion that Panchen Lama was murdered by the Chinese in January 1989. This is what is known in the matter:

Shortly before Panchen Lama left Peking to return to Tibet in January 1989, he had a great quarrel with the communist leaders in Peking. Two days after having publicly branded the Chinese oppression in Tibet he had pains in his chest. He called for his doctor in the evening, but that doctor never turned up. Instead an unknown nurse appeared to give him an injection. After this injection Panchen Lama fell into a coma. He was dead before sunrise, while the Chinese claim that he suffered a heart attack and died later in the afternoon.

Shortly upon this a number of Panchen Lama's relatives were disposed of in the same way: they were visited by strange nurses who gave them injections putting them into a coma, whereupon they died. China officially explained that they also had suffered from sudden heart attacks. This strange occurrence of so many heart attacks in one family must then have been something of an epidemic.

This method of execution in China is regarded as more human than to shoot the victim a bullet in his neck and then bill his family for the bullet, although the more elegant method is also more expensive. Above all, it is more discreet and more diplomatically supple, especially concerning high officials with a public reputation.

The greatest worry of Dalai Lama concerning the 6-year-old Panchen Lama, who was arrested and taken away together with his parents by the Chinese, is that he might vanish into a Chinese psychiatric asylum to be drugged and brainwashed.

Chinese prisons are known to be the most horrible in the world. The one thing more horribly unhuman would then be Chinese psychiatry.

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This article caused some consternation and protests. It was stipulated, that it can not be proved that Panchen Lama or his relatives were murdered, and that their heart attacks might have been natural. We have to admit that none of these alleged murders have been scientifically proved.

But put the case that Panchen Lama really died of a heart attack and that all his relatives did the same. What then might have caused his heart attack? Is it impossible that 14 years' imprisonment and torture might have affected his condition and added to the risk of a heart attack at the age of only 52? Already in 1962, when Panchen Lama criticized the Chinese for the first time, he was put under close guard and forbidden to speak publicly. It took two years before the Chinese dared to let him speak publicly again. It was then on the great occasion at Barkhor, the great square in central Lhasa, when Panchen Lama praised Dalai Lama and Tibetan independance so that every Tibetan could hear it. Consequently the Chinese buried Panchen Lama alive for 14 years after a mock trial in which he was publicly manhandled.

Even after his release in 1978 he was often taken in again by the Chinese and was sometimes seen with a cauliflower ear, which he hardly had managed to inflict on himself.

In brief, although the possibility that Panchen Lama might have died of a heart attack can not be theoretically excluded, the Chinese must all the same be held responsible for his martyrdom.

It has also been stated, that Tibetans can die of heart attacks from pure empathy with a close relative, who has died in this manner. With this theory for an explanation, the relatives of Panchen Lama might have died naturally, although their heart attacks were strikingly epidemic. But if the Chinese were directly responsible for the death of Panchen Lama, the more responsible they were then for the deaths of his relatives, especially if they all died of empathic heart attacks.

So in any case the Chinese remain morally and directly responsible, which no natural or medical expertise in the world can explain away. To this comes the fact, that the Chinese had every motive in the world to wish to get rid of the exclusively embarrassing presence and existence of the late Panchen Lama.

Now and then you hear countries like China, Turkey, Iraq and Indonesia scold the United States and other western nations for interfering with "the internal affairs" of these countries. Without any exception it has proved, that whenever these quarrels occur, those "internal affairs" always consist of genocides, to such an extent, that it has become axiomatic, that whenever a country tells other nations to refrain from interfering in "the internal affairs" of that country, the only thing that country wants is to continue practising genocide alone and in peace.

The more important then to interfere with "the internal affairs" of countries like China, Turkey, Iraq and Indonesia.

This is a great love story and perhaps the best film of the year, made on a most interesting Dutch novel. Even if the story is not based on facts, it is spun around a most actual occurrence: the sensational "Cave of Swimmers" out in the Sahara desert beyond nowhere, which is lavishly decorated with prehistorical paintings depicting among other things people who are actually swimming. These prehistoric paintings is one of many proofs that the Sahara desert once was rich and fertile with endless resources of water and wild life.

The film and the novel describe the futility of world history in contrast to love, the classical love topic, which is the base of almost every great novel. The second world war with all its unhuman efforts and devastating political cataclysms disappears and becomes nothing in comparison with the tragic story of the lovers, who never can have each other and who rather die than accept it. The performances are outstanding, especially the always brilliant Kristin Scott Thomas and the reliable Willem Dafoe, who gets his thumbs cut off by a Gestapo officer, which makes him a combined drug addict and fanatic angel of revenge - without ever appearing as unsympathetic. The desert photography with its endless dune landscapes like a woman's body is breathtaking and has probably only been equalled and surpassed in "Lawrence of Arabia".

The most interesting aspect of this film, however, is its historical perspective. At the same time as eternal love is posed against the nonentity of the historical present the perspective of timelessness deepens by the mystery of all the prehistorical swimmers in a cave far out in the Sahara. We have already discussed the theories about how the asteroids came into being, the wayward position of Pluto in the solar system and Mars as once a living planet. The swimmers in Sahara confirm the desiccation of our planet. This serious phenomenon is most evident in Tibet. In western Tibet there were once flourishing kingdoms, which gradually were stricken by draughts, so that people had to evacuate more and more areas. There is a very interesting theory about the kingdom of Gugge (pronounced 'Cookie') or its predecessors having once been maybe the oldest civilization on earth, from where people then migrated south (down the Indus valley resulting in the Harappa civilization) and west (down Syr-Darja and Amu-Darja, resulting in the spread of the Caucasian peoples). The oldest accounts in the Bible (Genesis 2:10-14) of the four rivers of Paradise (which could have been the four rivers Indus, Brahmaputra, Sutlej and Ganges, which all have their sources around Mount Kailas in western Tibet,) and of the deluge (with Noah introducing a new chapter in history by coming down from Mount Ararat to plant some wine,) could be remains in the form of legends from the old kingdom of Gugge or its predecessors.

If these theories could be scientifically proved by time it would import, that large areas of the continents once were covered by water, so that only very high lands (like Tibet and Ararat) were populated. And in that case, this would not have been longer ago than just before our known history as it found its beginning in Mesopotamia and Egypt around 7000 years ago.

According to our colleague John B. Westerberg in the Himalayas, this theoretical possibility is what makes the region of western Tibet most interesting: it could be the archaeologically most exciting area in the world.

"Sinkiang" means in Chinese "the new province", while the correct name of that country is East Turkestan. It was occupied by force together with Tibet in 1950, although Mao Zedong already in 1944 had promised the Uighuri, the people of East Turkestan, independance and freedom, if they only helped him against general Chang-Kai-Shek of the Kuomintang in the Chinese civil war. The Uighuri offered Mao Zedong that help, whereupon after his victory in China, he enslaved the Uighuri together with the Tibetans and other non-Chinese peoples. Like Tibet, East Turkestan hade before 1950 normally been independant. In February this year there were violent atrocities in the town of Yining, in which 10 people died and several dozen were wounded. Already on the 6th of February, a number of Uighuri were arrested for being regarded as guilty of the disturbances, summary proceedings were held, and hundreds of Muslims were executed in the course of a few weeks. Only on February 7th, 30 Uighuri were publicly executed.

The Chinese in "Sinkiang" are only 37% of the population, of which the majority are Muslim Uighuri, a Turkish people of mainly nomads. About 500.000 Uighuri live as refugees in neighbouring countries from Central Asia to Turkey. Almost all Chinese in "Sinkiang" have been stationed there against their will and deported from China to this kind of Chinese Siberia. China has almost only used "Sinkiang" as a testing ground for nuclear weapons.

According to official Chinese sources, there has been no disturbances, trials or executions in "Sinkiang" this year.

The Chinese attitude towards Islam has generally been most disdainful.

No one really knows. She went through an equally disastrous revolution as Russia after 1917 and China 1949-76, as the dictator Khorloin Choibalsam, the obedient puppet of Stalin, decided to exterminate all religious thinking in the country to replce it with purist atheism. As a result, he burned most of the 700 monasteries of the country and killed off 18,000 monks. The remaining 92,000 monks that survived the holocaust, although homeless, were compelled to forced labour in factories or forced matrimony or both. The greatest monastery of Mongolia was Erdene Zuu in Karakorum with 60 temples and thousands of monks and teachers. Like the Orthodox Church of Russia, Buddhism in Mongolia was compelled to go underground and remain there for 70 years. Only since 1990 it has started to come out again from its hiding, which China greatly worries about, although in the greatest monastery of Mongolia, Erdene Zuu, there are only three restored temples and a few old monks.

The communist urge to eradicate all Buddhism in China, Mongolia and Tibet for atheistic reasons, in order to establish atheism as a sort of substitute religion, is very difficult to understand, since Buddhism isn't even a theistic religion - there are no gods to abolish or to replace with atheism. Instead of exterminating some kind of godliness, they only destroy old honest traditions and historical monuments, culture and civilization, to replace it with nothing. Is that any better?

His first book is maybe the absolute classic among authentic accounts of Tibet as it was before 1950. He lived in Tibet for seven years (1943-50) which gave him perhaps a more intimate knowledge of the country than any other European's.

He couldn't return until 1983, and to make his return possible he had to join a tourist group. It was lucky, however, that he could return at all, and the book which resulted from his return visit is a most valuable complementary book to his "Seven Years in Tibet" 30 years earlier.

The book is a very melancholy, nostalgic and painful account of the Chinese occupied Tibet compared to the wonderful old Tibet which Heinrich Harrer once used to know. The most tormenting comparison is all the new Chinese ugliness to the old Tibetan beauty and fantasy which once flourished. Harrer analyzes the new order constructively, however. He meets his old friends and dedicates several chapters also to such that chose to collaborate with the Chinese and even serve them. The book is extremely sensitive and delicate all through, it vibrates constantly of Harrer's intensive emotions in his encounters with everything he recognizes and all the changes he observes, he has a perspective like nobody else by having seen everything 30 years earlier in time, and his analyses and conclusions, judgements and critical observations are throughout sincere, convincing and probably correct.

The only thing you can criticize in him is firstly his very subjective unreserved partiality to the Dalai Lama, which in a way is against Dalai Lama's own policy, since Dalai Lama is highly self-critical and has himself often pointed out the flaws and disadvantages of that theocratical system which he himself is the leader of. You can also criticize Harrer for his prejudice against the Panchen Lama: we know today that the tenth Panchen Lama already in May 1962 took a firm stand against the Chinese communist party in a long letter of 120 pages to the foreign secretary Chou-En-Lai, in which he sharply pointed out the methodical Chinese destruction of Tibet in impressingly exact statistics. (After this letter the Panchen Lama was forbidden to open his mouth publicly for two years, until he delivered his famous speech to the Tibetans in Lhasa in 1964, whereafter he was interned and not allowed to see Lhasa again for 18 years.)

Finally you can criticize Harrer for his denouncement of the poor Lobsang Rampa, (really Cyril Henry Hoskins). To demand that Lobsang Rampa should be stopped is a crime against the freedom of speech and of the press. Lobsang Rampa was entitled to write whatever he wanted, and you can't categorically condemn his books for being lies, just as you can not deny St. John the Apostle his right to his own revelations and his right to write them down in the Apocalypse. Naturally, Lobsang Rampa is to be read with the greatest possible scepticism, but you can't altogether pronounce his writings as perfectly devoid of interesting symbolical meanings.

Thank you, Heinrich Harrer, for your splendid contributions to the cause of Tibet. May such efforts always continue and never cease.

We were ten people from Scandinavia who embarked on this exquisite Tibetan journey in the beginning of May, going by air to Kathmandu and Lhasa, thence proceeding by land rovers to Gyangtse, Shigatse and Lhatse, taking the northern route to western Tibet by Oma and Gar (Ali), coming to Darchen by Mount Kailas from the west. We spent four days walking around the holy mountain after having witnessed the great festival at Tarboche of raising the great flag pole, and then went down to bathe in Lake Manasarovar. We did not visit Purang but turned back east and travelled through winter snows and desert sand dunes, where we often went stuck, back to Saga, from whence we turned south to visit Tingri and Shegar before going to Rombuk and Mount Everest, alias Sagarmatha, alias Chomolungma. That mountain also had a Chinese name, which was impossible and unnecessary to learn. Then we went down to Zhangmu to return to Kathmandu, where we stayed for a few days before flying back to Sweden. The whole journey lasted for 34 days. Within Tibet we travelled altogether more than 3000 kilometres by jeep.

The only problem on the way were the Chinese. In every temple and every single monastery, even the cave of Milarepa above Zhangmu, there were Chinese officials extorting high fees for our entering these holy places, as if we were to be punished for visiting them as pilgrims. Between Darchen and Lake Manasarovar we were arrested by five armed Chinese military men in a jeep, who searched all our luggage, turned all our things upside down, all the time saying nothing with rigid stone faces. They also found nothing. The only thing they searched for was pictures of the Dalai Lama. After finishing their mission with no result, two of them went aside to pee in public in full view of all of us and of the whole plain. Unfortunately none of us had his camera ready.

Apart from the Chinese, the whole journey was a wonderful success, all of us came back home after this "the most difficult pilgrimage in the world" (Charles Allen) in better health and shape than ever, and I would gladly do it all again.

Our next Tibetan journey is already being planned for 1999.

Gothenburg, July 12th, 1997.

It turned out to be the contrary. I was very well taken care of in Jammu, both up and down, and Srinagar proved to be the perfect peace and just a wonderful experience, so I stayed on there for more than two weeks; but as soon as I went east towards Zoji La there was a world of difficulties.

I learned some interesting facts. There seems to have been some efforts for a referendum for the Kashmiris to choose between India and Pakistan, but there should be a third option: independence for Kashmir from both, and that seems to be what most Kashmiris would want, since both Pakistan and India have given Kashmir nothing but troubles since 1947. The last Maharadja seems to have turned to India only because Pakistan tried to invade Kashmir by force. So India found a good reason to use force as well, and so Kashmir has had wars for 52 years, and there seems to be no end on it.

Now, force is always the most stupid of all solutions, because it never solves anything. It merely kills, and that's no constructive solution. I believe that the only possible constructive solution to the problems of Kashmir would be total independence from both Pakistan and India, both ceding their occupied territories to Kashmir. Also the area occupied by China, the Soda Plains, must be ceded back to Ladakh, since they are illegally occupied.

Such a solution could only be accomplished, though, in a very long run by patience, negotiations and diplomacy. Since such a constructive way would be the opposite of force, it is not possible to achieve it by any kind of force. The primary goal, then, must be to put a stop to all hostilities.

Of course, we have the problem that only India can stop the infiltration of war maniacs in the north from Pakistan and Afghanistan.

We must have patience, but in the end I think that sovereignty of Kashmir could be accomplished.

For some, the case is already on the international agenda.

Official cannibalism is no news in socialist autocracies. China differs though for example from the Soviet Union by carefully making accounts of the procedures and preserving them.

Wang Zujian was head of culture in Wuxuan, where he witnessed the mass cannibalism movement growing into a daily whirlpool of bloodshed. He couldn't bear watching the metamorphosis of his home town into the stage of a ruthless mob who in the name of the party tore asunder new victims in streets which already had been covered by mutilated bodies. There are always those who can't remain silent.

Cannibalism occurs in three stages. First it is all done in utmost secrecy and fear of being discovered. When victims where murdered in the inner party conflicts the man-eaters stole out in the night to the killing fields and often fumbled in their arrangements.

Then the blood-tide rises. Now the tearing asunder of bodies is performed openly, enthusiastically and with great skill. A swift cut under the ribs - the model is the Chinese sign for a person. Then step your foot on the belly and squeeze simultaneously out the heart and the liver, why not to the suitable accompaniment of the chairman's eight allowed musical pieces, militant marches all eight of them, with flying red colours and enthusiastic quotations from the little red book of Mao, all in the name of holy Marxism.

Finally the mass cannibalism movement: the mob in berserk rage like a hord of hungry dogs. The victim is chosen for a tamzing procedure, an open trial for all the people to partake in on the plaintiff's side, which inevitably ends with the victim getting slugged down. Thrust a pointed metal tube into his skull and suck out the brains. Whether the victim is alive or not the mob rushes forth like cannibals with knifes and daggers drawn, and everything is good enough as ingredients for the feast, which is accompanied by carousal and hasard games. In the campus areas, in hospitals, in the various administration unit canteens the cauldrons are boiling and the smoke rising in the sky.

