Tibet’s Dalai Lama marks 50 years of protest

By GAVIN RABINOWITZ
The Associated Press
DHARMSALA, India Somber prayers and hymns remembered the dead. Monks in ornate yellow headdresses blew giant conches and long brass trumpets to announce the coming of the Dalai Lama. A band playing drums, cymbals and bagpipes added to the din.
Then, the soft-spoken man of peace delivered an unusually harsh message — a systematic indictment of the Chinese government that forced him to flee Tibet during a failed uprising in 1959.
“These 50 years have brought untold suffering to the land and people of Tibet,” the 73-year-old Buddhist spiritual leader told about 2,000 Tibetan exiles gathered Tuesday to commemorate the rebellion.
The Nobel Peace laureate, who accused the Chinese government of treating his people “like criminals deserving to be put to death,” highlighted the widening gulf between the two sides since violence engulfed the region and talks broke down last year.
China, which accuses the Dalai Lama of trying to split Tibet from China and fomenting recent violence, denounced his speech as “lies” and underlined the development it brought to the Himalayan plateau.
The Dalai Lama’s 30-minute speech in Dharmsala, a two-street town in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas where he set up his headquarters in exile, warned that Tibet’s unique religion, culture and language are “nearing extinction.”
Decades of China’s communist experiments, particularly the violent xenophobic Cultural Revolution, “thrust Tibetans into such depths of suffering and hardship that they literally experienced hell on earth,” he said, adding that the campaigns led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Tibetans.
The Dalai Lama also charged China with overseeing a “brutal crackdown” since protests shook the region last year.
A 2008 commemoration of the 1959 uprising by monks in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa erupted into anti-Chinese rioting and spread to surrounding provinces — the most sustained and violent demonstrations by Tibetans in decades.
On Tuesday, Lhasa was calm but tense.
There also were protests in Nepal, South Korea, New York, London, Berlin, Vienna, Switzerland, Taiwan, Australia and New York.
While China claims Tibet has been part of its territory for centuries, Tibet was a deeply isolated theocracy until 1951, when Chinese troops invaded Lhasa. Tuesday’s anniversary marked the March 10, 1959, riots against Chinese rule that led to a crackdown and, later that month, the Dalai Lama’s dramatic flight across the Himalayas and into exile.
China long has said it brought modernity to a region where monks and wealthy landowners ruled over huge tracts of land worked by slaves and serfs.