About Chellaney

Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

Contrasting International Response to Repression in Tibet and Burma

Posted on April 4, 2008 by Chellaney

Tibet and Burma:
Dissimilar Response

While a booming China
openly mocks the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and escapes even
international censure, an impoverished Burma reels under widening
sanctions despite smaller-scale repression.

Brahma
Chellaney

Asian Age, April 5, 2008

There are
striking similarities between Tibet and Burma — both are strategically located,
endowed with rich natural resources, suffering under long-standing repressive
rule, resisting hard power with soft power, and facing an influx of Han
settlers. Yet the international response to the brutal crackdown on monk-led
protests in Tibet and Burma has been
a study in contrast.

When the Burmese crackdown on peaceful protestors in Rangoon last September left at least 31
people dead — according to a UN special rapporteur’s report — it ignited
international indignation and a new
round of U.S.-led sanctions. More than six months later, the tepid
international response to an ongoing harsh crackdown in Tibet by the Burmese junta’s closest ally, China, raises the question whether that country
has accumulated such power as to escape even censure over actions that are far
more repressive and extensive than what Burma witnessed.

Tellingly, despite growing international appeals to Beijing
to respect Tibetans’ human rights and cultural identity and begin dialogue with
the Dalai Lama, there has been no call for any penal action, however mild,
against China.
Even the leverage provided by the 2008 Beijing
Olympics is not being seized upon to
pressure Beijing
to end its repression in the Tibetan region.

When the Burmese generals cracked down on monks and their pro-democracy
supporters, the outside world watched vivid images of brutality, thanks to
citizen reporters using the
Internet. But China employs tens
of thousands of cyberpolice to censor Web sites, patrol cybercafes, monitor
text and video messages from cellular phones, and hunt down Internet activists.
As a result, the outside world has yet to see a single haunting image of the
Chinese use of brute force against Tibetans. The only images released by Beijing are those that
seek to show Tibetans in bad light, as engaged in arson and other attacks.

The continuing arbitrary arrests of Tibetans through house-to-house
searches are a cause of serious concern, given the high incidence of mock
trials followed by quick executions in China. That country still executes
more people every year than all other nations combined,
despite its adoption of new rules requiring
a review of death sentences.

The important parallels between Tibet
and Burma begin with the
fact that Burma’s
majority citizens — the ethnic Burmans — are of Tibetan stock. It was China’s 1950 invasion of Tibet that opened a new Han entrance to Burma. But now the
Han demographic invasion of the Tibetan plateau is spilling over into Burma, with Chinese presence conspicuous in Mandalay city and the
areas to the northeast.

Today, the resistance against repressive rule in both Tibet and Burma is led by iconic Nobel
laureates, one living in exile and the other under house detention. In fact,
the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi received the Nobel peace prize in quick
succession for the same reason: For leading a non-violent struggle. Each is a
symbol of soft power, building such moral authority as to command wide international
respect and influence.

Yet another parallel is that heavy repression has failed to break the
resistance to autocratic rule in both Tibet
and Burma.
If anything, growing authoritarianism has begun to backfire, as the popular
monk-led revolts in Tibet and
Burma
have highlighted.

Vantage location and rich natural resources underscore the importance of
Tibet and Burma. The
Tibetan plateau makes up one-fourth of China’s landmass. Annexation has
given China control over Tibet’s immense
water resources and mineral wealth, including boron, chromite, copper, iron
ore, lead, lithium, uranium and zinc. Most of Asia’s major rivers originate in
the Tibetan plateau, with their waters a lifeline to 47 percent of the global
population living in South and Southeast Asia and China. Through its control over
Asia’s main source of freshwater and its building of huge dams upstream, China holds out
a latent threat to fashion water into a political weapon.

Energy-rich Burma is a land bridge between the Indian
subcontinent and Southeast Asia. China, however, has succeeded in strategically
penetrating Burma, which it
values as an entryway to the Bay of Bengal and Indian
Ocean. Beijing is now busy
completing the Irrawaddy Corridor through Burma involving road, river, rail,
port and energy-transport links.

The key difference between Tibet and Burma is that the repression in the
former is by an occupying power. Months after the 1949 communist takeover in Beijing, China’s
People’s Liberation Army entered what was effectively a sovereign nation in
full control of its own affairs.

At the root of the present Tibet crisis is China’s failure to grant the
autonomy it promised when it imposed on Tibetans a “17-Point Agreement for the
Peaceful Liberation of Tibet” in 1951. Instead of conceding autonomy, Beijing has actually done the opposite: It has pursued
Machiavellian policies by breaking up Tibet as it existed before the
invasion, and by seeking to reduce Tibetans to a minority in their own homeland
through the state-supported relocation of millions of Han Chinese.

