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Burning with despair

EDITORIAL | JEFF JACOBY

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

January 18, 2012|By Jeff Jacoby

Buddhist monks in India attend a rally in support of Tibetans. (ASSOCIATED PRESS )

NEAR THE Kirti monastery in a Tibetan part of China’s Sichuan province, 21-year-old Lobsang Jamyang publicly set himself on fire last Saturday. It was the fourth time this month that a Tibetan protesting Chinese repression had resorted to self-immolation. When local residents attempted to retrieve his body from the police, Chinese security forces fired into the crowd, reportedly wounding two.

So far little is known about this latest Tibetan to burn himself alive. A few days earlier, however, a 42-year-old “Living Buddha’’ - a prominent Tibetan monk named Sonam Wangyal - swallowed and doused himself with kerosene, then set himself aflame in the western province of Qinghai. Sonam was an admired spiritual leader who had run an orphanage and a home for the elderly, and was regarded as the reincarnation of a high-ranking lama. Radio Free Asia reported that before immolating himself, he prayed and burned incense on a hilltop, and distributed leaflets calling his death a protest “for Tibet and the happiness of Tibetans.’’

The Chinese Communist Party crudely suggested that Sonam had killed himself after being discovered having an affair with a married woman. Such vulgar insults say more about the regime that spreads them than about the martyrs it seeks to defame. So does Beijing’s propaganda accusing the Dalai Lama - the exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate - of orchestrating the self-immolations.

Since last March, 16 Tibetans - nearly all of them Buddhist monks and nuns - have set fire to themselves, desperate to open the world’s eyes to the relentless brutality with which the Beijing government tyrannizes its people. The world is noticing. The wave of fiery suicides, the State Department’s spokeswoman said last week, reflects “enormous anger, enormous frustration with regard to the severe restrictions on human rights, including religious freedom, inside China.’’ In response, the Chinese foreign ministry sourly warned Washington not to use “Tibet-related issues to interfere in China’s domestic affairs.’’

But it is China that cruelly interferes in Tibet’s domestic affairs. And it has done so with unsparing savagery ever since Mao’s invasion of Tibet in 1950.