Telegraph (Saturday) - ‘Westerners are too self-absorbed’ By Alice Thomson

Tsering Wangmo is shaking uncontrollably as tears pour down her cheeks. Still sobbing, she pulls up her top and slowly turns around to show me a fretwork of scars. They criss-cross her body from shoulders to waist.

“My crime,” she explains when she is calmer, “was to be found by the police with a picture of the Dalai Lama. I was dragged through the streets of Lhasa by my hair, beaten with electric prongs, then thrown into jail for three years.”

Her waterlogged, open-air prison in Tibet was shared with around 1,000 other women. “We were tortured, raped, hung upside down for hours,” she says. “Many died.” On her release, she discovered that her husband had been forced to marry a Chinese woman, so she took her children and fled barefoot across the Himalayas to find solace with the Dalai Lama.

She is one of thousands of Tibetans who have made the trek to Dharmsala, an old British hill station in northern India, to seek safety with their exiled leader.

Here, they are joined by hundreds of Westerners who come, clutching their Lonely Planet guides, for a glimpse of their guru. While Tsering turns her prayer-wheel in the refugee centre, a rotund Austrian biscuit heiress called Heidi Gudrun is staying in a deluxe suite at one of the new hotels that has sprung up nearby to cater for well-heeled travellers.

Heidi seems just as miserable as Tsering - but for a vastly different reason. “For 15 years, I have tried to lose weight,” she says. “I have lost two husbands, I have had my stomach stapled - the Dalai Lama is my last hope.”

It is the peculiar fate of this Dalai Lama that he serves as a guru for overweight biscuit heiresses as well as a living god to 10 million Tibetan Buddhists.

This is why I don’t have a whole lotta respect for white Buddhists. In general, that is. On a related note (sort of), I was wondering the other week, does anyone (and I’m asking this seriously) think it’s possible for a Buddhist to be a Republican? But anyway, that’s not the point I wanted to make.

Forty-eight years have now elapsed since he was forced to flee Lhasa for the safety of India.

During that period, more than a million Tibetans have been killed by the Chinese because of their refusal to stop worshipping the Lord of Compassion, and more than 5,000 temples have been destroyed. Tibetans who shout his name in the marketplaces risk having their tongues ripped out.

So, forty-eight years (and for some time before that (apparently he met Mao)) he’s been working on rescuing Tibet from the Chinese, and now Alice tells us (in the Podcast) that he’s actually given up on freeing Tibet completely, but just wants better treatment for Tibetans, all through peaceful means, for fifty years, and Tsering just had to flee Tibet after being kidnapped, tortured, and raped, and had to flee over the Himalayas, which a lot of her compatriots have to do, without shoes sometimes, Alice also tells us. Then you have that great point Mark Steyn made last year:

It must be great to be the guy with the printing contract for the ‘FREE TIBET’ stickers. Not so good to be the guy back in Tibet wondering when the freeing thereof will actually get under way. For a while, my otherwise not terribly political wife got extremely irritated by these stickers, demanding to know at a pancake breakfast at the local church what precisely some harmless hippy-dippy old neighbour of ours meant by the slogan he’d been proudly displaying decade in, decade out: ‘But what exactly are you doing to free Tibet?’ she demanded. ‘You’re not doing anything, are you?’

So, yeah, that peace crowd’s really onto something. Anyway, in discussing his views on marriage (he’s, uh, for them), this popped up, which really surprised me:

Although he is known for his tolerant, humane views, he is a surprisingly harsh critic of homosexuality. If you are a Buddhist, he says, it is wrong. “Full stop.

No way round it.

“A gay couple came to see me, seeking my support and blessing. I had to explain our teachings. Another lady introduced another woman as her wife - astonishing.

I’ll skip his pronouncement on “holes”. But, yeah. I wonder if any of the Buddhists I went to school with know that. He is their living God, after all. No blaming it on the old white guy in the funny hat who doesn’t know what God wants anyway.

Now, for those of you who may not read the whole thing (even though it is rather long (I actually did skip quite a lot)) he seems to like George Bush more than he does Tony Blair. And isn’t that something.

You know, if the Chinese are forcing Tibetans to marry with Chinese people, which apparently they are, isn’t that ethnic cleansing?

Date: Apr 2nd, 2006 · Comments RSS · Tags: Geography and Foreign Affairs