Dalai Lama supports Taiwan democracy

On a visit to Taiwan, the Dalai Lama called on the Taiwanese people to protect their democratic institutions, saying, "You achieved democracy. That you must preserve".

The Dalai Lama went to Taiwan to visit and pray for the victims of Typhoon Morakot. The visit also had important political dimensions, since he was invited to the island by the opposition. China, as usual, protested against the visit. China and Taiwan do not disagree with each other over the status of Tibet: both the Republic of China (i.e., Taiwan) and the People's Republic of China (the mainland) see Taiwan as an integral part of China (see map).

The Dalai Lama said that Taiwan "should have a very close, unique link with China".

Touring the village of Xiaoling, which suffered from mudslides as a result of the typhoon, the Dalai Lama was reminded of "Buddha's message of impermanence. It is indeed very very sad."

Hsueh Shu-Chun, who lost her entire family save her husband, said that "Praying for the victims brings relief not only to them but to survivors like me."

The mess in Xinjiang

It's profoundly saddening to see what's going on on the streets of Ürümqi these days. The more violent representatives of both communities, the Uyghurs and the Han, are following their baser instincts: blood for blood, suffering for suffering. It's pointless to engage in a game of "Who started it?" While it's true that the riots in Ürümqi appear to have been started by Uyghurs, it's also true that they are responding, however inapporpirately, to decades of subjugation, cultural denigration and religious oppression, including having the state dictate who can enter mosques and who cannot.

As Orhan Pamuk notes in his 2001 article entitled "The Anger of the Damned", an ordinary Muslim in a third-world country who may "momentarily" support acts of violence against innocent Others is driven not by "Islam or this idiocy people call the war between East and West, nor... by poverty". Rather, he is driven by "the impotence born of a constant humiliation, of a failure to make oneself understood, to have one's voice heard".

That, I have no doubt, is what drove the young Muslim Uyghur rioters in Xinjiang. The Han counter-riots, while understable, are all the more deplorable: after all, it is the Han who rule the Chinese state, and it is they who have colonised Xinjiang and continue to do so, not the other way around. It was quite revealing to see a Chinese journalist on BBC World saying that "some of them [the Uyghurs] cannot even speak proper Mandarin Chinese", and that the government sent in Han settlers to "counterbalance" the Uyghurs in their own homeland.

Every empire crumbles sooner or later. The Chinese one has held on thus far, but is it not in China's interest to transform itself into a voluntary community of ethnicities, rather than continuing to be (to use Lenin's term for the Russian Empire) a prison of nations?

[This post was written in Istanbul.]