The Chinese are famous for their good economy, and they have never left any spoils. During the years 1956-82 the Chinese murdered 1,207,487 Tibetans, and it's not plausible that so much meat was left to nothing.

In unsurpassable naïvety president Nixon and foreign secretary Henry Kissinger at the same time opened their bosoms to China, let her into the Security Council in the United Nations, kicked out the legally governed Taiwan and promoted China to a permanent status of "most favoured nation". One of China's conditions to accept president Nixon's generosity was that America was to discontinue their support to the Tibetan freedom-fighters, who consequently were let down and sacrificed after 18 years of heroic struggle.

During Mao's heroic "giant step forward" 1958-62, when all China was industrialized by force, between 40 and 80 million Chinese died as a result from famine, since the farmers weren't allowed to cultivate anything anymore, since they were forced into the factories.

Books like Zheng Yi's "Scarlet Memorial", a collection of authentic documentary material from the Mao era, make both the terror regime of Hitler and Stalin's Gulag Soviet Union appear like heavenly idylls in comparison.

"My opinion is that the whole Han-Chinese totalitarian culture is dominated by cannibalism."

"We love our country, but we hate our leaders."

- student on Tiananmen Square, June 4th 1989.

"The one-party state of China is like the 'Titanic', and it's the west that keeps the doomed ship floating. Not until the leaking ship has foundered there will be any hope for China."

"China has one enemy only. His name is Truth, and China will never get rid of that enemy as long as China lives. But worst of all is, that as an enemy he is the most difficult and relentless one you can have. The greatest possible political mistake to make is therefore to make him your enemy by once failing him."

"There is not one Tibetan, monk or civil, who hasn't chosen to co-operate with the Chinese exclusively to thereby preserve his Tibetan life and heart. Their only hope is that they haven't done this ultimate sacrifice in vain, but that they one day will be able to return the enforced pledge and be rid of it for ever."

- John B. Westerberg.

Behind the transaction is of course primarily American business interests. China and America are today the world's only remaining imperialist nations. For that reason they back each other, believing their imperialist interests to be in common, although one is an autocracy and the other a democracy. Thus their belief that they have their imperialist interests in common is a gross mistake.

The folly in the matter is to allow the Chinese Communist Party to play any part in the game. The Chinese Communist Party is a bandit league without any popular support or legitimation. They usurped power in China in 1949 to establish a hard-line autocracy, ruling by exterminating millions and hundreds of millions of people, and they have stayed in power only by brute force. To at all recognize such a government was a terrible mistake from the first. I believe France was the first democratic nation to take such a most undemocratic step.

Anyone who deals with such an undemocratic government as the self-imposed communist regime of China becomes part of its oppression of the Chinese people and is contaminated by the crimes of that party, no matter how hard that party tries to conceal and negate its crimes of the past. The Communist Party of China has survived and keeps on surviving only by vile lies. It has no heart, no core and no legitimacy. It is itself what Chairman Mao called a "paper tiger". It calls the legitimate Tibetan exile government in Dharamsala in India the "Dalai Lama clique" while in fact the ruling communist party of China is no less than a clique of self-imposed usurpers.

The least duty of China towards that Tibet, which we have enslaved, tortured and bereft of their identity for so many years, would be to restore every single monastery which we destroyed in Tibet between 1956-76. We destroyed more than 6000 monasteries and rendered more than 500,000 monks and nuns homeless, many of which died as a consequence. This atrocious universal crime China has to atone for, or she will be made to atone for it.

This is my statement concerning the Hongkong issue.

1911 Revolution in China, which becomes a constitutional democratic republic under the leadership of the socialdemocratic doctor Sun-Yat-Sen, a thorough democrat and the founder of the Kuomintang party, the social-democratic party of China.

Tibet takes care of the opportunity and ousts the Chinese.

1913 The Simla conference, in which the British try to arbitrate between China and Tibet. For the first time ever, China claims that Tibet has been a part of China since 700 years, which claim Tibet strongly opposes and proves to be wrong by facts of history. In a compromise settlement, China is granted an undefined suzerainty in relation to Tibet, but China refuses to attend to sign the final documents. Thereby Tibet is in reality fully independant, and no Chinese is able to visit Tibet for the next 37 years without a British visa by India.

1947 India achieves independance from Great Britain under prime minister Nehru, which practically means that Britain is in no situation to do anything more for Tibet.

1949 The Communists defeat Kuomintang in China, which is exiled to Taiwan. The dictator Mao Zedong sets a goal to 'liberate' Tibet (that is, to renew the Chinese occupation of Tibet,) and prepares the Red Army (the 'People's Liberation Army') for that purpose. Tibet immediately tries to get some help and support from abroad, but both India and Great Britain have recognized the new autocratic Chinese government. The United States will not even receive a Tibetan peace delegation.

1950 Tibet pleads in the United Nations in May, but the UN will not put the issue on the agenda. Great Britain alleges in a purely formalistic excuse that the political status of Tibet never has been defined or recognized. You might here assume that the labour government of London has chosen to follow suit with prime minister Nehru and sympathize with the Peking government. Thus the issue is scamped away in the United Nations.

On October 7th Tibet is invaded by a Chinese army of 120,000 men on six fronts against a Tibetan defence army of 8500 men. Thus Mao's 'peaceful liberation' of Tibet is enforced on the largest possible scale with no possibility of failure.

1951 On May 23rd the Tibetans are given the option to accept China's 'peaceful liberation' according to a program in 17 articles or to have their entire country and civilization destroyed by the Chinese army. Under this threat Tibet accepts and signs the 17 articles. In this moment no Tibetan can dream about that the Chinese will violently destroy their country and civilization anyway.

1956 The communists start their methodic destruction of Tibet by ruining and bombing monasteries in the eastern province of Kham in Tibet. The famous Tibetan Kham warriors start their guerilla war against China, which will go on for 18 years. The Tibetan revolt is a fact.

China responds by accelerating their sinofication of Tibet by increased destruction of monasteries and by forced sterilizations of Tibetan women in order to in the long run ethnically cleanse the Tibetan people out of Tibet. Thus the Chinese genocide on the Tibetans has started.

1959 The Tibetan rebellion culminates in March, when the guerilla warriors of Kham control all the southern parts of Tibet. 30,000 Tibetans demonstrate outside Norbulinka against the Chinese occupation and tell them to go home to China. Chinese militaries fire two grenades against the people, which explode inside the Norbulinka park without hurting anyone. But this is taken as a signal for Dalai Lama to escape, and everyone encourages him to seek shelter in India. The escape is successfully staged on March 17th. Thereafter the insurrection in Lhasa is crushed. The Chinese can easily massacre the Tibetan people, but they no longer can reach Dalai Lama, who reaches safety in India, where he establishes his exile government.

For the first time the Tibetan issue is taken up in the United Nations by the insistence of El Salvador.

President Eisenhower starts supporting the Tibetan guerilla warriors through CIA.

1962 China attacks India on two fronts. For the first time Nehru realizes that he has been fooled all the way by China.

1956-76 The Chinese destroy 6246 Tibetan monasteries out of 6259 existing ones and at the same time destroy 60% of all Tibetan original literature, which is about 75,000 volumes, while only 40% are saved, that is about 50,000 volumes.

Out of the Tibetan population of about 6 million the Chinese murder at least 1,207,487 Tibetans who are known by their names. Out of these more than 400,000 are celibatarian monks and nuns. At the same time the Peking regime floods Tibet with unvoluntary Chinese immigrants. The Chinese population of Tibet is today about 7,5 million.

1958-79 Famine in Tibet as a result of Chinese exploitation and failed policies.

Gross Chinese destruction of the environment in Kongpo in southern Tibet, where forests are clearcut and transformed into deserts with ecological disaster for the entire Himalaya region as an incurable result. This brutal deforestation without any replanting of trees goes on still today.

1972 As a result of president Nixon's new agreements with the Peking regime, the CIA support of the Tibetan guerilla warriors is discontinued.

1974 The last Tibetan guerilla warriors escape to Mustang in Nepal, where the Nepalese authorities urge them to surrender on conditions that no evil will befall them. This is a result of Chinese manipulations. Those who surrender are forthwith thrown into prison and are bereft of all their property, contrary to given word of honour. Those who refuse to surrender try to run the gauntlet through all Nepal towards Dharamsala in India, where Dalai Lama lives with his exile government, but they are surrounded by Chinese and Nepalese just by the last pass into India, and the last 37 who dared to defend Tibet are sacrificed to the last man.

1987 New surprising demonstrations in Lhasa against the Chinese, which continue still today.

The Chinese genocide against the Tibetans still proceeds today with continued forced Chinese immigration into Tibet and forced sterilizations of Tibetan women and mothers often without any anaesthesia with the result of death.

1996 All pictures of Dalai Lama are forbidden in Tibet, and the remaining monasteries are cleansed of all monks and nuns who are not loyal to the Peking regime.

They start pulling down the old picturesque Tibetan quarters in Lhasa to replace them with unhuman Chinese concrete blocks.

The Chinese economical boom is used as one more weapon and perhaps the most efficient of all against the Tibetans: those who become Chinese are given a share of the surplus, while those who remain faithful to their Tibetan identity are left without. Thus the remaining Tibetans are turned out of the Chinese society, which is taking over Tibet and turning the Tibetans out of their own country.

The Chinese 'final solution' to the Tibetan issue thus seems to be easily carried through, since all the world gladly supports China economically for the sake of fast fortunes.

Hitler used the Turkish genocide on the Armenians as a paragon example for his planned genocide on the Jews. This genocide on six million Jews is the only genocide of the century which has somewhat been atoned for by many of the responsible ones being punished and many of the survivors being recompensed.

The genocide of the Chinese on the Tibetans began in 1956. During the years 1956-83 more than 1,2 million Tibetans were murdered, which was a fifth of the entire people. Not until 1959 the genocide was made publicly known through the careful investigations of the International Commission of Jurists of the United Nations in Geneva. However, China denied that any genocide had taken place and even more that it still went on. This genocide reached its height during the Chinese cultural revolution 1966-76 while the whole western world most enthusiastically exalted China to the skies for her paragon example of morality. No one ever tried to stop this genocide, and most people shut their eyes to it, especially president Nixon when he visited China in the beginning of the 70's to do business. The genocide on the Tibetans is still denied by China today with the same right as the Turks deny their genocide on the Armenians.

H.H.Dalai Lama represents the non-violence policy with the utmost admirable continuity, thanks to which this policy line has become dominant in the struggle for Tibetan freedom. Strange enough, the same line is followed by the leading freedom fighters of Turkestan (Sinkiang), although these are Muslims and exposed to the same long term ethnic cleansing campaign as the Tibetans through compulsory sterilizations, prohibition of education in their own language, religion and culture, barbaric military oppression, concentration camps for all with different opinions from the autocracy, and Chinese monopoly on all corruption. This principle of non-violence, introduced by Gandhi, is certainly wise, admirable and the only right one, but it did not necessitate Indian independence from the British. Instead, it was general Subhandas Chandra Bose who in league with the Japanese and Germans and with terrorist means in the Second World War forced Gandhi into effecting total independence from the British for good and for worse.

The problem with the non-violence principle is its inefficiency. The Chinese laugh at the dovishness of the Tibetans and continue to sterilize them, torture and execute them, put them in concentration camps from which tribulations they die sooner or later, and force them to leave the country en masse, which instead is being swamped by forced and reluctant Han Chinese settlers, all in accordance with the long term foolproof plan of methodical ethnic cleansing. This has been going on for 50 years without anyone having done anything about it. The Tibetan non-violence principle and placidity has spread like a disease across the world, which only silently has been watching China ruin 98,5% of all Tibetan temples and monasteries, extirpate 90% of its learning by extirpating 90% of her monks, nuns and educated intellectuals, and bereave the Tibetans of all their human rights. India and Britain were of course the most guilty ones of this passive assistance to national murder, when Nehru only thought well of China and thereby allowed China to do whatever she felt inclined to, and when Britain claimed, as Tibet desperately asked the United Nations for help in 1950, that Tibet never had been acknowledged or established as a sovereign nation - probably the century's worst instance of formalistic pedantry. But the United States continued this passive assistance to national murder under the presidency of Nixon by abandoning Taiwan and instead raising the world's most incriminated nation China to a status of not just any democracy (which China never has been except for a brief period under Dr. Sun-Yat-Sen 1912-25) but to the status of the most favoured nation in the world.

The non-violence policy of Turkestan appears even more remarkable when you observe the fact that China always has used Turkestan as their testing ground for nuclear weapons with the same catastrophic radioactive pollution results damaging the environment and all life in the area for times unsurveyable as the Soviet Union did in east Kazakhstan. The complaisance of the non-violence principle has actually favoured the development of Chinese capacity for universal aggression.

To this astounding acquiescence and submission to a terrorist state, marked by matchless cowardice especially on the parts of India, Britain, the United Nations and the United States, there is only one precedent in history: the complaisance of Neville Chamberlain to Hitler in the 1930s.

Does this mean that we advocate resistance by violence? No, we will never go that far. But there will always be characters like Subhandas Chandra Bose, who will not in the long run tolerate oppression, discrimination and injustice. Even the Jews finally rebelled against the Germans in the Warsaw ghetto, which initiative started a universal movement leading up to the independence of 1948. This process would never have been crowned with success without the initiative to resistance by violent means. History has never been able to stop characters like Subhandas Chandra Bose, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Guzmao of East Timor, or the men behind the French revolution. I never take to violence myself, but if it were within my power to stop the man who would start an avalanche engulfing all China in a deluge resulting in for instance the independence of Tibet and Turkestan, I would do nothing stop him.

To the world we would like to say with Wei Jinsheng: Let China go down. It's bad business to invest in a sinking ship. Let the communist party of China and its accursed corruption with all the lies of the People's Liberation Army perish and be forgotten once and for all, since the only thing these two establishments represent historically is oppression, destruction and evil.

This is a complicated story, but we'll try to make it as simple as possible. The 17th Karmapa, who escaped from Tibet to India now in January, is the head of the oldest sect in Tibet, and his reincarnations date further back than those of H.H. the Dalai Lama. The 16th Karmapa passed away in 1981 in Chicago, and the 17th, born in 1985, was acknowledged both by H.H. the Dalai Lama and China in 1992. This is unique. But one of the closest associate holy lamas of the 16th in Chicago, Shamar Rinpoche, an extremely trusted man, discovered and established another Karmapa in Sikkim in 1994, who actually was installed in his own monastery of Rumtek in Sikkim in India, a monastery which he himself (the 16th) had built in 1959 after his escape from Tibet and which is believed to be one of the richest in India with assets of $1,2 billion. So there are two Karmapas, both are acknowledged and established, and none of them could with any certainty claim to be truer than the other. Unfortunately this has sometimes resulted in bitter enmity among followers of the different Karmapas against each other, which is both childish and stupid and which temptation Buddhists of all people indeed should rise above. Many ask themselves now with some worry how the Tibetan Karmapa will tackle this issue. Hopefully he won't. The reason for his leaving Tibet was, that neither teachers from India were allowed to go to Tibet to educate him, nor was he himself permitted to go to India to be taught by them there. He is 14 years old and urgently needs further education within his own religion to be able to assume the responsibility necessary as the head of the oldest holy order of Tibet.

It's just for us to wish him the best of luck.

There is ground for optimism. The political course of China at present is suicidal. She has definitely failed in her 50 years' effort to extirpate the Tibetan people, culture, history and religion. The world is awakening to the realities of the Chinese effort to by force wipe out a nation and its history. The justness of the Tibetan cause is self-evident, and so is the gross fiasco of the Communist government of China.

The argument of the debate of the seminar was violence contra non-violence. The second protagonist of the debate was Katrin Goldstein-Kyaga, tibetologist of the University of Stockholm. The paradox was, that while Jamyang Norbu, a true Tibetan veteran out of the heart of the conflict, advocated non-violence and admirably maintained a constructive attitude, the researches made by Katrin Goldstein-Kyaga, a Swede married to a Tibetan, rather pointed to the necessity of more drastic measures.