It has gerrymandered Tibet by making Amdo (the present Dalai Lama’s
birthplace) Qinghai
province and merging eastern Kham
into the Han provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan and Gansu. More recently, Chongqing province was carved out of Sichuan.

The traditional Tibetan region is a
distinct cultural and economic
entity. But with large, heavily Tibetan areas having been severed from Tibet, what is
left is just the 1965 creation — the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), the central
plateau comprising Ü-Tsang and western Kham, or roughly half of the Tibetan
plateau. Yet China
has changed even the demographic composition of TAR, where they were hardly any
Han settlers before the Chinese annexation.

TAR, home to barely 40 per cent of
the 6.5 million Tibetans in China, was the last “autonomous region” created by
the Chinese Communists, the others being Inner Mongolia (1947), Xinjiang
(1955), Guangxi Zhuang (1958) and Ningxia
(1958). In addition, China
has 30 “autonomous prefectures,” 120 “autonomous counties” and 1,256
“autonomous townships.”

All of the so-called autonomous areas are in minority homelands, which
historically were ruled from Beijing only when China itself
had been conquered by foreigners — first by the Mongols, and then the Manchu.
Today, these areas are “autonomous” only in name, with that tag designed to
package a fiction to the ethnic minorities. Apart from not enforcing its
one-child norm in these sparsely populated but vast regions (which make up
three-fifths of China’s landmass),
Beijing grants
them no meaningful autonomy. In Tibet,
what the ravages of the Cultural Revolution left incomplete, forced “political
education” since has sought to accomplish.

China grants local autonomy just to two
areas, both Han — Hong Kong and Macao.
In the talks it has held with the Dalai Lama’s envoys since 2002, Beijing has flatly refused to consider the idea of making Tibet a Special
Administrative Region like Hong Kong and Macao.
It has also rebuffed the idea of restoring
Tibet,
under continued Chinese rule, to the shape and size it existed in
1950.

Instead it has sought to malign the Dalai Lama for seeking “Greater
Tibet” and pressed a maximalist historical position vis-à-vis him. Not content
with the Dalai Lama’s far-reaching 1987 concession to forsake Tibetan independence, Beijing insists
that he also affirm that Tibet
was always part of China. But as the
Dalai Lama said in a recent Newsweek interview,
“Even if I make that statement, many people would just laugh. And my statement
will not change past history.”

Contrary to China’s claim that its present national political structure
is unalterable to accommodate Tibetan aspirations, the fact is that its
constitutional arrangements have continued to change, as underscored by the
creation of 47 new supposedly “autonomous” municipalities or counties in
minority homelands just between 1984 and 1994, according to the work of Harvard
scholar Lobsang Sangay.

Until the latest uprising, Beijing
believed its weapon of repression was working well and thus saw no need to bring
Tibetans together under one administrative unit, as they demand, or to grant Tibet a status equivalent to Hong Kong and Macao. President Hu
Jintao, who regards Tibet as his core political base from the time he was the
party boss there, has ruled out any compromise that would allow the Dalai Lama
to return home from his long exile in India. Following the uprising, Hu’s line
on Tibet
is likely to further harden, unless effective international pressure is brought
to bear.

The contrasting international response to the repression in Tibet and Burma brings out an inconvenient
truth: The principle that engagement
is better than punitive action to help change state behaviour is applied only to
powerful autocratic countries, while sanctions are a favoured tool to try and
tame the weak. Sanctions against China are also precluded by the
fact that the West has a huge commercial stake in that country. But Burma, where
its interests are trifling, is a soft target.

So, while an impoverished Burma
reels under widening sanctions, a booming China openly mocks the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. Even the 1989
Tiananmen Square massacre of countless hundreds of
students did not trigger lasting international trade sanctions against Beijing.

No one today is suggesting trade sanctions. But given that Beijing
secured the right to host the 2008 Olympics on the promise to improve its
human-rights record, the free world has a duty to demand that it end its
repression in Tibet or face an international boycott, if not of the Games, at
least of the opening ceremony, to which world leaders have been invited. By
making the success of this summer’s Olympics a prestige issue, China has
handed the world valuable leverage that today is begging to be exercised. This
rare opportunity must not be frittered away.

India’s Feckless China Policy

Posted on April 4, 2008 by Chellaney

Stop Being Bullied

Present slipshod approach belittles India, eggs on China

Brahma Chellaney

Times of India, April 4, 2008

Beijing’s provocations against India continue unabated. Arrogant authoritarianism blinds China to counterproductive actions. Surprisingly, India plays into Beijing’s hands and compounds the indignities. Recent instances underscore the manner India is being belittled from within.

