Tenzin Kunga
Tenzin Kunga is a former civil servant of the Central Tibetan Administration, currently living in London. He is interested in closely following news about UK-China geopolitics with Tibet as the core.
Just as the world was fighting its way out of the pandemic that originated in China’s Wuhan in late 2019, a large country invaded its smaller neighbouring country, rightly prompting a huge global outcry.
After cosying up to Chinese President Xi Jinping ahead of the much-maligned Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, where the two leaders declared a “no limits” partnership, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops into Ukraine on February 24,2022 just as the Games got to a close.
As the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine unfolded before our eyes, courtesy of international media on the ground and through social media, the world witnessed with horror the images of hundreds of innocent civilians being killed, homes and hospitals being bombed indiscriminately, upending Ukrainian lives, even as the elderly, women and children fled the Russian onslaught painfully leaving behind their able-bodied young loved ones to fight the invasion.
While the Ukrainian army and recruits led by its dynamic President put up a brave resistance stalling the Russian advance, more than four million (an estimated 10% of its population), Ukrainians have fled their country as refugees into neighbouring countries as the war enters its second month.
The unprovoked invasion of an independent nation by its larger neighbour, in this case the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has parallels with Tibet’s story.
Back in 1949/50 the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of the newly established People’s Republic of China illegally invaded Tibet from the east where the ill-equipped Tibetan warriors bravely fought the war-fit Chinese army and put up a fierce resistance. However, the sheer number of soldiers in the PLA ranks coupled with their comparatively superior military equipment, and through deceitful means, the Chinese leadership forced down the 17-Point Agreement on the Tibetan leadership, calling this “peaceful liberation” when there was nothing peaceful about their actions, nor was there any liberation for Tibetans.
The parallels with Ukraine don’t end there. Tibet’s temporal and spiritual leader His Holiness the Dalai Lama stayed back with his people and made every reasonable effort possible to ensure that much-needed reforms inside Tibet could be implemented. He tried earnestly for nine years until 1959 when the Chinese started bombing his residence, forcing him to escape out of Tibet’s capital Lhasa to neighboring India where he arrived on March 31, 1959. He has been living in exile since.
The pictures of Ukrainian women and children escaping into neighbouring countries as refugees bring back painful memories of similar stories my parents told me as I was growing up in a refugee settlement in south India, where I was born. My parents had followed in the footsteps of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, crossing the mighty Himalayas, with nothing but the bare minimum to survive the journey ahead and arriving in India in the 1960s. I feel that my parent’s generation went through a lot of hardship: being uprooted from their beloved homeland, escaping across dangerous terrain fearing for their lives, starting a new life on foreign soil, doing hard labour – building roads in the hills of northern India initially and later cutting down forest land to build settlements in south India, and sustaining the freedom movement under the able leadership of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Reflecting on the global response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine led by the US, EU and UK, it is heartening to see the West rightly united, not just in its condemnation of the illegal invasion, but also in its coordinated efforts to make the invasion costly for Russia through biting sanctions. We Tibetans, only wish that we had had a similar response when my independent nation was illegally invaded by China and when our leaders rallied for support. Maybe things would have been different today.
Events in history are not just for study but also to take lessons from. It is painful to see the Chinese Communist regime today committing genocide on Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in East Turkistan; and to see Hong Konger’s freedoms severely cracked down upon. Lessons must be learnt from Tibet’s example. Illegal occupation and unprovoked aggression should be stopped at the very beginning.
As His Holiness the Dalai Lama has repeatedly said we should all work to make this a century of Peace and Dialogue, unlike the previous one, which was characterised by war and wide scale destruction.
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