It was Jamyang Norbu, though, who most thoroughly charted the sea of troubles. The issue of East Turkestan, with its vast clamp-down of Muslim rebels, from which country no news ever reach the western world, made itself felt from its want of attention. One recent year 20,000 bombs exploded all over China, a great part of them unexplained, probably just out of general unrest and desperation. Although it is forbidden, hundreds of millions of farmers unsettle and invade the towns, totally out of control of the authorities. The economic crisis deepens, and China has to rely on imports of cereals. Corruption is soaring, especially in the banking system. And so on.

So keep on working. Information, demonstration and protests, on international and especially on economic levels, are the means. Most governments have inaccurate or no knowledge at all of what is going on in Tibet and China. They must be informed, and the hard currency is Facts, Facts, and more Facts.

Dear Christian,

Long time since. I beg your pardon for my long silence. As you know, things are never easy here in Bihar and getting worse all the time. It's not difficult to develop a "Kali mentality" looking forward to the end of the last days, especially now in the dry season, when all life and future depends on the coming monsoon, the constant uncertainty, which no one knows whether it will postpone doomsday or not.

I haven't seen John for a very long time. He is constantly busy up in the hills and never comes to Buddhagaya anymore. He was recently in Russia I believe, which would rather add to his unsuitableness to the plains. All Tibetans and Scandinavians are out of place here in India, except maybe for the mountains, where John has developed as much resistance to cold and altitude as any native Tibetan, while I prefer the plains, where I was born, and where I as a Buddhist am as much out of place in this chaotic and religiously anarchistic India as any Tibetan in the Hindu plains. I guess we're all out of place in this turbulent age.

What worries me is that things are getting worse, especially for us Buddhists, and especially for the Tibetans, above all the Tibetans in Tibet. The Chinese are actually winning the war but in a way which no one ever anticipated. They are losing it politically, economically and materially. Their army is totally out of place in Tibet and can't be supported: all the hundreds of thousands of soldiers are constantly starving and freezing to a slow torturous death. We don't know how many Chinese soldiers simply have vanished into nowhere in the mountains, out of the statistics, buried nowhere, completely forgotten and with no chance for any exoneration ever. They are the biggest losers. The Tibetans keep seeing them in reborn flies, which never existed in Tibet before the Chinese came. One cut in the life-line to China, and there is no hope for half a million Chinese soldiers abandoned in the mountains of Tibet. The Chinese settlers, who are being paid by their government to colonise Tibet, can't stand life there. They only want to get home, before they die, which many fail to, that is, to get home in time. They are also deserted by their government, paid by their lords to vanish and perish in Tibet, where no Tibetan wants them. They are also great losers. If they survive, they have wasted and lost their life anyway. And all this vain enterprise, sacrificing human beings for inhumanity, is costing China more than it can pay, and banks are going into bankruptcy. They are just starting.

But there is another frontier, and that is the most important and dangerous one. It's the mentality. What the Chinese are bringing into Tibet, what they have been educated in and taught to tackle life with by their masters, is hatred. They bring violence and hatred to Tibet, and their worst war is hating the Tibetans, for no reason at all, just for being obliged to live in Tibet. And this hatred many Tibetans are absorbing. There are many Tibetans (together with Uigurs, who are even better at it,) who look forward to the day when they will cleanse all Tibet (and East Turkestan) of Chinese. They are looking forward to an ethnic cleansing of an opposite and righteous kind. Of course, we have to understand them, the Chinese have killed millions of Tibetans and Uigurs and got away with it, so why shouldn't they be punished? But they don't see the real danger: their minds have become infected with Chinese hatred. When they give way to that hatred, implanted by the Chinese, they have lost the war. That would be the ultimate defeat. Even if the Chinese leave Tibet, (which they very well might do one day,) if they pull out the army and leave all Tibetan business to the Tibetans, that victory will be worthless if Tibetans take any revenge.

This is my chief concern in the Tibetan problem as a Buddhist. And all I can do is to pray, pray that this will never happen, that Tibetans never will give way to Chinese hatred.

Maybe someone will hear my prayer.

Yours sincerely,

Kim, a Bihari Buddhist.

The participants had been Tibetans, Ladakhis, one Kashmiri, one Pakistani, one Hindu and doctor Sun from China except John himself. The man from Pakistan (Lahore) had been of no consequence since his position had been outside the entire problem. The Kashmiri (Srinagar) had been something of a comic ingredient with his good-natured complaisance and total optimism. To him it was a course of nature that both Kashmir and Ladakh would obtain more autonomy and independence both from India and from each other and that also Tibet would have her own way.

The main issue was Tibet under Chinese occupation and slavery. John and Doctor Sun had argued mostly, their arguments had been quite violent but in different ways. And although the conference had been strangely coloured by the recent issues of Chinese rage against Europe and the World Bank and by the unusual curfew in Leh, the arguments of John and Doctor Sun had completely dominated the conference.

The reason for the curfew in Leh was the atrocious murders of three monks in Rangdum, Zanskar, some days earlier. Moslem militants had taken a truck, its driver and a German trekker for hostages, when the truck reached Rangdum four monks had welcomed them, just to get shot at by the militants: only one of the monks had managed to escape and save his life. In the confusion the German tried to escape, and also the driver, who was later arrested alone on the road to Kargil. (The German was found one month later shot dead in the mountains.) The curfew in Leh was proclaimed before anyone knew anything about the fates of the German, the driver and the three militants. Leh was suddenly transformed into a ghost town, it had never happened before, and in that shadow John organized a secret conference about the future of Tibet and Central Asia.

John had with regret elucidated on the hopeless case of the Chinese never really understanding their own actions. They were unable to listen, it was impossible to reason with them, the policy of the governing Communist Party couldn't be criticized or called in question, and it was the duty of all Chinese to just blindly obey orders. Against this situation the best good-will in the world was of no avail and not even Dalai Lama's, who only wants the welfare of China and Tibet and who has the perfect formula: Tibetan autonomy but under Chinese military, administrative and foreign policy control. This solution would be optimum for all parties and is politically ingenious. But China condemns it from sheer totalitarian stupidity.

John elucidated on this tragedy. Endless efforts have been made to bring China to reason, only constructive aspects and arguments have been tried, diplomatic efforts have been tireless, but the only Chinese to realize the sense and constructiveness of Dalai Lama's proposal have been students and opposition members, who pessimistically have given up like to a lethal disease, faced by the all-powerful Communist Party's refusal to compromise. One of these was Doctor Sun, a true Chinese democrat brought up with Doctor Sun-Yat-Sen's social democracy, with both interesting and risky contacts with the whole organized Chinese opposition.

His argument had shocked everyone. His conclusion was that the only solution was to kill every single member of the Communist Party all over China. He proposed this in dead earnest. He knew many who gladly would agree and partake in such an action, and that the number of these was steadily increasing.

The Union movement could do nothing. All trade and labour unions were forbidden and persecuted, and to join was criminal. That path was closed. The peaceful Falun Gong were stamped as enemies of the people, although they never had anything to do with politics, and the Christians and Buddhists were too kind. The Moslems made war on their own using their own methods and would never be able to make peace. Their war really went on outside the Chinese problem. And the only way to tackle the problem, Doctor Sun said, was to kill every single member of the Communist Party.

Thus far to radicalism had this arch democrat found it necessary to go, and he knew what he was talking about. He knew his China and had experience enough of all the mistakes of the Communist Party and of the hopeless opposition underdog situation since 50 years, which constantly has worsened after June 4th 1989. His word was all too heavy.

John's comment afterwards:

"We have done everything possible to make them understand what they have done. We have tried all diplomatic possibilities to make them realize the necessity to detach themselves from their insane, unhuman and paranoid policies, but every effort we have tried has only increased their transgressions. Their policy in Tibet to entertain a monstrous army and all the time pump Chinese into the country rewarded and paid for by the state, enforcing incredibly expensive mining and failing dam projects, is comparable only to the crazy Nazi policy against the Jews, when during the second world war immense fortunes and efforts were spent on death camps and trains rather were used to transport Jews to Auschwitz than to send vital necessities to the eastern front. We have tried to make the Chinese listen to reason, we have tried to make them understand, but they simply won't. They are terrified of losing their megalomaniac illusions of grandeur and infallibility, their paranoia increases like an avalanche, and any Chinese to utter the least critical word against the government or party is enough to stamp him for life as a traitor, which means all he has to look forward to in life, if he is allowed to live, is a life sentence in labour camps, if he isn't lucky enough to be exiled. We have tried everything and will continue to try everything. I don't believe in Doctor Sun's radical solution, even if constantly more Chinese find it the last remaining one. Like Dalai Lama I believe in a better and peaceful solution. They say that we Christians and Buddhists are far too kind unto naïveté in our tolerance, but I think the greatest realists are always to be found in the camps of goodness. The Communists of China are no realists, since they have chosen to see only what they want to see."

The most popular views of death are typically dualistic in nature: on one hand there are the spiritualistic, soul theories embedded in theistic belief systems, on the other there is the "modern", materialistic nihilism.

The former posits the eternalness of the soul, either jumping from one life to another through multiple births and rebirths, or from life to the hereafter, i.e. the blissful paradise or fiery hell.

The latter rejects all kinds of speculation of what might happen to the "soul" after a person dies, since the concept of soul itself has no grounds in the empirical scientific circle. It is regarded as something scientifically unverified, thus the question of its existence cannot be determined with reasonable certainty, therefore it is safer to believe that only nothingness embraces us after death.

Blissful nothingness. It sounds enticing, sounds much better than the emotionally draining and physically painful existence of life. But why do even those who believe in this theory dread death so much? Presumably, because deep down they do not really believe in it, not to mention that there is little credible evidence for their nihilistic belief.

No one has ever returned to report entry into nothingness. In fact, those who have had near-death experiences testified to a kind of realm resembling the religious or spiritualist view of the afterlife.

It is hard to believe the great souls we know, the people whose presence illuminate those around them, will one day just be a piece of nothingness; their greatness no more than a sum of atoms and molecules in the brain that will decay together with the rest of their physical existence.

It is absurd to think our mother's unique personality and strong, loving character is nothing more than an effect of atomic or molecular flux in her brain, that her consciousness is a matter of electric leaps among the neutrons in her central nervous system. If that were the case, why are we so different from one another? Why is each of us so marvellously unique? If consciousness were a matter of uniform biological and physical mechanisms, we should all be as boringly predictable as Japanese-made robots.

Buddhism, the tradition that is adhered to by the Tibetans, rejects the two extremes represented by the two opposite camps above. Although it acknowledges the continuity of consciousness from life to life -- as energy can neither be created nor destroyed -- it rejects all absolute soul theories -- postulations of a rigidly fixed identity or static personal essence -- with its cardinal doctrine of selflessness, or soullessness (anatta).

This process of continuity is sophisticatedly dealt with by "The Tibetan Book of the Dead", one of the most important books our civilization has produced. Written by the great master Padma Sambhava, it is a manual of useful instructions for people who are facing death, as well as for their relatives and loved ones, and has been quite popular for centuries in Tibet. It is connected with a large body of literature in Tibet that thoroughly investigates the phenomena of dying. The title is a free translation of Bardo thos grol. Bardo means "between-state", which refers to the whole process between death and rebirth. Tibetans discern six betweens: the interval between birth and death ("life between"); sleep and waking ("dream between"); waking and trance ("trance between"); and three betweens during the death-rebirth process ("death-point", "reality" and "existence").

The words thos grol mean that this book's teachings "liberate" just by being "learned" or "understood", giving the person facing the between an understanding so naturally clear and deep that it does not require prolonged reflection or contemplation. So the more apt translation of the title would be "the great book of natural liberation through understanding in the between".

The Tibetan attitude toward death and the between is neither mystical nor mysterious. Their multilife perspective is no more (and no less) a religious belief system than our modern sense of the structure of the solar system, or of the pattern of the cycle of seasons in a year.

They considered it a matter of common sense and scientific fact that animate beings exist along a continuum of lives, and that the death, between and rebirth processes follow a predictable pattern. They have credible accounts by enlightened voyagers who have gone though the between experience consciously, preserved the memory and reported their experiences.

Tibetans accept these reports of their "psychonauts" just as we do those of astronauts who report what happened on the moon. Tibetans also believe that most people can recover memories of their former lives by a fairly elementary regime of meditation. Tibetans act on this Buddhist perspective in a practical manner, using their lifetimes to educate themselves to understand the world and to prepare for death and future lives by improving their ethical actions, emotional habits and critical insights.

Despite their seemingly unreal, "gay" acceptance of death, Tibetans celebrate lives to the amazing point that they will not harm worms when it can be avoided, for "those worms could have been their loved ones in their previous lives".

Tibetans are on the whole a cheerful, vibrant and lively lot. They cherish freedom in all respects and on all levels. They are very modern, indeed, in their heads and hearts. They have lived intelligently by their lights, have used human life well and extracted its fullest potential for evolutionary, not just material, progress.

With the surprisingly sophisticated age-long inner and death science of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition they have cultivated, they have so much to offer to their more "modern" counterparts, whose concept of achievement is heavily colored by a relentless pursuit of materialistic accomplishments. A distinct measure of the unparalleled beauty of their civilization comes from their vivid awareness of the immediacy of death and the freedom that awareness brings."

Comment. So this article denies both personal immortality in every possible form (both in Paradise and Hell and through reincarnation with the maintenance of an identity) and the materialistic concept that all is finished once you are dead. Instead it makes allowances for a kind of impersonal immortality through reincarnation in a form which we in a mortal shape can not grasp. This is a kind of compromise solution to the problem and something so genuinely Buddhist as another instance of the golden mean and the middle path. And this at least is very sensible.

A Note of Warning, by Doctor Sun.

Don't get fooled. China never means what she says, and all she says is a formula of lies meant to cover up her real intentions. She invaded Tibet in 1950 for the sole purpose of swallowing her up with her mountain riches, not caring one iota about the Tibetans. Since her successful occupation of Tibet in 1950 she has consistently carried out her plans, robbing Tibet of all her riches, pushing the Tibetans back, gradually taking over the country, aiming at a final result of having all the Tibetans exterminated or sterilised and the Tibetan Buddhist religion only maintained for show to fool tourists. Since 1950 China has only spoken well of Tibetans and their religion, claiming what they did was only for the welfare of the Tibetans, preaching tolerance and freedom, while in reality genocide has been practised consistently since 1956, and it has never slowed down except temporarily only to immediately renew its strength and harden its oppression. China always had only one policy in Tibet: Smash and grab. It wasn't pretty, so they always had to mask it behind lies and pretexts.

The Chinese are scared stiff, because they know they are losing their ground. Or should I say only the Chinese communists, the majority of the people being innocent and not aware of the schemes of the ruling party? But the whole Chinese people are accessories to the crimes of the regime, since they obey the regime.

One chief characteristic has dominated every communist regime in the world ever since Lenin, through Stalin and Mao, through Pol Pot and Milosevic. That characteristic has been the quality of evil. They have all been aware of their evil, they have practised evil, and they have been fully aware of the evil they have done all the way. When Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Milosevic carried through their genocides, they were perfectly aware of what they did, and so are the Chinese communists. When they speak peace, talk generosity, claim progress, preach human rights and profess benevolence they only mean murder. So don't get fooled, like the Russian peasants by Lenin and Stalin, like the farmers by Mao, like the world by Pol Pot and Milosevic, and like the Jews by Nazism and Hitler. It's more important to survive than to listen to politicians, take them seriously and believe in them. They are always wrong while only individual thinking is right.

China claims to have ruled Tibet for 700 years and to have rightfully reclaimed their own property. But before that Tibet conquered China with the result that Tibet and China made an everlasting agreement to leave each other in peace. But China has always broken all agreements and tried to rewrite and falsify history, because the Chinese government has never had anything else to stand on except lies.

And what about the 6000 monasteries and temples that China reduced to ashes and dust in Tibet, together with 60% of all books in the Tibetan language? What about the 1,2 million Tibetans, a fifth of the entire Tibetan population, that the Chinese purposely murdered? That's history for you. Don't you forget it ever.

Recognise evil when you see evil, or else you can't protect yourself from it.

"As I was driving past Tiananmen Square in Beijing today, a small thought fired in my mind. This was the scene of the Tiananmen Square massacre, if you believe the sensationalist Western press. It was the Tiananmen "incident," if you prefer the Japanese press, which has long been craven to Beijing. Or it was the scene of a reactionary, illegal, destabilizing uprising by malevolent students who killed many noble patriotic soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army, until their Western-influenced, anti-Chinese actions were finally ended by the just and correct actions of those troops as overseen by supremely wise patriarch, Deng Xiaoping, and much beloved hatchet man Li Peng.

