May you live to be very old and very healthy! In a related news, this blog entry:
Dalai Lama's 70th Birthday - Who gives a Damn?6th July is the Dalai Lama’s 70th Birthday. I’m told that America doesn’t care. One TV company (that wasn’t even prepared to go on record) said ‘Our viewers would care, why?’ Oh, please! Because young Americans are coming back into your country in coffins - that’s why. And no, this is not an anti-Bush rant. As a Londoner I’ll cut both the Republicans and the Democrats some slack and say that I believe both sides are doing what they believe to be the right thing. So where does the 70th birthday of the great old man of peace come into this? Am I suggesting that we should all wear robes and sit around and meditate? Not at all. But the logic — which I would have thought was obvious, goes like this. Are we or are we not wishing to move towards a world where discontented countries and peoples resolve their grievances by negotiation?
At the moment the message that Bush, Blair, Putin and Hu Jintao are sending to every malcontent in the world is — if you want attention for your country’s plight — bomb someone. Our newspapers will give you the headlines and everyone will learn where your country is on a map. Or kill some school children in their morning assembly.. yes, the Russian ‘separatists’ are certainly known. But Tibet? No those Chinese ‘separatists,’ the Tibetans, have asked for, first independence and then genuine autonomy, since the 1950s but they haven’t bombed anyone. You’d think that someone would pay some attention to them.
Any parent knows this… surely we don’t just punish when kids are doing the wrong thing - we reward them when they are doing the right thing. And yes, there is a difference between countries and kids but there is also a similarity. What are the world’s most powerful leaders paying attention to? Wake up! Demonstrate — for God’s sake — that striving for negotiated settlement is worth it. Are we going to let the old man enter the history books with his life a demonstration that seeking to resolve your country’s problems by talking is a waste of time?
There are two further absurdities here. America wouldn’t even have to change their current policies.. they could pursue a policy of rewarding non-violence at the same time as whatever other policies they feel are best. Nor would they have to upset international relations with China. A bit of decent diplomacy could easily see that it is in China’s best interests to reward the Dalai Lama and get the old man back in Tibet. I mean, can it really take the best minds of China to beat out a solution to something that is already in the Chinese constitution? Mmm, let’s see — make the Autonomous Region of Tibet into the Autonomous Region of Tibet. Twelve bright Chinese people and a couple of the Dalai Lama’s representatives from India… it would take how long?
And yet, there it is. The most powerful thing that China could do to help the world in the war against terrorism. We could switch on our TV and see the old monk going back into the country of his birth and hundreds of thousands of Tibetans would go with him. It would be the most amazing scene since the fall of the Berlin wall. The Chinese could claim a victory (as of course they would) and there would be celebrations all across China, just as there were when Hong Kong ‘came back to the Motherland.’ And the international perception of China would sky rocket… in time for the 2008 Olympics.
But is seems that we want our Grandchildren to read something different in the history books. It seems that they will read that only planting bombs makes headlines. Because no-one has noticed the Dalai Lama is 70. And America, I’m told, doesn’t care.
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Isabel Losada is a London-based activist and author. 
Happy Birthday, 14th Dalai Lama!, His Holiness turns 70
Jul 6 2005, 07:00 PM
