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Dalai Lama To China: I Won’t Back Down

by Doug Mataconis @ 3:04 pm on March 16, 2008.

The Dalai Lama is known as a man of peace and proponent of non-violence, but he’s also not a man to back down to tyranny:

MCLEODGANJ, India — The Dalai Lama said Sunday that he would not instruct his followers inside Tibet to surrender before Chinese authorities, and he described feeling “helpless” in preventing what he feared could be an imminent blood bath.

“I do feel helpless,” he said in response to a question at a wide-ranging, emotionally charged news conference here in what has served as the headquarters of the Tibetan government in exile for nearly 40 years. “I feel very sad, very serious, very anxious. Cannot do anything,”

His aides said they had received reports from Tibet of 80 killings on Thursday and Friday alone, in and around the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, including 26 slain just outside a prison called Drapchi. Chinese state media has reported 10 deaths and characterized most of them as shopkeepers ”burned to death” during protests.

Meanwhile, reports are filtering out that seem to indicate that the protests are not letting up:

For the second straight day on Sunday, protests spread into different Tibetan regions of China. Buddhist monks and police reportedly clashed in a Tibetan region of Sichuan Province. A crowd of 200 Tibetan protesters burned down a local police station, news agencies reported.

One witness said a police officer was killed in the confrontation. But the India-based Tibet Center for Human Rights and Democracy reported that the police in the region had killed at least seven Tibetan protesters.

The Dalai Lama, who heads the government in exile and serves as the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, called Sunday for an independent international inquiry into the recent violence.

He endorsed the right to peaceful protest, called violence an “act of suicide,” and accused Beijing of carrying out “a rule of terror.”

Asked if he could stop Tibetan protesters from flouting Beijing’s deadline to surrender by midnight on Monday, the Dalai Lama, 72, replied swiftly: “I have no such power.”

He said he had received a call on Saturday from Tibet. “‘Please don’t ask us to stop,’” was the caller’s request. The Dalai Lama promised he would not, even though he said he expected the Chinese authorities to put down the protests with force.

And that will be their choice, and their responsibility.