Stuck in what seemed an intractable traffic jam on the broad boulevard beside the square of Heavenly Peace, I watched people flying kites over the open space as plain clothes police toured the perimeter on the lookout for Falun Gong protesters, whom they routinely round up and toss into vans that are conveniently waiting under the trees around the fringe of the square. Horns sounded as taxi drivers got impatient, and a car trying to jump lanes slammed into the side of a bus, causing a crowd of rubberneckers to gather around the damaged vehicles. Not so heavenly, and not very peaceful either. I started to feel my grip on reality loosening.

When I made it back to my hotel, I turned on CNN in an attempt to return to some reality. The lead news item was about the hostages in the Philippines, released through the intervention of known humanitarian and antiterrorist hero Muammar Gadaffi. Then there was an item about Nobel Peace Prize winner Aun San Suu Kyi, who had tried to drive up-country in Burma and was being blocked in her car on a small bridge by the Burmese army - they accused her of trying to "damage" the country. The third story concerned the opening of an international religious summit in New York under the auspices of the United Nations. Yes, China was there, with its seven-person delegation. Of course, none of the Falun Gong adherents were included - most of the leaders are in jail anyway.

But what really made me feel a migraine coming on - the Dalai Lama had been disinvited by the UN. It might have offended China, admitted Kofi Annan, secretary-general, TIME cover boy and renowned hero of the oppressed around the world. But guess who is on his way to New York, for a meeting of parliamentary heads? None other than the hero of the Tiananmen Square massacre/incident/unpatriotic crime, Li Peng. Kick out the Dalai Lama, and line up to welcome Li Peng. In the United States. Have I completely lost the plot here?"

- Terry McCarthy, August 30, 2000

Answer to Terry McCarthy concerning Li Peng plot:

"Here’s another plot for you.

In 1971 the Nixon-Kissinger regime decided to launch a historical coup. They would abandon all support of Taiwan to instead start business with mainland China. It was a complete success. China is now one of the greatest markets in the world, especially for America.

Before the Nixon-Kissinger regime, America had been the only one to support the Tibetan freedom fighters, the Kham guerillas of Tibet. President Eisenhower introduced this policy by CIA in 1959. In 1974 all support to the last Tibetan freedom fighters was discontinued, and the freedom fighters were left to die. The last ones tried a heroic escape to Dharamsala but were betrayed by Nepal and killed to the last man by Nepali and Chinese troops surrounding them just as they reached the final pass to India.

The same Nixon-Kissinger regime gave Suharto-Indonesia full support in occupying East Timor in 1975.

But one thing Mr Kissinger had no hand in. Before the presidential elections in 1968 president Lyndon Johnson initiated peace negotiations with Vietnam. He wanted that peace settlement to be the last action of his presidential period. These negotiations were sabotaged by Nixon, who gambled for support of the army to continue the Vietnam war. He won the elections, and the Vietnam war continued for another 7 years. President Johnson and Hubert Humphrey knew about Nixon’s manoevre, and Nixon was terrified that anyone would blow the whistle to let things out. It was to find documents in this matter that he ordered the Watergate intrusion.

So, Nixon and Kissinger helped to establish and confirm the two greatest autocracies in Asia, and America is still at it in China. Perhaps Nixon never knew about the Chinese mass destruction of 6000 Tibetan monasteries and the killing off of one fifth of the entire population. Perhaps he also didn’t know about Mao Zedong killing off 43 million Chinese in his forced industrialization projects, his "Let a Thousands Blossoms Bloom"-campaign and the 10-year cultural revolution. Or was president Nixon just one of those too many politicians who only prefer to see what they want to see and nothing else, the main Chinese political line since 3000 years?

Here again are some other nasty statistics:

"Allegations of procedures forced on Tibetan women include infanticide, in which lethal chemicals are injected into a baby’s brain, forced abortion after nine months of pregnancy, abortion via electrical rods inserted through the vagina, rusty IUDs that may bring on tuberculosis and other diseases and IUDs left in the uterus for eight years instead of the recommended three.

Quoting Dharamsala-based Tibetan Women’s Association, the UNF also reported that "nearly 20 percent of Tibetans may no longer be able to reproduce because of sterilization procedures."

"One Tibetan woman interviewed by researchers at the Tibetan Administration in Dharamsala said 70 percent of women over age 18 in her village, including herself, were sterilized. In one district, 308 women were reportedly sterilized in 22 days."

Thus China continues her secret genocide on the Tibetans, which has been going on for 50 years along the same pattern without any reactions from the world outside. Of course, China always denies anything like this going on, and that’s how they have always got away with it. And they will go on like this as long as Communist China remains backed up by western powers, first of all by major business interests in America.

And that is the most upsetting thing of all, that Tibet already 50 years ago, as it was occupied by Comnmunist China, was unanimously betrayed and let down by the whole democratic world. It appears today that the only society to support Tibetan sovereignty over Tibet is the ’Ruckus Society’, mainly represented by NGO’s and demonstrators against globalization, like those starting a new universal peace movement in opposition to the world pollution of the oil industries and other World Bank projects:

"Beijing was recently graced with a visit by leading members of the Ruckus Society - the U.S. civil disobedience group at the heart of the huge demonstrations that shut down last year’s World Trade Organization talks in Seattle.

The activists - veterans of anti-globalization protests, Amazon ecology campaigns and oil industry boycotts - were in China to represent their newest interest: a free Tibet."

(David Rennie, The Daily Telegraph)

But what we need is something more than just the Ruckus Society to react against the betrayal of Tibet by the whole organized democratic world.

Kathmandu… Kodari… Zhangou… Xegar… Shigatse… Gyantzo and finally that holiest of holies - Lhasa. The journey on the Friendship Road is long, arduous, exciting and intensely emotional. In the early part, Everest is on your left and in that summer of June ’98, you can almost reach out and touch the melting snows. At the talk about this, last week to an overflowing hall at the Y.B. Chavan Centre, it was impossible to even get to the essentials of genocide in Tibet.

Six thousand monasteries have been reduced to eight as mentioned in the 50-minute film shown by Pammi Pandey, before three of us began our experiences in Tibet. Lonely Planet says there are 2000 active monasteries.

There was no mention of nuns with their vaginas ripped out by court hangers or monks forced to rape them, after Chinese soldiers had their fill. I couldn’t talk of precious religious artefacts, Tangkas, looted from monasteries and used as toilet paper. Over a million killed in recent years.

When the heat overflows at these horrors and the throat is dry with the drought for words that cannot be expressed, there is only bottled water in the darkened hall to keep an almost fluent flow.

To explain the slides taken by a travelling companion, Baban Govardhan, Nagpur’s leading surgeon, whose early fumblings with the camera would have lost him a lot of patients if they knew of such clumsy fingers. The first shot at the Friendship Bridge of trucks being repaired may well have been in Bhatinda or Bhubhaneshwar.

Baban blossomed in his art from this blue period to me near prayer flags on a wind-swept pass close to where the Panchen Lama was scuttled away recently by the Chinese to be kept under wraps.

With growing confidence the photographs captured the essence of my hollow cheeks, sunken eyes and a nose fleshy with remembered delights. Even the audience, numb with horror as the tale unfolded tittered in unexpected delight. The emotion all of us in a rattling van went through, came out in a simple slide. Of a beautiful young Tibetan girl by the roadside in a small town selling bits of machinery that will barely be of use in a bicycle.

I tried to talk of the Friendship Road with potholes that knocked out dentures and fractured axles. The claustrophobia in those vast expanses where we tried to look for our own Shangri La as visitors from all over the world hung thick and quiet for five whole days.

We endlessly wound past the Turquoise Lake, barren remote mountains that dipped and fell away, yak which ambled past like animals from pre-history.

Until, tired and tumbling out of the bus at Lhasa after six days on the road with few toilets and worse food and everywhere left-overs of a gentle, loving race vandalised and hugely diminished, a rainbow greeted us at the Potala.

Here was regeneration and hope. Spectacular in its depths and colour and the huge range of arc dipped straight into Dr Govardhan’s head as he stood for a group photograph.

At the Potala itself there are hidden cameras which search our every move. We were cautioned many times not to even think of handing over our photograph of the Dalai Lama. There were even instances in the past where some of the monks at the Tashi Limpo monastery near Shigatse turned out to be Chinese agents who got tourists arrested for asking questions out of turn.

The whole country of Tibet is under siege by gun-toting arrogant Chinese. An old and precious culture is disembowelled. Barkhor, the traditional part of Lhasa does not get any electricity in the evenings and somehow makes do with patched up generators.

The new part of the capital city could be Manchester or Nariman Point in Mumbai. There is hardly a new generation of residents. Tibetan women were forcibly sterilised between 1982 and ’86. Genocide of an entire race close to the end of the 20^th century is one of the important causes of the new millennium. A conspiracy of silence has not brought this to the notice of anyone willing to hear.

Friends of Tibet in India are making an effort now, to touch our conscience. The most powerful man in the world, the President of the United States, is bothered about billions of dollars to be got from trading with the Chinese. The moral values are ploughed under by the purely economic ones. Our own stance is cautiously ambiguous.

The Philips radiogram given by Nehru to the Dalai Lama still sits in a barren room of the Norbulingka Palace from where His Holiness left in a hurry deep in the night of March 19, 1959.

Those of us in Mussourie for our first hesitant steps into the world of administration in the early Sixties saw Tibetan children who had fled kicking stuffed rags tied into tight balls with the expertise that Ronaldo or Beckham will envy even today. Their cheerful laughter floated across our valley.

That laughter is still cheerful today. For the pain behind, you have to travel on the dusty road to Lhasa.

- Human Rights Watch, Asia.

(Translated from Swedish by Christian Lanciai

the Free Thinker - August 28th, 2002.)

"There was nothing more despicable in the West than its disgusting sympathy for Red China from the 60s and its loathsome Mao cult. While Mao exterminated people and villages and launched ethnic cleansings on a large scale in Tibet and Turkestan, using highly developed military violence and brutality against people that could not defend themselves and who owned nothing but their ancient Buddhist culture, which the Maoist army of gangsters just for that reason then systematically and with zealous force committed themselves to utterly destroy and annihilate, the West kowtowed to the Chinese communists and licked them in cajolery, bestowing on the small red book, the only permitted literary work of the cultural revolution, a mawkish veneration as a cult object. While Mao methodically and deliberately destroyed the entire culture of China and more than 6000 monasteries and temples in the brutally occupied and enslaved Tibet, even America fell to the temptation of oiling their way into Mao's favours to make business with him by the initiative of Nixon and Kissinger. Up till then, America had been the dominating bulwark against evil and autocracy in the world and had helped the Tibetan freedom fighters against the Chinese, but since Nixon and Kissinger decided to change that way of thinking and start kissing Mao's toes and do business with as great crooks as possible (including även the dictators Suharto and Pinochet among others), the Tibetan freedom fighters were betrayed together with the just cause of Tibet in a treason worse than that of Chamberlain against Czechoslovakia in 1938. The situation is hardly much different now: also China pursues the "Lebensraum" policy of comprehensive ethnic cleansings against other peoples in order to make more room for Han Chinese. The communist regime of Beijing has nothing to stand on except lies, fraud and brute force. All their propaganda consists of lies, and they refuse to listen to anything else. If someone tells them the truth, like the Tibetans used to do for their only defence, they respond by their normal procedure of killing all critics and opponents at once. Ask the freedom fighters from Kham. The Chinese murdered 480,000 of them in order to fill up their country with loyal Maoist Han Chinese insects.

During the last ten years I have untiringly worked for the exit of the Chinese communist regime to prepare the path for independence in Tibet and Turkestan. I will continue these efforts untiringly but only by diplomatic peaceful means. The communist regime in Beijing must be ousted, it's a ghastly stinking cancer tumour to the whole world, and I don't care how it is removed as long as it is removed, but I will never even punch a Chinese on his nose. If I encounter crooks I get out of their way and rather ignore them than have anything to do with them, while of course I don't mind their disappearing through the proceedings of others, which though I will have nothing to do with myself.

In denouncing the Chinese communist regime I also denounce every politician in the world who co-operates with it and declare them to be crooks just as much as those crooks they co-operate with, thereby giving them legitimacy. Everything dealing with the Chinese communist establishment is rotten, and I will have nothing to do with it.

During the last twenty years, China has pathetically tried to clean their slate from the Mao era by introducing market economy, and they keep on saying: "Look, we have now a market economy, everything is now going in the right direction in China, so please come and do business with us, Mao is a concluded chapter of the past, and we should all forget and forgive." They can't get away that easily. It's easy to forgive but impossible to forget, the communist party now ruling in Beijing is the same as in Mao's time, the same old men are still there paying homage to the same inhuman materialistic principles, and they must not and shall not get away with it, as neither the Nazis did. What the Chinese did in Tibet was at least as cruel as what the Germans did in Poland. The only difference is that the Germans were ultimately stopped, while the Chinese carry on their covert systematic ethnic cleansing in Tibet still 52 years after their brutal invasion and occupation of this peaceful cultural people and their country.

The Lithang monastery was a large and important monastery in Kham but only a monastery of some wealth and lands, but within the monastery were also employed many women and children, who lived there. A Tibetan monastery is not only a monastery for monks and nuns but also a school and university for all ages. The Tibetan monastery system is the only educational system that Tibet ever had, but it has been quite sufficient and efficient and stable at the same time as it has been the world's best educational establishment.

In 1956 the Chinese communists demanded the monastery should render an account of all its assets including land properties and valuables in the monastery. The monks of Lithang would not do this. Why should they, celibate custodians of religious traditions and engaged only in prayers and education, submit themselves to the commands of foreign atheists? They took counsel with other men of the area, who felt the hour was come to start some resistance against the encroaching Chinese. So they raided a Chinese cantonment and took their weapons. When consequently the Chinese began hunting them, they sought protection in the monastery with the monks. The Chinese demanded their extradition. The monks demanded peace and claimed the monastery as a place of refuge, from which no one could be extradited who once had sought asylum. The Chinese then suggested, that if the rebels were extradited the monastery would be spared new enforced collectivizations for two years. The monks did not agree to these terms.

Then the Chinese bombed the monastery. Bombers had never been heard of before in Kham, so the people were completely vulnerable and could not protect themselves. There were six thousand people in the monastery who believed the monastery would protect them, as it always had done against every peril, why they refused to leave it, while the Chinese bombed the monastery to cinders. Four thousand out of the six thousand perished, mostly women and children, monks and elderly people.

No news of this reached outside China. The world had all its attention on the Suez crisis, just like in 1950, when China invaded Tibet, the world was watching the Korean war, which it considered "more important".

Lithang was only one episode out of many and far from the only monastery to be bombed by the Chinese. Ganden and Tsurphu, two of the leading monasteries in the heart of Tibet, are two other examples. During the Second World War the allies bombed and destroyed the Italian monastery Monte Cassino south of Rome, but they had no choice, since the Germans had transformed the monastery into a strategic defence fortress. The Chinese bombed and devastated more than 6000 monasteries in Tibet just because these by their spiritualism constituted something alien to the Chinese established atheism and materialistic communism and therefore were considered hostile. The Chinese cultural massacres in Tibet were just as cruel as the premeditated effort of the Germans 1933-45 to exterminate the Jews with the difference, that the Chinese are still keeping at it today but with subtler means: instead of directly trying to eliminate the Tibetans by force they try to flood the Tibetan population in an enforced mass immigration of Chinese into Tibet, so that Lhasa, the capital, is hardly Tibetan any more. Two thirds of all Tibetan houses have been torn down, and half of the entire population of Lhasa is now Chinese, while the Tibetans constantly are bereft of more of their identity and human rights. Now they are no longer permitted to make a pilgrimage to their own holy mountain of Kailash without expensive special permits, and obvious human rights like education and work are being denied the Tibetans while the Chinese are given privileges. At the same time, one Chinese in Tibet costs Beijing as much as four Chinese in China. In Tibet Beijing has made its worst business deal and that by force.

The question is: did the monks of Lithang have any right to refuse a foreign occupational force the assets of their monastery or not? If they had no right to refuse, then according to the same precedent no one has any right to resist any tyranny or outrage. If they had a right to refuse, then you have to take your stand for Tibet against China - until China has left Tibet for good."

