Rangzen now! 12Nov2008

A quick round-up of recent news from Tibet:

• A journalist from The Australian reports that the Chinese military is still intensively occupying the capital city of Lhasa.  “During four days in Lhasa this week — the first visit to Tibet by an Australian journalist since the March riots that left up to 200 people dead — I witnessed a city creaking under the weight of the Chinese military,” reports Cameron Stewart in a lengthy account of his visit complete with audio and visual multimedia.  From The Australian, via Jamyang Norbu, who just re-published his “Case for Independent Tibet”.
• Jamyang Kyi is a popular Tibetan writer, singer, poet and feminist.  She was arrested on April 1 of this year for sending text messages to the pro-Tibet Chinese blogger Woeser and eventually released.  Her latest blog post, in which she describes her torture during incarceration, has been translated by the High Peaks Pure Earth blog.  An excerpt:
  

  Ever since the Chinese-Tibetan conflict had flared up, and as result of the government’s deliberate propaganda, the Chinese would stare at Tibetans with hatred, whether it be in a bus, the market place or on any public road. Once, when I was walking down the road with my daughter who was wearing the traditional chuba that my friend Walza Norzin Wangmo had bought her as a gift, a Chinese kid of about six or seven years old came yelling in front of my daughter and stood blocking her way. This kind of Chinese attitude wasn’t an isolated incident that we experienced but rather the common experience of other Tibetans too.

• Perhaps after meditating on the events of the past year, the Dalai Lama recently acknowledged that his everlasting rounds of negotiations with the Chinese government have returned little results.  In Dharmsala he said he had “given up” on the “middle away” approach, then in Tokyo he complained that his “faith in the Chinese government is becoming thinner, thinner, thinner.”  This is a signifcant shift in rhetoric from only a few months ago, when His Holiness basically endorsed the Beijing Olympic Games while many Tibetans and their allies around the world used the opportunity to protest and highlight the Tibetan cause (see the Mediahacker’s multimedia protest map).  His Holiness has pledged to “remain completely neutral” in the Tibetan leadership’s formulation of a new policy towards China.  Via the Buddhist Channel.