MB Civic

By H. D. S. Greenway | Tuesday, March 18, 2008 | The Boston Globe

“…Fires rising from burning shops, red-robed monks beaten, the dead lying in the streets, and burned-out cars in the stone square outside the Jokhang, Tibet’s most sacred shrine; thus did unrest come to Lhasa, not as a stranger. In other decades, violence has flowed as a protest against Chinese rule following China’s brutal invasion of more than half a century ago – a takeover to which Tibetans remain unreconciled.

What an embarrassment for China, trying so hard to organize an Olympic Games intended to symbolize China’s emergence as a modern, great power among nations. What an embarrassment for President Hu Jintao, who, while boss of Tibet, wet his hands in repression.

Recently I visited the Jokhang, the circulation of which – always clockwise – is obligatory for many devout Tibetans. As folk from the countryside poured into Lhasa, and to other shrines in the post-harvest pilgrimage season, one sensed that all China’s attempts to crush Tibet’s Tantric-Buddhist traditions, the destruction of its monasteries, the dispersal and imprisonment of its monks, the exile of its Dalai Lama, had failed. Buddhism remains undaunted in Tibet, and with it, as the Chinese always feared, the seeds of a resistance….”…BS

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/03/18/seeds_of_a_resistance_remain_in_tibet?mode=PF