- John B. Westerberg.

China occupied Tibet and East Turkestan by force with no right as soon as the communists had taken over the leadership in Beijing in 1949. As a result of this enforced occupation, Tibet not only lost one fifth (more than 1,200,000) of all Tibetans by violence, persecution, abduction, starvation, deportation and mass executions, but did also China deliberately try to exterminate the whole national Tibetan culture and identity by methodically destroying almost all the temples and monasteries there was, in total 6246 out of 6259. Many of these monasteries were bombed by aircraft, for example Tsurphu, Ganden and Lithang, where thousands of women and children had sought refuge, who were bombed to death, about 2000 civilians in one monastery bombing in 1956. We must never forget this. The Chinese atrocities against Tibet, their people and culture during 50 years, is the most clear-cut possible argument for total Tibetan independence from China.

Thereby nothing has been said about China’s crimes against their own citizens. The victims of the Mao Zedong regime are calculated to about 43 million especially by starvation catastrophes caused by aborted political reform programs and the inhuman systematic persecution of the Culture Revolution against all of China’s own citizens during the last ten years of Mao. The communist regime boasts of having eliminated 125 million unborn children (mostly by forced sterilizations and abortions) in enforced birth control programs. Recently they also boasted the humanization of their executions from a bullet in the neck to specially manufactured execution buses. This is a kind of progress that the Nazis of Germany were proud of in the 30s.

But you mustn’t tell the Chinese about these things, because it will upset them, and if you ask them with what right they keep Tibet and East Turkestan under forced occupation, they will accuse you of trying to split their mother country. Then you mustn't spare them, because the only way to teach the cat not to shit in the sofa is to put his nose into his own shit until he learns from his own mistakes. Such is the immensity of the disastrous results of China’s aborted enterprises in Tibet and the western provinces of China, that lasting environmental problems might match what the Soviet Union left behind as a legacy of one immense environmental disaster from Vladivostok to Berlin after its fall. The same kind of gross environmental ruthlessness without considering the consequences has been forced on Tibet, East Turkestan and the western provinces of China which once Stalinism in the Soviet Union was responsible for turning all the Russias into a dump with. Moreover, this affects India, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam as well, since their rivers come from Tibet, where Chinese deforestation has turned nature into a havoc of disasters across the entire Tibetan plateau; which gives us the strange impression of China accelerating their environmental destruction in panic as if to insist on destroying as much as possible before its regime has to fall, as did the same environmentally disastrous Soviet regime.

Recently Australia decided to invest $1,4 million in human rights development in China, which China smilingly accepts while they continue to execute people on a larger scale than in the rest of the world together and boast the "humanization" of their execution methods. With equally humble flatulence and creeping encouragement, India kowtows to China, acknowledging Tibet to be part of China; and so does the US, who has helped the China regime to progress ever since the Nixon-Kissinger days in the beginning of the 70s, when they embarked on their global policy program to support and build up rogue states and autocracies like Chile, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Iraq and China for the sake of American business interests.

Recently president Bush announced there were still a number of rogue states left in the world to consider. These were pointed out to be Belorussia under Lukashenko, North Korea under Kim Jong Il, Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, Libya under colonel Khaddafi, Burma with its China-supported military rule, Iran, Sudan and Cuba. Not a word was in this context mentioned of China, the world’s greatest autocracy and rogue state with possibly 200 million lives on their conscience and which democratic nations like the US and Australia humbly and enthusiastically continue backing up since they make money out of that business.

Here in Darjeeling there are intense discussions going on about the possible opening up of the old trade route between Darjeeling and Gyangtse across Sikkim. No one knows as yet when and if it will happen, and here they don't quite believe in it. This opening is presumed to be a result of the latest negotiations between India and China, in which India made the concession to accept Tibet as part of China. Was it a tactical manoeuvre of India which will speed up the thaw of China and hasten the fall of its regime, or was it China that once more fooled India? That remains to be seen.

When two years later Moscow reported that Raoul Wallenberg was dead, this was swallowed by the Swedish government without comment. It also swallowed the Russian explanation that Raoul Wallenberg never had entered Soviet territory but had found his end in Hungary. It also swallowed that no evidence ever was produced by the Russians to confirm Wallenberg’s death. Whatever could the Swedish government do? The more important then to watch what they did not do.

When later there were witness reports that Wallenberg was alive, that he had been seen in Moscow by other prisoners and that these had been tapping messages between themselves through the prison walls of Lubyanka, that psychiatrists happened to mention they had had him as a patient and other such stuff, the Swedish government became active but in the opposite way to what would have been expected as rational. They silenced the matter. The foreign minister accepted the Russian word that Wallenberg was dead (without evidence) and refused to accept any other version or even any other possibility, since he did not want to offend the Russians. "The Soviet authorities are respectable. They wouldn’t tell a lie. We must believe them, we have no choice. We must respect them." This cowardice even worsened during the years, during decades the cruelty of silence was the only policy allowed - there was a governmental effort to silence the matter to nothing, and this policy was maintained until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Not until then, after 50 years, one acknowledgement after the other started gradually to turn up. The Soviet authorities had been lying from the start, and Sweden had not even questioned the lies. The governmental policy was admitted to have been cowardly false. The first official excuses from the government to Raoul Wallenberg’s family were delivered - after 50 years.

This remarkable Raoul Wallenberg syndrome reappears in the even more revolting standpoint of the world in the Tibetan issue. Independent Tibet was occupied by military force by Communist China in 1950. Only El Salvador dared to raise the issue in the United Nations and was silenced. In 1956 the Chinese started their methodical destruction of Tibet with its culture and history by bombings and closing and looting of monasteries, the universities of Tibet, and their temples. Not until Dalai Lama’s escape in 1959 did the Tibetan issue start some attention. A commission of international jurists in Geneva decided to investigate the case and arrived at the conclusion that China had already committed genocide in Tibet. Nobody did anything about it. In 1966 commenced the total devastation of Tibet, which was allowed to rave at large for ten years while the United States by the initiative of Henry Kissinger withdrew their support for the Tibetan resistance movement and abandoned Taiwan (which actually was governed by the only legal government of China), to instead start making business with Communist China and Mao Zedong, the murderer of at least 43 million of his own subjects. (Taiwan is today a developed and working democracy while China after 54 years is still the world’s greatest dictatorship.) No one did anything for Tibet except specially invited leftist writers, like Han Suyin, who wrote books about Tibet depicting China as her benefactor and liberator. The first book to criticize China from inside Tibet was not written until 1979 (John F. Avedon’s "In Exile from the Land of Snows".)

Unlike the Raoul Wallenberg case, no Chinese has ever made any Tibetan excuses or indemnified anything of the Chinese holocaust against the Tibetan people and culture, which process instead is just kept rolling on and even accelerated together with the Chinese executions, which also are speeded up after constantly quicker summary trials; while the world keeps disinterestedly looking on and lick China under her feet as if in a kind of voluntary blindness and refusal to recognize the evidence of a 50 year old political problem, which by this neglect just keeps growing, given fresh fuel and dirt today in Nepal and France; as the authorities of Nepal in spite of international law returns Tibetan refugees to China (since China pays Nepalese policemen to do this) where the fugitives consequently are maltreated and vanish; and as the French president Jacques Chirac, duped by a Chinese economical charm offensive, tries to persuade the European Community to resume the arms trade with China, which export was interrupted after the massacres by the Chinese authorities on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, June 4th 1989. For what purpose will China use those arms? Shoot more Tibetans and Uighurs? Start war against Taiwan?

One of the discussions was whether the most important film of the festival was "The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine" from Cambodia or "The Cry of the Snow Lion" from Tibet. Both were documentaries about recent genocides, and both had their Scandinavian first nights. The difference between them, however, was considerable.

The Cambodian film made by one of the rare survivors shows the automatic apparatus from the inside, set for systematic genocide without anyone being able to stop it. The film conveys an impression of maximal horror since, unlike recounts from Auschwitz, it has a more authentic touch by the fact that the real tormentors play their own parts in the film. We have only been able to look into Auschwitz after it was all over, with all the activities terminated and all the victims, living and dead, removed forever; but here the actual genocidal process goes on before our own eyes without there being anything we or the victims can do about it. The result is so heavy, that even professional and hardened self-tormentors must find it unendurable. And this occurred under a regime that was praised as an example all over the world by intellectuals of the left led by such infallible and intelligent prophets as Jean Paul Sartre, who obviously didn’t care about what Pol Pot actually was busy at.

The Khmer Rouge and their murder of 1,5 million of their own subjects is however a finished story, while the Tibetan trauma goes on and has been going on for more than 50 years. "The Cry of the Snow Lion" is an objective documentary carefully compiled during 9 years, which deals with all the important milestones on the way: "the peaceful liberation" by military force of Communist China, the introductory destruction of the monasteries and the Tibetan university system during the 50s, the starvation crisis 1959-62 because of Mao’s "agricultural reforms" which implied the deaths of 30 million Chinese during these three years only, the Tibetan uprising 1959 with Dalai Lama’s consequential escape, how after that Tibet was hermetically closed up and shut for insight from abroad for 20 years while the genocide on the Tibetans ruthlessly went on, the total destruction during the cultural revolution advocated by Mao during his last ten years, the final opening of Tibet to foreign investigation in 1979 with shocking revelations of the heartrending sufferings of a tortured people, how CIA helped the armed resistance for 15 years to then under Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon betray and abandon them, the new uprisings in Lhasa 1987 with the Chinese atrocities filmed in broad daylight and so on all the way up to the vidoeofilmed Chinese destruction of Serthar in 2002 when 9000 monks and nuns were driven away and their homes systematically destroyed. Many renowned tibetologists are interviewed in the film, you can see what John F. Avedon looks like, who wrote the first critical book against China about Tibet in 1979, Stephen Batchelor, who wrote the first truthful Tibetan guidebook, Robbie Barnett of the TIN and many other legendary authorities on the Tibetan issue. Even some Chinese are interviewed who appear like completely brainwashed dummies who have no thought of their own left in their heads but are only allowed to prattle propaganda. One of the most upsetting scenes is of a festival in Nagchu, where the Tibetans appear all dressed up flamboyantly for their festivities, but something is wrong. Not one Tibetan is smiling. In the next moment you see why: they are being watched by heavily armed troops who all have their machine guns ready. If anyone doesn’t co-operate in this propaganda manifestation of the perfect harmony between Chinese and Tibetan, he knows what to expect!

In spite of its complete neutrality, the film makes a horrendous impression by its summing up of the situation, that this has been going on since 50 years and is going on still. This systematic genocide has never relaxed for 40 years. Every day a few Tibetans disappear, every day a few fugitives cross the Himalayas into India and get chillblains and black toes on the way, every day new innocent prisoners are murdered in Chinese prisons or torture chambers somewhere, and every day there are new executions and forced sterilizations. We can not see them, they occur behind bars on a low scale, but indefatigably they keep going on without China doing anything to stop it. On the contrary, the process is constantly encouraged and urged on by Beijing, where it is officially proclaimed that it doesn’t happen with a beaming smile to charm the world, while the population of Lhasa day by day is getting less Tibetan and more Chinese, and where most Chinese are soldiers (at least 300,000 in Tibet) and implanted prostitutes (568 brothels in Lhasa 1999). The core of the Tibetan problem is that the unacceptability and injustice of the Chinese oppression only can worsen as long as nobody does anything about it. It’s worse than Chinese torture; it is the Chinese form of genocide, as slowly and as unnoticeably as possible.

The Himalayas Updated

- notes on the way, by Christian Lanciai.

There is a saying in the Himalayas, that "if man is to have a future at all, he must understand himself and his own past." Maybe that is why I keep returning to the Himalayas: in front of the face of the highest, purest and loveliest mountains in the world you stand naked, spiritually naked, and you have to confront your own nakedness and consider your situation carefully. Thus you are forced to get to know and understand yourself.

Man is much more than just his historical past. For me, the main attraction of India is her spiritual depth and the seriousness of her culture. Indian civilisation is probably the oldest in the world, it is impossible to date, but Hinduism is certainly the world's oldest living religion, and her main offspring is Buddhism. But Hinduism was born in the mountains of the Himalayas.

In the depth of the great Himalayas you find a valley called "the Valley of the Gods". It's in the heart of the land of Vishnu, but the geographical names of that area are rather of the predecessors to the well-known Indian gods Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, that is, of Rudra, Karna, Indra and others. You find these valleys and strange places in Garwhal, western Uttaranchal, where the Ganges runs up, where also the sacred pilgrimage sites Gangotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath are found, all these representing different sources of the Ganga, the holy river of India.

But no matter how sacred these places are, for many modern people and thinkers the chief place of attraction in India is Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh because of the Dalai Lama's presence there. He represents much more than just Tibetan Buddhism since he there leads an exile government of the suppressed Tibet and the persecuted Tibetan people, who today face what the Jews stood against in the Second World War. The comparison is not far-fetched, though there are differences: the Jews did not have a country of their own when the Nazi persecution set in, but the Tibetans did have their own country which never had belonged to anyone else, when the Chinese occupied it by military force and compelled many Tibetans to choose between exile or death. Many who chose to remain perished in torture chambers or labour camps, at least about 500,000, probably much more. It's not a Chinese tradition to count casualties.

For this very special situation of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetans, he appears as the leading freedom fighter of the world together with the imprisoned Aung Sang Suu Kyi of Burma, especially since both strictly follow the principle of non-violence. Their method is wisdom and patience against the cruelty and folly of mundane politics.

You can feel this inspired freedom aspiration all over Dharamsala mixed with bitter memories and painful melancholy, but the optimism is there. Just as the Nazi terror became a driving force for the Jews with their greatest dynamic expansion since the times of king David and Christ for a result, so will the communist-atheist persecution of Buddhism and the Tibetan nation and culture transform into perhaps the greatest dynamic growth of Tibetanism and Buddhism in history - for the first time Buddhism will spread into all corners of the world.

A bit further away in Himachal you find a paradise of a different kind, where you find cannabis growing all over the country wild in nature around Manali, the Kullu valley and Manikaran. Those who find the best way to enjoy life through drugs will find many hippie paradises in the eastern areas of Himachal.

Further down is Shimla, the last Indian summer capital of the British, which still retains its style and is an agreeable spot to spend some days in. Another place like that is Mussoorie above Dehra Doon, one of the nicest hill stations, which is almost exactly as the British left it. Further down is Rishikesh on the Ganges, an entirely vegetarian town with many holy men: you can't find a drop of alcohol or a piece of meat for eating in the whole town. I never heard of anyone who didn't like it in Rishikesh.

But let's move up along the river to the sources of the Ganga and to the valleys of the gods. If you follow the river up west you will eventually reach Gangotri, the traditional temple at the main source of the holy river. But this river is now being controlled by a dam, which has caused much controversy. Several towns and villages have been drowned, like Tehri, and people refused to move from their family homes through many generations to alien places until they were forced to. If an earthquake will happen here and the dam will burst, all Rishikesh will be washed away.

But the eastern arm of the river is more interesting. It's called Aliknanda, and along it you will find a richer landscape with flourishing villages and communities to a much greater extent than on the main Ganga. Another riverarm leads up to Gaurikund, from where you can walk up to the temple of Kedarnath at 3500 meters, another source of the Ganga. It is set under wild mountains in the middle of the snows and is a quite fantastic place.

But if you keep following the Aliknanda you will eventually end up in the valley of the gods, where the small town of Joshimath has perhaps the wildest and most dramatic settings found anywhere in the world. It's right in the middle of the great Himalayas, where the river bursts through the mountains in gorges which you can't see the bottom of, while the mountains rise sharply and almost vertically straight up to 7000 meters and more. One of the mountains here is the Nanda Devi, the highest mountain of India, at 7800 meters. It's a sharp top with a hunch like a camel and is a very spectacular mountain and almost impossible to climb. You see it best from Auli, a small village above Joshimath, at 3000 meters.

Of course there are lots of places around here where you can retreat and philosophise in peace and quiet, like Gandhi did in Kausani, where he wrote his autobiography. There is an ashram there in his name with a museum and is a very peaceful spot, ideal for a retreat, and you can see all the Garwhal high Himalayas from there.