What is discreditable is not that Beijing summoned the Indian ambassador post-midnight, but that the envoy — a distinguished woman diplomat — docilely turned up at the Chinese foreign office at 2 am. No host government can compel a foreign diplomat to appear before it at an odd hour, that too in peacetime. The correct response to that imprudent, bureaucratic-level call would have been for the ambassador to say politely but firmly that she would visit the foreign office during regular business hours.

Worse, it was not Beijing but New Delhi that revealed the post-midnight summons and the ambassador’s South Block-cleared compliance. Had New Delhi retaliated or wanted to prepare public ground to retaliate, such disclosure was unavoidable. But to have revealed that without any intent to respond amounted to inflicting self-humiliation. It brought home the unmistakeable softening of the Indian state. When Beijing in the early 1960s summoned Indian chargé d’affaires P.K. Banerjee at an unreasonable hour, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) called in the Chinese chargé d’affaires at 3 am on two separate occasions, after which the Indian envoy faced no further harassment.

In the present case, New Delhi did not take umbrage that in handing to its ambassador a list of places where Tibetan exiles purportedly planned to hold protests, Beijing was not only asking the world’s largest democracy to deny Tibetans the right to protest, but also revealing the existence of a Chinese intelligence network in India (and suggesting it was superior to India’s). Far from retaliating, a feckless New Delhi actually rewarded Beijing, by granting its ambassador an audience with the home minister to discuss the Olympic torch’s safety, even as China’s brutal crackdown in Tibet mocks the Olympic Charter’s “human dignity” principle.

When the Chinese made a protest over the Prime Minister’s Arunachal tour, it was again not Beijing but New Delhi that leaked the news. In doing so, New Delhi helped put the spotlight — to Beijing’s delight — on China’s claim on Arunachal Pradesh. A wiser New Delhi would not have given publicity to China’s low-key action in presenting, as External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee admitted recently, “not formally, but informally, a démarche to our Embassy”. But it just could not resist the urge to use the démarche to pat itself on the back for the PM’s Arunachal trip, although the tour conspicuously skipped Tawang and came after, rather than before, his China visit.

Yet, when Chinese forces last November provocatively destroyed some Indian army bunkers at the Sikkim-Bhutan-Tibet tri-junction, New Delhi did the opposite: It tried to sweep the grave episode under the rug, employing “sources” to discredit reports about the attack inside Sikkim. It took New Delhi four full months to acknowledge that attack, with Mukherjee admitting in the Rajya Sabha on March 19 that, although China accepts the Sikkim-Tibet border “as settled in the Anglo-Sikkim Convention of 1890”, “some bunkers have been destroyed and some activities have taken place”. This is the latest example of New Delhi first gratuitously downplaying a belligerent Chinese action, only to sheepishly admit the truth later.

Take another shocker: The Army chief had the gall to say recently that India is as culpable as China in committing cross-border intrusions. His statement not only made light of official assertions about growing Chinese incursions — about 300 in the past two years, or more than three per week — but also flew in the face of a glaring fact: China’s continuing refusal to clarify the frontline, in order to keep India under military pressure. Beijing’s breach of promise to exchange maps has brought the bilateral process to define the line of control to a grinding halt. Instead of stressing China’s intransigence, General Deepak Kapoor witlessly justified Chinese cross-border forays by saying the “Chinese have a different perception” of the frontline. The Chinese have a different perception because it suits them.

Earlier, Gen. Kapoor betrayed his ignorance of India’s security commitment to Bhutan by saying that Chinese military intrusions into Bhutanese territory are “a matter between China and Bhutan”. When the Army chief does not seem to know (or care) that India is responsible for Bhutanese defence, which neighbour can bank on this country? Bhutan, in any event, is the only friend India is left with.

The defence ministry has contributed its own bit to lowering India’s esteem, earning in the process a grudging compliment from China’s official Xinhua news agency, which in a March 25 Mandarin commentary states: “India’s defensive and cautious attitude toward China appears to have permeated its defence ministry”. The ministry has completely watered down the China section in its latest annual report, as if India’s concerns have just vanished.

The more power China accumulates, the more it will seek to humiliate India. It is past time India got its act together to deal with Chinese provocations deftly. Asymmetry in inter-state relations does not entail the propitiation of the stronger. Diplomacy is the art of offsetting or neutralizing power imbalances. Consistency and confidence help obviate flipping and whining. India’s present slapdash approach is not only an invitation to greater trouble, but nationally demeaning.

The writer is a strategic affairs analyst.