Lower down and more busy is Almora, the old capital of this part of the world, with the shrine of Kesaar Devi next to it, another hippie paradise; but for me Almora is too modern and hectic. I prefer the delightful oasis of Naini Tal, a small summer town constructed around a lake, which was the first summer capital of the British in the 1820s. The style and charm of those days is still there. It's a wondrous place where Christian churches, Hindu temples, Moslem mosques and a Buddhist Tibetan monastery exist together without any problem at all; but the centre of the town is an impressing cricket field just by the water. They always play there, and loudspeakers keep informing the whole town how the game goes. Together with Dharamsala and Darjeeling, it's one of my favourite spots in India.

Darjeeling lies on the other eastern side of Nepal and is geographically Sikkimese. The British leased it from Sikkim in the 1840s to start growing tea there, and after Indian independence 1947 Nehru continued the lease contract with Sikkim and even voluntarily doubled the fee. Not until India formally occupied Sikkim in 1974 there was no need for India to continue paying the rent for Darjeeling to Sikkim.

The main reason why Indira Gandhi decided to put an end to Sikkim independence was her fear that China would do it instead. Not until this year did China accept Sikkim as a part of India, while India at the same time formally accepted Tibet as a part of China. One can't help remembering the pact between Nazi-Germany and Soviet-Russia in 1939 before they cut up Poland between themselves.

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The main characteristic of the landscape and mentality of Sikkim is softness. It is a green lush country completely dominated by its sacred mountain the majestic Kanjenjunga, who generously spreads out her hills in all directions towards the east in grand green valleys and an extremely agreeable landscape incomparable with anything else. This geographical harmony also marks the people, who perhaps are the kindest in all India. It was an independent kingdom for many centuries until India decided to incorporate it into the Indian Union, thus making sure the Chinese would not invade it. Previously, Sikkim had only had troubles with Nepal, which consistently has been rather aggressive against Sikkim; and the main population of Sikkim today are Nepalese, whereas the original Sikkim people, the Lepcha, have withdrawn more and more into a rather obscure minority.

Geographically, Darjeeling belongs to Sikkim, although its characteristic is entirely different. The name 'Dorjeling' means the 'home of the thunderbolt', and Darjeeling could be described as one of the most dramatic places in India, not only because of the very changeable and constantly surprising weather - you can have glorious sunshine in one moment to be immersed in fog the next, and then suddenly there are torrential showers and thunder. The main languages are Nepali, Hindi and Bengali, but the first language is English. More than any place in India, Darjeeling has retained its British stamp, and when Gandhi wanted to separate India from the British (and cause the secession of Pakistan, Burma and Ceylon as well) Darjeeling was not interested. Several of the small provinces east of Darjeeling shared that failure to be impressed by the activities of Gandhi, and some of them are still fighting to get rid of the Hindu dominance. The North East Territories are the most troublesome spot in India after Kashmir, and foreigners are not allowed there without special permits. The people there are mainly Christian and Burmese.

Nepal, which produced the best soldiers for the British Empire, the famous Gurkhas, and which always co-operated well with Britain although never colonised, suffered a very traumatic tragedy the other year, when the heir to the throne shot his whole family dead except his uncle, who is now king. Behind this atrocious family quarrel was much more than the heir's displeasure at his parents' not allowing him to marry the girl he wanted. He was on drugs, mainly cocaine, which his uncle had initiated him into the use of, and the terrible royal family tragedy should be seen mainly as the result of a drug psychosis on behalf of the heir, who ended the massacre by turning his gun on himself. Since then there has been no real stability in Nepal. The king, the former uncle, is conservative and has little concern for his people. Being an orthodox Hindu, he doesn't like Buddhists and Christians much, and things have not improved during his rule. On the contrary, the Maoist guerrilla warfare has increased, and it's not safe anymore for anyone to journey by road. There are police checkpoints everywhere causing much trouble and delay, traffic doesn't work at night because of the curfew, and even tourists have become robbed by bandits.

China obviously plays some part in this, since she officially supports the Nepalese central government and the royal throne while at the same time she provides the Maoist guerrilla with weapons. I have heard this from several sources. China denies this, but the weapons of the guerrillas are Chinese. China claims Tibetans smuggle them across, or that Indian communists are doing it; but the only motive behind this must be a Chinese ambition to gain more control of Nepal, like she has of Burma, where the military dictatorship firmly maintains the economic control of the country by a monopoly on drugs, mainly heroin. Only the Chinese government has accepted the military dictatorial government of Burma, backing it up with weapons. One can see Chinese control of Nepal increasing: she wants to stop the refugee flow from Tibet to Nepal, and Nepal has started to return Tibetan fugitives to China, spiting the United Nations international agreement concerning political refugees. Nepal is in a bad fix between the giants India and China with no other bordering countries except these threatening mammoth states. Of course she is afraid of both and has a difficult diplomatic balance to keep by trying not to upset or anger any of them. But whatever Nepal does to please India will anger China, and vice versa, so Nepal can do nothing to improve her relationships without causing either of her two overbearing neighbours to start threatening again.

On the other hand, every traveller I have met to Burma has praised the country and her people. The trick in visiting Burma is not to change any money at the airport but to reserve all expenses for the people, so that the military government gets nothing. It's easy to travel alone, people are extremely helpful and want to speak English with you, it's ideal for a student of Buddhism, adorer of nature and lover of idylls; and the military autocracy will of course fall sooner or later to give way to the democratic opposition led by the most admirable Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung Sang Suu Kyi, who has devoted her life solely to serve and help her people. Burma (Myanmar) is definitely a country of the future.

If there are troubles in Nepal, there are no less troubles in main India, which was manifest as I travelled through Bihar. The same kind of strikes that paralyse Nepalese traffic sometimes occur in India. I was held up seven hours on a train because a local politician had felt insulted and in anger organised the local police to stop the trains indefinitely until he had obtained an excuse; and as I travelled by bus there was a corpse on the road, which also caused the police to stop the traffic on the main road in India to the North Eastern Territories for hours. Bihar is the most notoriously criminal state of India, it is backward, illiteracy is high, it's difficult to find people who can speak English, so for us it is best avoided. The problem is that it is the heart of India, so it's difficult to avoid.

The capital Patna used to be the capital of the Indian Empire when it reached its highest expansion under the Buddhist king Ashoka the generation after Alexander the Great. It was then called Pataliputra and is still today an awesome metropolis of 3,5 million; but nothing is left of the ancient Buddhist imperial splendour - except the oasis Bodhgaya 100 kilometres to the south just off Gaya.

This is a fascinating spot where all Asia meets - here you find all Asian nationalities with Buddhist temples of their own, from Ceylon to Japan with all nations in between. The two most beautiful temples are the main Tibetan ones, but also the Thai and the Bhutan temples are startling masterpieces of architecture. Pilgrims from all over the world come here, even from the west, to study, meditate or just enjoy the peace around the Mahabodhi Stupa, built before the 7th century by the spot where the Buddha had his enlightenment, the holiest site of Buddhism in the world. It's impossible not to be impressed by the general atmosphere here of devotion, piety and respect.

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What then is to be said about Tibet and China? Let me quote the words of a good friend of mine in Darjeeling:

"Another obviousness is the absurd political existence of the China phenomenon as a single extreme monster state in a fairly democratic world, but the politicians and business men of the leading democratic countries in the west are so stupid that they keep backing up, investing in and fawning on China in the preposterous illusion that China is a golden calf to make the best and quickest money out of, while in fact the whole Chinese society stands on clay feet and is tottering as the economy might collapse at any moment, being overheated and completely corrupt. Their yuan is overrated, they invest tens of billions in megalomaniacal projects that destroy the environment instead of remedying the lacks and wants of the country; the railway to Tibet, their greatest project ever, can never pay itself off and is as absurd as the concentration camps project of Nazi Germany; and the second greatest, the Three Gorges Dam on Yangtse, may at any time burst in an earthquake causing all cities along the river to be washed away, while tens of millions of ordinary Chinese are evacuated by force to satisfy the vanity and inhumanity of the accountable bureaucrats. The situation in Tibet is the most flagrant manifestation of the hysterical madness of China. She does everything to extirpate the Tibetan people and culture to replace it with a Chinese one in order to forever confirm Chinese ownership of Tibet, while this only raises accelerating protests all over the world, highlighting China's catastrophic environmental destruction of Tibet. China is very well aware that she is making all efforts to destroy Tibet completely, and she does it on purpose, just because that villain Mao set China on that course, this Mao, whom the whole western world cherished and admired and kowtowed to just because America behaved badly in Vietnam, while everyone gladly closed their eyes to how badly Mao's China behaved in China and against their own people, the casualties being something about 150-200 million including all enforced abortions. China even opened fire against their own people on Tiananmen Square in the middle of the capital Beijing on June 4th 1989 - never has the cruelty and inhumanity of the governing party of China more clearly showed the nature of its real face of only cynical inhumanity and vanity; and still the Chinese continue to adore and cherish Mao and follow its beastly governing party, as if they refused to realise the obviousness of its absolutely and unacceptably criminal existence."

So the problem is not Tibet. The problem is China, and Tibet has wrongly been made to suffer for it.

But there is one more country in the Himalayas, which I have not dwelt on and even less been to visit - Bhutan. In a humdrum ordinary Indian canteen among locals I met a young lonely German lady with glasses who had been to Bhutan not as a tourist but on a special invitation and mission and thus got around the necessity to pay for her existence there by $200 a day. She described Bhutan as the last Himalayan paradise - still completely segregated and untouched by the vitiation of modernism, mass tourism and mass immigration as well as completely free from civil wars and political crises - the monarchy still retains all power, and it’s probably best that way. It’s just to hope for the country’s continued virginity and that she may continue like that in her own style as long as possible.

So there are still hidden and unknown Shangri-La-like paradises in the Himalayas although you have to search for them and they are getting more difficult to find. But they will always be there, they always were basically inaccessible, since they always were reserved for only those who really make an effort.

Thereby this Himalayan report is concluded for this time with this journey.

Christian Lanciai, five weeks in October-November, 2003.

No matter how China keeps on defending her occupation of Tibet, China can never escape the fact that she methodically carried through as complete a destruction of the Tibetan cultural heritage, civilisation and identity as possible with permanent violence during 20 years 1956-76, which included the complete destruction of 6246 temples and monasteries together with the looting of their art treasures and the burning of their sacred scriptures - 40% of all Tibetan literature in the form of hand manuscripts were burned. As if this was not enough, the Chinese starvation catastrophe 1959-62 was also forced upon Tibet, during which 40 million Chinese perished due to the mismanagement of the Chinese communist regime and its political measures of madness to enforce a poorly planned industrialisation which generally failed. In Tibet the farmers were forced to cease the cultivation of barley to sow wheat instead, which could not grow in Tibet, which they found out when it was too late. Tibet had never before suffered from famine.

Of course, Mao Zedong was chiefly responsible for all this, but his communist party is equally responsible, since it is still today applying the same policy towards Tibet by a brutal occupation force which marginalizes and discriminates the Tibetan people in order to gradually outmanoeuvre and replace it with Chinese. The Chinese mass immigration in Tibet is enforced by the government and runs over the Tibetans, who are excluded from the education and human rights which according to the regime are reserved only for loyalist Chinese.

As if this was not enough, China has also ruthlessly exploited the Tibetan natural resources of forests and minerals to replenish their own treasuries without giving the Tibetans one cent and to leave behind a totally clean-cut and plundered country with subsequent ecological disasters in the form of erosion and deluge, since the forests which earlier bound the earth no longer exist. The short-sightedness of this reckless exploitation has resulted in ecological catastrophes in all countries which have rivers coming down from Tibet, that is India with Sutlej and Brahmaputra, and the countries in Further India with Salween and Mekong, including China itself of course with Hwang Ho and Yangtse Kiang.

As if this was not enough, China has also interfered with the Tibetan theocratic reincarnation succession system by enforcing a Panchen Lama of its own choice on Tibet (the second highest spiritual leader of Tibet) although the regime is atheist and officially denies the possible existence of anything spiritual. Mao himself professed that all religion was poison, and still his communist party claims the right and competence to decide and establish reincarnations. An actual Panchen Lama was found by Tibetan monks in the traditional way according to ancient rules, which Panchen Lama immediately was abducted by the Chinese together with his whole family, the fates of which are still unknown today after eight years; while the Chinese instead established a boy from a communist family loyal to the regime, a Panchen Lama without any ties or any contact with the Tibetans.

As if this was not enough, the Chinese have also reduced the Tibetan people in Tibet with one fifth mainly through mass executions, (just during a few months in 1959 some 80,000 Tibetans were murdered according to actual Chinese statistics,) mass internment in concentration camps and the forcing of 130,000 Tibetans into exile from their home country - still today some 1500-3000 Tibetans annually are forced to flee across the Himalayas under inhuman hardship because of the constantly harder thumb-screws on Tibet. China annually carries out more executions by its jurisdiction than the whole of the rest of the world together. Compare such a jurisdiction of summary trials and executions on a mass scale with those few individuals who were treated badly by the old Tibetan society. Did China have any right to enforce on Tibet her much more efficient, severe and brutal jurisdiction?

The historical judgement on China and her now 55 year-old communist one-sidedly atheist terror regime must be severe, extremely severe, since there is no excuse for it. The only defence for China is that primitivism and very small portion of violence which took place in old Tibet; but violence is never an excuse for violence, and China’s outrage has been a million times worse, deeper, more brutal, more unjust and more inhuman. China destroyed the Tibetan monasteries by dynamiting and aeroplane bombings, (for instance Ganden, Tsurphu and Lithang, three of the most important,) as if the monasteries were strongly armed fortresses, with the excuse that they were power centres that had to be destroyed. But the Tibetans were the last people on earth who bothered about power, and all the power that existed in the monasteries was knowledge. China replaced it by their power, which was only violence and oppression.

The Chinese power complex is universally criminal and started already with the emperor Shih Hwang Ti, the idol of Mao Zedong, who sacrificed a fifth of his country’s population in building the Chinese wall and who tried to burn all the books in his country in an effort to make Chinese history start with himself. But vanity is powerless against truth, and historical criticism can never be silenced. Shih Hwang Ti and Mao Zedong were the worst murderers and oppressors in Chinese history, and nothing can alter that fact, since they are both long since dead without having done anything to pay for their crimes; while the terrible results of their lives’ work are being carried on by the monstrous Chinese power complex, which in vain nourishes itself through artificial breathing in the form of lies in an insane effort to excuse a universal violence and outrage which never can be excused.

Who wants to be part of such a China? At least no sensible or decent human being.

by Michael Trend, Daily Telegraph

(Filed: 24/04/2005)

This document was discovered last week on a photocopier of the State Council in Beijing and passed to me by a concerned official.

"Dear Tibet,

The People's Republic of China has, as you will have noticed, recently been insisting that Japan should repent for historical wrongs. Anxious not to be accused of hypocrisy and double standards, we have decided to set a good example by writing to you now to repent of our wrongdoing in your country.

It is a matter of much regret to us that we invaded your country in 1950. In particular, we offer a full apology for the way in which we put down the popular uprising of 1959, during which we recorded, in one of our own army documents, 87,000 deaths through military action (although this figure did not include, as has since been pointed out to us, those Tibetans who died at that time as a result of suicide, torture and starvation).

We also ask forgiveness for the hundreds of thousands of other Tibetans who have died since that time as a result of our deliberate policies. That we forcibly sterilised so many Tibetan women and subjected so many others to mandatory abortion is now a matter of deep shame for us. We unreservedly apologise to those women who have been raped, especially those, including nuns, detained in prison.

 Indeed we are very sorry that we have held so many people in prison over the years. We deplore our lamentable failure to recognise the basic human rights of the Tibetans. We deeply regret our use of false detention and torture. Consequently, we will immediately release Tenzin Delek Rinpoche and all other political prisoners from jail and we undertake to return the Panchen Lama, whom we abducted 10 years ago, to Tibet.

Likewise, our abuse of Tibet's natural resources causes us great unease. What fools we were so aggressively to deforest such large tracts of your country. The effects of this for your ecology and economy are highly disturbing to us. Moreover, we now view with profound distress the destruction of almost all of your religious buildings during the Cultural Revolution. We confess that one of the main reasons why we have recently allowed some of these to be rebuilt is our desire to encourage dollar tourism.

We wish to withdraw our entirely fallacious argument that Tibet is an inalienable part of the Motherland. We recognise that the Tibetan people are a completely separate race from the Han Chinese, with their own history, language and culture, and have a right to autonomy. We acknowledge the leadership of the Tibetan people of the Dalai Lama, and offer him our warmest congratulations on the important reforms he has made in modernising and democratising Tibet's government in exile.

Above all, we recognise the most important contribution His Holiness has made to help us move away from our regrettable past. We now much appreciate the way he has insisted that his people deal with us only in a peaceful manner rather than follow the usual course of the oppressed with bombs and bullets. How much better it would be if all governments of the world actually practised what they preached in this regard and actively negotiated with the men of peace and stood up to the men of violence - rather than vice versa.

Moreover, we have taken to heart His Holiness's wise and generous advice on the serious problems we face reassuring the rest of the world that we are a peaceful, responsible, constructive and forward-looking modern country. We accept that our hosting of the Olympic Games in 2008 and the International World's Fair and Exposition in 2010 will not help dispel the concerns, suspicions and fears that the world feels as we emerge as a regional and global power. We now fully understand the need urgently to address the lack of basic civil and political rights and freedoms of our citizens, especially with regard to minorities.

We recognise that there are many other distinct peoples and religious groups we have abused in recent years, but our treatment of Tibet is a particular sorrow to us. We understand that the Dalai Lama has given us an opportunity to put right the wrongs of the past, an opportunity that might never come again.

We are, therefore, now committed to withdraw the ridiculous preconditions for the negotiations we have been holding with his representatives and move forward. We understand that it is ludicrous for us to insist that the Tibetans first agree to our desired conclusions of the talks before they even begin.

We have told many lies about Tibet. These lies have covered the revolting use of coercive power that we have deployed in your country for more than half a century. We now want to be open and honest about the past, recognising that violence and lying are inextricably tied together. We apologise; we will stop the violence and the lying; we will set the record straight.

Yours etc,

The People's Republic of China"

In Haitian folklore, zombies are people reanimated from near death and enslaved to the witch doctor that revived them. Could it be that China's leaders are taking their cues from Haiti?

From Burma to Nepal to Zimbabwe, China is providing political, diplomatic, and security support to failing dictatorships. Beijing gives just enough help for the dictator to survive sanctions and domestic popular revolts, while the PRC gains a dependent state.

The faux-Communist witch doctors of Beijing are not propping up these unsuccessful governments for ideological reasons - quite the opposite. Nepal is an absolute monarchy, Burma is a military dictatorship, and Zimbabwe is governed by a once democratically chosen leader gone bad. In repayment for reanimating these near-dead regimes, the PRC is demanding - and getting - obedience to its nationalistic policies of creating strategic space around China, isolating Taiwan, securing critical resources, and guaranteeing markets for Chinese products.

The partial enslavement of the zombie countries is clearly demonstrated in China's newest acquisition, Nepal. Nepal is struggling through a bloody civil war with Maoist rebels. The Maoists have managed to gain the upper hand in a large part of the country and can, on occasion, isolate Katmandu. King Gyanendra's response to his failing counter-insurgency strategy was to dissolve the government and declare his monarchy absolute. He then ordered the Nepalese security forces to suppress all opposition. Consequently, India, the United States and Britain all condemned the king's actions and cut off military aid to Nepal. China stepped up with a zombie-making potion of political acceptance and security assistance.

China's Foreign Minister, Li Zaoxing, visited Nepal and declared that the King's seizure of power was "an internal matter for Nepal." For his part, King Gyanendra announced that "China is a reliable friend of Nepal." On April 22-24, Gyanendra will visit China for an economic conference, his first visit abroad since he seized power.

In exchange for Beijing's diplomatic support, Nepal is turning on its defenseless Tibetan refugees. China's ambassador declared that "Nepal is very important to the stability and prosperity of Tibet." King Gynandera replied to the Foreign Minister that "Nepal firmly supports the one-China policy of your government and will never allow any anti-China activities in Nepal's territory." Gyanendra subsequently shut down offices representing the Tibetan government-in-exile that had operated in Nepal since 1960 and began a pogrom of persecution of Tibetan refugees that included forced repatriations.

Furthermore, China is enslaving Nepal's economy as well. China is among the top-five donor countries to Nepal, but Chinese aid is largely aimed at supporting Chinese businesses and tapping Nepal's natural resources to the exclusion of Nepalese businesses. Nepal had been pushing for more equal trade terms to counteract its enormous trade imbalance with China, but since Gyanendra took over the country concrete remedies have failed to materialize.

Zimbabwe's descent to zombie status is no more mysterious than Gyanendra's near-death experience. Zimbabwe is a resource-rich southern African nation, suffering a major economic crisis, with inflation at 400 percent and unemployment at about 70 percent. Zimbabwe's per-capita income has nosedived over the past eight years from $682 in 1998 to $521 in 2002. President Robert Mugabe abused his office to suppress opposition parties and maintain his grip on power. His ruling party won an overwhelming victory in March 2005 in elections not believed to be free or fair by most Western countries.

Amid sanctions imposed by the European Union and the United States, China delivered $240 million in military goods to Zimbabwe including thousands of AK-47 assault rifles, riot gear, and mobile water cannons. Mugabe's security forces used the weapons to break up opposition political rallies and demonstrations. Beijing also provided radio-jamming equipment to Harare, thwarting pro-democracy broadcasts during the last "election" campaign.

In return for China's military equipment, President Mugabe is said to have promised China land and access to mineral resources. In November 2004, Wu Bangguo, chairman of the standing committee of China's National People's congress, paid a visit to Zimbabwe and signed six economic agreements.
Emmerson Mnangagwa, speaker of the Zimbabwean national assembly said the national assembly would lay down laws to ensure that high priority be given to the Chinese enterprises.

Although there are no Tibetan refugees to persecute in Zimbabwe, Mugabe does his best to please his new master by helping to isolate Taiwan. The ministry of foreign affairs of Zimbabwe said in March 2005 that Zimbabwe firmly supports China's anti-secession law, which authorizes the use of military force to prevent Taiwanese independence.

Burma and North Korea have been zombies so long that they may now be in permanent vegetative states, but the persistence of these two regimes beyond their long-expected demise is a clear demonstration of the efficacy of China's policy. Burma has been under strict international sanctions since it violently suppressed a popular revolt in 1988, but there is no sign of the junta's imminent collapse. North Korea's economy completely failed in the 1990s, starving to death an estimated 1.5 million people, but Kim Jong Il blithely clings to power and is grooming his son as a successor.

Forced to compete with the American model of representative democracy, the government of the People's Republic of China offers the third world a non-ideological choice - liberty or tyranny. Of course, Beijing does not offer this option to the third world's people, who no doubt yearn for freedom and prosperity. Instead, the Chinese vision appeals only to failed despots whose regimes can survive only with Chinese resuscitation - the Zombies.

- Dana Dillon is a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

These excerpts constitute about 5% of the original texts.

"Throughout its 80-plus years, everything the CCP has touched has been marred with lies, wars, famine, tyranny, massacre and terror. Traditional faiths and principles have been violently destroyed. Original ethical concepts and social structures have been disintegrated by force. Empathy, love and harmony among people have been twisted into struggle and hatred. Veneration and appreciation of the heaven and earth have been replaced by an arrogant desire to "fight with heaven and earth." The result has been a total collapse of social, moral and ecological systems, and a profound crisis for the Chinese people, and indeed for humanity. All these calamities have been brought about through the deliberate planning, organization, and control of the CCP.

Non-communist societies generally consider humanity’s dual nature of good and evil and they rely on fixed social contracts to maintain a balance in society. In communist societies, however, the very concept of human nature is denied, and neither good nor evil is acknowledged. Eliminating the concepts of good and evil, according to Marx, serves to completely overthrow the superstructure of the old society.

Communism has done many things with absolute cruelty. The CCP promised the intellectuals a "heaven on earth." Later it labeled them "rightist" and put them into the infamous ninth category of persecuted people, alongside landlords and spies. It deprived landlords and capitalists of their property, exterminated the landlord and rich peasant classes, destroyed rank and order in the countryside, took authority away from local figures, kidnapped and extorted bribes from the richer people, brainwashed war prisoners, "reformed" industrialists and capitalists, infiltrated the KMT and disintegrated it, split from the Communist International and betrayed it, cleaned out all dissidents through successive political movements after it came to power in 1949, and threatened its own members with coercion. Everything it did left no leeway.

The above-mentioned occurrences were all based on the CCP’s theory of genocide. Its every political movement in the past was a campaign of terror with genocidal intent. The CCP started to build its theoretical system of genocide at its early stage as a composite of its theories on class, revolution, struggle, violence, dictatorship, movements, and political parties. It encompasses all of the experiences it has embraced and accumulated through its various genocidal practices.

The essential expression of CCP genocide is the extermination of conscience and independent thought. In this way a ‘reign of terror’ serves the fundamental interests of the CCP. The CCP will not only eliminate you if you are against it, but it may also destroy you even if you are for it. It will eliminate whomever it deems should be eliminated. Consequently, everyone lives in the shadow of terror and fears the CCP.

A veteran official who had suffered torments in the Yan’an Rectification movement recalled that when he was under intense pressure, dragged and forced to confess, the only thing he could do was to betray his own conscience and make up lies. At first, he felt bad to be implicating and framing his fellow comrades. He hated himself so much that he wanted to end his life. Coincidentally, a gun had been placed on the table. He grabbed it, pointed it at his head and pulled the trigger. The gun had no bullets! The person who investigated him walked in and said, "It’s good that you admitted what you’ve done was wrong. The Party’s policies are lenient." The Communist Party would know that you had reached your limit, know that you were "loyal" to the Party, so you had passed the test. The CCP always first puts one in a deathtrap and then enjoys one’s every pain and humiliation. When one reaches the limit and just wishes for death, the Party would "kindly" come out to show one a way to live. It is said "better a live coward than a dead hero." One becomes so grateful to the Party as one’s savior. Years later, this official learned about Falun Gong, a Qigong and cultivation practice that started in China. He felt the practice to be good. When the persecution of Falun Gong started in 1999, however, his painful memories of the past revisited him, and he no longer dared to say that Falun Gong was good.

The experience of China’s last Emperor Pu-Yi was similar to this officer’s. Imprisoned in the CCP’s cells and seeing people killed one after another, he thought that he would die soon. In order to live, he allowed himself to be brainwashed and cooperated with the prison guards. Later, he wrote an autobiography The First Half of My Life, which was used by the CCP as a successful example of ideological remolding.

Today the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s violence and abuses are even more severe than those of the tyrannical Qin Dynasty. The CCP’s philosophy is one of "struggle," and the CCP’s rule has been built upon a series of "class struggles," "path struggles," and "ideological struggles," both in China and toward other nations. Mao Zedong, the first CCP leader of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), put it bluntly by saying, "What can Emperor Qin Shihuang brag about? He only killed 460 Confucian scholars, but we killed 46,000 intellectuals. There are people who accuse us of practicing dictatorship like Emperor Qin Shihuang and we admit it all. It fits the reality. It is a pity that they did not give us enough credit, so we need to add to it."

In 2004, the China Information Center analyzed a survey done by the China Sina Net, and the results show that 82.6 percent of Chinese youth agreed that one can abuse women, children and prisoners during a war. This result is shocking. But it reflects the Chinese people’s mindset, and especially that of the younger generation, who lack a basic understanding of either the traditional cultural concept of benevolent rule or the notion of universal humanity.

On September 11, 2004, a man fanatically slashed 28 children with a knife in Suzhou City. On the 20th of the same month, a man in Shandong Province injured 25 elementary school students with a knife. Some elementary school teachers forced students to make firecrackers by hand to raise funds for the school, resulting in an explosion in which students died.

Recently, to promote the Forest Law, the State Bureau of Forestry and all its stations and forest protection offices strictly ordered a standard amount of slogans to be put out. Not reaching the quota would be treated as not accomplishing the task. As a result, local government offices posted a large number of slogans, including "Whoever burns the mountains goes to prison." In the administration of birth control in recent years, there have been even scarier slogans such as, "If one person violates the law, the whole village will be sterilized," "Rather another tomb than another baby," or, "If he did not have a vasectomy as he should, his house will be torn down; if she did not have an abortion as she should, her cows and rice fields will be confiscated." There were more slogans that violate human rights and the Constitution, such as "You will sleep in prison tomorrow if you don’t pay taxes today."

Was the long-term struggle to keep the CCP members free from corruption? No. 55 years after the CCP has been in power, corruption, embezzlement, unlawful conduct, and acts that damage the nation and the people are still widespread among the CCP officials throughout the country. In recent years, among the total number of approximately 20 million party officials in China, eight million have been tried and punished for crimes related to corruption. Each year, about one million people complain to higher authorities about the corrupt officials who have not been investigated. From January to September of 2004, the China Foreign Exchange Bureau investigated cases of illegal foreign exchange clearance in 35 banks and 41 companies, and found US$120 million in illegal transactions. According to statistics in recent years, no less than 4,000 CCP officials have escaped China with embezzled money, and their stolen funds from the state add up to tens of billions of U.S dollars.

Engels stated that everything during or before the Middle Ages had to justify its existence before the trial of human rationality. As he made this remark, he regarded himself and Marx to be judges in such a trial. Mikhail Bakunin, an anarchist and friend of Marx, commented on Marx this way, "He appeared to be God to people. He cannot tolerate anyone else as God except himself. He wanted people to worship him as they would God, and pay homage to him as their idol. Otherwise, he would subject them to verbal attack or persecution."

The brutal tortures used on Falun Gong practitioners are many and varied. Beating, whipping, electric shock torture, freezing, tying with ropes, handcuffing and shackling for extended periods, burning with open flame, lit cigarettes or hot irons, being cuffed and hung up, being forced to stand or kneel down for a long time, being jabbed with bamboo sticks or metal wires, sexual abuse, and rape are just a handful of examples. In October 2000, guards at the Masanjia Forced Labor Camp in Liaoning province stripped the clothes completely off 18 female Falun Gong practitioners and threw them into the prison cells for male inmates to rape and abuse at will. All these crimes have been documented in full and are too numerous to list.

Another common form, among many, of inhumane torture is the abusive use of "psychiatric treatment." Normal, rational, and healthy Falun Gong practitioners have been unlawfully locked up in psychiatric facilities and injected with unknown drugs capable of destroying a person’s central nervous system. Some practitioners, as a result, have suffered partial or complete paralysis. Some have lost the sight in both eyes or lost hearing in both ears. Some have experienced the destruction of muscles or internal organs. Some have lost part or all of their memory and become mentally retarded. The internal organs of some practitioners have been severely injured. Some have suffered complete mental collapse. Some even died shortly after being injected with the drugs.

Statistics indicate that cases of Falun Gong practitioners being persecuted with "psychiatric treatment" have spread to 23 out of 33 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities under the direct leadership of the central government in China. At least 100 psychiatric facilities at the provincial, city, county or district level have engaged in the persecution. Based on the number and distribution of these cases, it is clear that the abuse of psychiatric drugs on Falun Gong practitioners has been a well-planned, systematically carried out, top-down policy. At least 1,000 mentally healthy Falun Gong practitioners were sent to psychiatric facilities or drug rehabilitation centers against their will. Many of

them were forcibly injected or force-fed numerous drugs capable of destroying someone’s nervous system. These Falun Gong practitioners were also tied with ropes and tortured with electric shock. At least 15 of them died from excessive abuse alone.

The traditional "scholarly class," exemplars of social morality, was thus obliterated.

Mao Zedong said, "What can Emperor Qin Shi Huang brag about? He only killed 460 Confucian scholars, but we killed 46,000 intellectuals. In our suppression of counter-revolutionaries, didn’t we kill some counter-revolutionary intellectuals as well? I argued with the pro-democratic people who accused us of acting like Emperor Qin Shi Huang. I said they were wrong. We surpassed him by a hundred times. "

Indeed, Mao did more than kill the intellectuals. More grievously, he destroyed their minds and hearts.

Since 1949, the CCP has persecuted more than half the people in China. An estimated 60 million to 80 million people died from unnatural causes. This number exceeds the total number of deaths in both World Wars combined.

By the end of 1952, the CCP-published number of the executed "reactionary elements" was about 2.4 million. Actually, the total death toll of former KMT government officials below the county level and landowners was at least 5 million.

The capitalists could not possibly afford to pay such "taxes" even with all their fortunes. They had no other choice but to end their lives, but they didn’t dare to jump into the Huangpu River. If their bodies could not be found, the CCP would accuse them of fleeing to Hong Kong, and their family members would still be held responsible for the taxes. The capitalists instead jumped from tall buildings, leaving a corpse so that the CCP could see proof of their death. It was said that people didn’t dare to walk next to tall buildings in Shanghai at that time in fear of being crushed by people jumping from above.

According to Facts of the Political Campaigns after the Founding of the People’s Republic of China co-edited by four government units including the CCP History Research Center in 1996, during the "Three Anti Campaign" and "Five Anti Campaign," more than 323,100 people were arrested and over 280 committed suicide or disappeared. In the "Anti-Hu Fang campaign" in 1955, over 5000 were incriminated, over 500 were arrested, over 60 committed suicide, and 12 died from unnatural causes. In the subsequent suppression of the reactionaries, over 21,300 people were executed, and over 4,300 committed suicide or disappeared.

Facts of the Political Campaigns after the Founding of the People’s Republic of China reported that, "In May 1984, after 31 months of intensive investigation, verification and recalculation by the Central Committee of the CCP, the figures related to the Cultural Revolution were: over 4.2 million people were detained and investigated; over 1,728,000 people died of unnatural causes; over 135,000 people were labeled as counter-revolutionaries and executed; over 237,000 people were killed and over 7.03 million were disabled in armed attacks; and 71,200 families were destroyed." Statistics compiled from county annals show that 7.73 million people died of unnatural causes during the Cultural Revolution.

When recommending the book Enemy Within by Father Raymond J. De Jaegher, former U.S. President Hoover commented that the book exposed the naked terror of communist movements. He would recommend it to anyone who was willing to understand such an evil force in this world.

In this book, De Jaegher told stories about how the CCP used violence to terrify people into submission. For instance, one day the CCP required everyone to go to the square in the village. Teachers led the children to the square from school. The purpose for the gathering was to watch the killing of 13 patriotic young men. After announcing the fabricated charges against the victims, the CCP ordered the horrified teacher to lead the children to sing patriotic songs. Appearing on the stage amid the songs were not dancers, but rather an executioner holding a sharp knife in his hands. The executioner was a fierce, robust young communist soldier with strong arms. The soldier went behind the first victim, quickly raised a big sharp knife and struck downwards, and the first head fell to the ground. Blood sprayed out like a fountain as the head rolled on the ground. The children's hysterical singing turned into chaotic screaming and crying. The teacher kept the beat, trying to keep the songs going; her bell was heard ringing over and over in the chaos.

The executioner chopped 13 times and 13 heads fell to the ground. After that, many communist soldiers came over, cut the victims' chests open and took out their hearts for a feast. All the brutality was done in front of the children. The children went all pale due to the terror, and some started throwing up. The teacher scolded the soldiers, and lined the children up to return to school.

After that, Father De Jaegher often saw children being forced to watch killings. The children became used to the bloody scenes and numb to the killing; some even started to enjoy the excitement.

When the CCP felt that simple killing was not horrifying and exciting enough, they invented all kinds of cruel tortures. For example, forcing someone to swallow a large amount of salt without letting him drink any water—the victim would suffer until he died of thirst; or stripping someone naked and forcing him to roll on broken glass; or creating a hole in a frozen river in the winter, then throwing the victim into the hole—the victim would either freeze to death or drown.

De Jaegher wrote that a CCP member in Shanxi province invented a terrible torture. One day when he was wandering in the city, he stopped in front of a restaurant and stared at a big boiling vat. Later he purchased several giant vats, and immediately arrested some people who were against the communist party. During the hasty trial, the vats were filled with water and heated to boiling. Three victims were stripped naked and thrown into the vats to boil to death after the trial. At Pingshan, De Jaegher witnessed a father being skinned alive. The CCP members forced the son to watch and participate in the inhumane torture, to see his father die in excruciating pain and listen to his father's screams. The CCP members poured vinegar and acid onto the father's body and then all his skin was quickly peeled off. They started from the back, then up to the shoulders and soon the skin from his whole body was peeled off, leaving only the skin on the head intact. His father died in minutes.

After gaining absolute control over the country, the CCP did not end its violence at all. During the Cultural Revolution, such violence became worse.

On August 18, 1966, Mao Zedong met with the Red Guard representatives on the tower of Tiananmen Square. Song Binbin, daughter of communist leader Song Renqiong, put a Red Guard sleeve emblem on Mao. When Mao learned of Song Binbin's name, which means gentle and polite, he said, "We need more violence." Song therefore changed her name to Song Yaowu (literally meaning "want violence.")

Violent armed attacks soon spread quickly to the whole country. The younger generation educated in communist atheism had no fears or concerns. Under the direct leadership of the CCP and guided by Mao's instructions, the Red Guards, being fanatic, ignorant, and holding themselves above the law, started beating people and ransacking homes nationwide. In many areas, all the "five black classes" (landlords, rich farmers, reactionaries, bad elements, and rightists) and their family members were eradicated according to a policy of genocide. A typical example was Daxing County near Beijing, where from August 27 to September 1 of 1966, a total of 325 people were killed in 48 brigades of 13 People’s Communes. The oldest killed was 80 years old, and the youngest only 38 days. Twenty-two entire households were killed with no one left.

Beating a person to death was a common scene. On Shatan Street, a group of male Red Guards tortured an old woman with metal chains and leather belts until she could not move any more, and still a female Red Guard jumped on her body and stomped on her stomach. The old woman died at the scene. … Near Chongwenmeng, when the Red Guards searched the home of a "landlord's wife" (a lonely widow), they forced each neighbor to bring a pot of boiling water to the scene and they poured the boiling water down the old lady's collar until her body was cooked. Several days later, the old lady was found dead in the room, her body covered with maggots. … There were many different ways of killing, including beating to death with batons, cutting with sickles and strangling to death with ropes. … The way to kill babies was the most brutal: the killer stepped on one leg of a baby and pulled the other leg, tearing the baby in half. (Investigation of Daxing Massacre by Yu Luowen)

The Guangxi cannibalism was even more inhumane than the Daxing Massacre. Writer Zheng Yi, author of the book Scarlet Memorial described the cannibalism as progressing in three stages.

The first was the beginning stage when the terror was covert and gloomy. County annals documented a typical scene: at midnight, the killers tip-toed to find their victim and cut him open to remove his heart and liver. Because they were inexperienced and scared, they took his lung by mistake, then they had to go back again. Once they had cooked the heart and liver, some people brought liquor from home, some brought seasoning, and then all the killers ate the human organs in silence by the light of the fire in the oven.

The second stage was the peak, when the terror became open and public. During this stage, veteran killers had gained experience in how to remove hearts and livers while the victim was still alive, and they taught others, refining their techniques to perfection. For example when cutting open a living person, the killers only needed to cut a cross on the victim's belly, step on his body (if the victim was tied to a tree, the killers would bump his lower abdomen with the knee) and the heart and other organs would just fall out. The head killer was entitled to the heart, liver and genitals while others would take what was left. These grand yet dreadful scenes were adorned with flying flags and slogans.

The third stage was crazed. Cannibalism became a massive widespread movement. In Wuxuan County, like wild dogs eating corpses during an epidemic, people were madly eating other people. Often victims were first "publicly criticized," which was always followed by killing, and then cannibalism. As soon as a victim fell to the ground, dead or alive, people took out the knives they had prepared and surrounded the victim, cutting any body part they could get hold of. At this stage, ordinary citizens were all involved in the cannibalism. The hurricane of "class struggle" blew away any sense of sin and human nature from people’s minds. Cannibalism spread like an epidemic and people enjoyed cannibalistic feasts. Any part of the human body was edible, including the heart, meat, liver, kidneys, elbows, feet, and tendons. Human bodies were cooked in many different ways including boiling, steaming, stir-frying, baking, frying and barbecuing … People drank liquor or wine and played games while eating human bodies. During the peak of this movement, even the cafeteria of the highest government organization, Wuxuan County Revolutionary Committee, offered human dishes.

Readers should not mistakenly think such a festival of cannibalism was purely an unorganized behavior by the people. The CCP was a totalitarian organization controlling every single cell of the society. Without the CCP's encouragement and manipulation, the cannibalism movement could not have happened at all.

The internal fights of communist parties are well known. All members of the Politburo of the Russian Communist Party in the first two terms, except Lenin, who had died, and Stalin himself, were executed or committed suicide. Three of the five marshals were executed, three of the five Commanders-in-Chief were executed, all 10 of the secondary army Commanders-in-Chief were executed, 57 of the 85 army corps commanders were executed, and 110 of the 195 division commanders were executed.

Liu Shaoqi, a former Chinese president who was once the No. 2 figure in the nation, died miserably. On the day of his 70th birthday, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai specifically told Wang Dongxing (Mao’s lead guard) to bring Liu Shaoqi a birthday present, a radio, in order to let him hear the official report of the Eighth Plenary Session of the twelfth Central Committee, which said, "Forever expel the traitor, spy, and renegade Liu Shaoqi from the Party and continue to expose and criticize Liu Shaoqi and his accomplices’ crimes of betrayal and treason."

Liu Shaoqi was crushed mentally and his illnesses rapidly deteriorated. Because he was tied to the bed for a long time and could not move, his neck, back, hip, and heels had painful festering bedsores. When he felt great pain he would grab some clothes, articles, or other people’s arms, and not let go, so people simply put a hard plastic bottle into each of his hands. When he died, the two hard plastic bottles had become hourglass shaped from his gripping.

By October 1969, Liu Shaoqi’s body had started to rot all over and the infected pus had a strong odor. He was as thin as a rail and on the verge of death. But the special inspector from the central Party committee did not allow him to take a shower or turn over his body to change his clothes. Instead, they stripped off all his clothes, wrapped him in a quilt, sent him by air from Beijing to Kaifeng city, and locked him up in the basement of a solid blockhouse. When he had high fever, they not only did not give him medication, but also transferred the medical personnel away. When Liu Shaoqi died, his body had completely degenerated, and he had disheveled white hair that was two feet long. Two days later, at midnight, he was cremated as a person with a highly infectious disease. His bedding, pillow and other things left behind were all cremated. Liu’s death card reads: Name: Liu Weihuang; occupation: unemployed; reason for death: disease. The CCP tortured the president of the nation to death like this without even giving a clear reason.

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Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge only existed for four years in Cambodia. Nevertheless, from 1975 to 1978, more than two million people, including over 200,000 Chinese, were killed in this small country that had a population of only eight million people.

The Khmer Rouge’s crimes are countless, but we will not discuss them here. We must, however, talk about its relationship with the CCP.

Pol Pot worshipped Mao Zedong. Beginning in 1965, he visited China four times to listen to Mao Zedong’s teachings in person. As early as November 1965, Pol Pot stayed in China for three months. Chen Boda and Zhang Chunqiao discussed with him theories such as "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," "class struggle," "dictatorship of the proletariat," and so on. Later, these became the basis for how he ruled Cambodia. After returning to Cambodia, Pol Pot changed the name of his party to the Cambodian Communist Party and established revolutionary bases according to the CCP’s model of encircling cities from the countryside.

In 1968, the Cambodian Communist Party officially established an army. At the end of 1969, it had slightly more than 3,000 people. But in 1975, before attacking and occupying the city of Phnom Penh, it had become a well equipped and brave fighting force of 80,000 soldiers. This was completely due to the CCP’s support. The book Documentary of Supporting Vietnam and Fighting with America by Wang Xiangen says that in 1970 China gave Pol Pot armed equipment for 30,000 soldiers. In April 1975, Pol Pot took the capital of Cambodia, and two months later, he went to Beijing to pay a visit to the CCP and listen to instructions. Obviously, if the Khmer Rouge’s killing had not been backed by the CCP’s theories and material support, it could not have been done.

For example, after Prince Sihanouk’s two sons were killed by the Cambodian Communist Party, the Cambodian Communist Party obediently sent Sihanouk to Beijing on Zhou Enlai’s orders. It was well known that when the Cambodian Communist Party killed people, they would "even kill the fetus" to prevent any possible troubles in the future. But at Zhou Enlai’s request, Pol Pot obeyed without protest.

Zhou Enlai could save Sihanouk with one word, but the CCP did not object to the more than 200,000 Chinese who were killed by the Cambodian Communist Party. At that time, the Chinese Cambodians went to the Chinese embassy for help, but the embassy ignored them.

In May 1998, when a large-scale killing and raping of ethnic Chinese took place in Indonesia, the CCP did not say a word. It did not offer any help, and even blocked the news inside China. It seems that the Chinese government couldn’t care less about the fate of overseas Chinese; it did not even offer any humanitarian assistance.

Besides the number of deaths, we have no way of knowing how many people became disabled, mentally ill, enraged, depressed, or frightened to death through the persecution they suffered. Every single death is a bitter tragedy that leaves everlasting agony to the family members of the victims.

As the Japan-based Yomiuri News once reported, the Chinese central government conducted a survey on the casualties inflicted during the Cultural Revolution in 29 provinces and municipalities directly under the Central Government. Results showed that nearly 600 million people were persecuted or incriminated during the Cultural Revolution, which comprises about half of China’s population.

Stalin once said that the death of one man is a tragedy, but the death of one million is merely a statistic. When told that many people starved to death in Sichuan province, Li Jingquan, the former Party Secretary of Sichuan Province, remarked, "Which dynasty didn’t have people die?" Mao Zedong said, "Casualties are inevitable for any struggle. Death often occurs." This is the atheist communists’ view on life. That’s why 20 million people died as a result of persecution during Stalin’s regime, which constitutes 10 percent of the population of the former USSR. The CCP has killed at least 80 million people, which is also nearly 10 percent of the nation’s population [at the end of the Cultural Revolution]. The Khmer Rouge killed two million people, or one quarter of Cambodia’s population at that time. In North Korea, the death toll from famine is estimated to be over one million. These are all bloody debts owed by the communist parties.

Today’s CCP has become the largest ruling "party of embezzlement and corruption" in the world. According to official statistics in China, among the 20 million officials, officers or cadres in the Party or government over the past 20 years, eight million have been found guilty of corruption and disciplined or punished based on party or government regulations. If the unidentified corrupt officials are also taken into account, the corrupt party and government officials are estimated to be at over two thirds, of whom only a small portion have been investigated and exposed.

While the CCP constantly brags about its economic advancement, in reality, China’s economy today ranks lower in the world than during the Qianlong’s reign (1711-1799) in the Qing Dynasty. During the Qianlong period, China’s GDP accounted for 51 percent of the world’s total. When Dr. Sun Yat-sen founded the Republic of China (Kuomintang or KMT period) in 1911, China’s GDP accounted for 27 percent of the world’s total. By 1923, the percentage dropped, but still was as high as 12 percent. In 1949, when the CCP took control, the percentage was 5.7, but in 2003, China’s GDP was less than 4 percent of the world’s total. In contrast to the economic decline during the KMT period that was caused by several decades of war, the continuing economic decline during the CCP’s reign occurred during peaceful times.

In a tree farm in eastern Sichuan province, upper level authorities distributed 500,000 yuan (approximately US$ 60,500) for a reforestation project. The leaders of the tree farm first put 200,000 yuan in their own pockets, and then allocated the remaining 300,000 yuan to tree planting. But as the money was taken away when passing through each level of the government, very little was left in the end for local peasants who did the actual tree planting. The government did not need to worry that the peasants would refuse to work on the project because of inadequate funding. The peasants were so impoverished that they would work for very little money. This is one of the reasons that products made in China are so cheap.

As a matter of fact, the Communist Party leaders transmitted empty words when they promulgated the "communist moral quality" or the slogan "Serve the people." The inconsistency between communist leaders’ actions and words can be traced all the way back to their founding father Karl Marx. Marx bore an illegitimate son. Lenin contracted syphilis from prostitutes. Stalin was sued for forcing a sexual relationship on a singer. Mao Zedong indulged himself in lust. Jiang Zemin is promiscuous. The Romanian communist leader Ceausescu made his entire family extravagantly rich. The Cuban communist leader Castro hoards hundreds of millions of dollars in overseas banks. North Korea’s demonic killer Kim Il Song and his children lead a decadent and wasteful life.

Gothenburg, May 25^th 2005.