Sanctions against Burma have only strengthened the junta

Posted on April 1, 2008 by Chellaney

Engage, don’t isolate

Burma illustrates that sanctions are not just a blunt instrument but counterproductive

By Brahma Chellaney

Hindustan Times, April 2, 2008

This week’s visit of the Burmese junta’s vice-chairman, General Maung Aye, who is also the Army chief, will formalize an agreement to launch an India-funded multi-nodal transportation corridor linking northeast India with Burma’s Sittwe port. The $135-million Kaladan Corridor has been made imperative by Bangladesh’s refusal to grant India transit access — a blinkered approach holding up the BIMSTEC free-trade area accord.

Maung Aye’s visit is an occasion to remember that Burma today is one of the world’s most isolated and sanctioned nations — a situation unlikely to be changed by its junta scheduling a referendum next month on a draft constitution. The junta’s reclusive chairman, Than Shwe, announced last week that the military would hand over power to civilians after elections in two years’ time. But the junta still holds out the threat to debar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from contesting.

Burma is an important state. First, size matters: this is not a Bhutan or a Brunei but a country that boasts the largest Indochina land area. Second, it is a resource-rich nation with copious natural-gas reserves. And third, it is a natural land bridge between South and Southeast Asia, and thus critical to the economic advancement of India’s restive northeast. Such is its vantage location that Burma forms the strategic nucleus between India, China and Southeast Asia.

Burma’s present problems and impoverishment can be traced back to the defining events of 1962, when General Ne Win deposed elected prime minister, U Nu, an architect of non-alignment. Ne Win, a devotee of Marx and Stalin, sealed off Burma, banning most external trade and investment, nationalizing companies, halting all foreign projects and tourism, and kicking out the large Indian business community.

It was not until more than a quarter-century later that a new generation of military leaders attempted to ease Burma’s international isolation through modest economic reforms. Such attempts, without loosening political controls, came after the military’s brutal suppression of the 1988 student-led protests that left several thousand dead or injured — a bloodbath that coincided with the numerology-dedicated Ne Win’s announcement of retirement on the ‘most auspicious’ day of August 8, 1988 (8.8.88).

Twenty years later, China, also addicted to the power of number 8, may be courting trouble by launching the Beijing Olympics on 8.8.08 at 8.08 am. The Games — communist China’s coming-out party — have already been besmirched by the brutal crackdown on the monk-led Tibetan uprising, just six months after Burmese monks spearheaded a challenge to authoritarianism in their own country through street protests that had an underlying anti-Chinese tenor. In fact, Burma’s majority people, the ethnic Burmans, are of Tibetan stock. The resistance against repressive rule in both Burma and Tibet is led by an iconic Nobel laureate — a symbol of soft power standing up to hard power.

Western penal actions against Burma began no sooner than the junta refused to honour the outcome of the 1990 elections, won by Suu Kyi’s party. But Burma became a key target of US sanctions policy only in this decade, as underlined by the 2003 Burma Freedom and Democracy Act (which bans all imports from that country) and a series of punitive executive orders. The new missionary zeal is due to a Burma activist in the White House — not the president but his wife.

Laura Bush’s activism has only been aided by the junta’s remarkable short-sightedness. The regime invited a new wave of US-led sanctions by killing at least 31 people during last September’s mass protests. It continues to detain Suu Kyi, besides isolating itself from the public by moving the national capital to remote Nay Pyi Taw. With Burma’s 58 million people bearing the brunt of the sanctions, China — a friend to every pariah regime — has emerged the only winner.

The oversized military fancies itself as the builder of a united Burma. In a country that has been at war with itself since its 1948 independence, the military has used the threat of Balkanization to justify its hold on politics. It trumpets its successes between the late 1980s and early 1990s in crushing a four-decade-long communist insurgency and concluding cease-fire agreements with other underground groups that left just a few outfits in active resistance. The period since has been viewed by the military as a time to begin state-building, while to the opposition it has been an unending phase of repression.

Given Burma’s potent mix of ethnicity, religion and culture, democracy can serve as a unifying and integrating force, like in India. After all, Burma cannot be indefinitely held together through brute might. But make no mistake: The seeds of democracy will not take root in a stunted economy, battered by widening Western sanctions.

Also, if the Burmese are to break their military’s vise on power, why has much of the world accepted the 1989 name change to Myanmar? As was evident from Ceylon’s 1972 renaming as Sri Lanka to give it a distinct Sinhala identity — a move that helped further alienate the Tamil minority — a name change represents powerful symbolism. The junta restored the traditional name, Myanmar, for nationalistic reasons. But a name change ought to have an elected government’s imprimatur.

The grim reality is that sanctions have put the Burmese society in a downward spiral of poverty and discontent while strengthening the military’s political grip. Burma is proof that sanctions hurt those they are supposed to protect, especially when they are enforced for long and shut out engagement. A calibrated approach is called for, with better-targeted sanctions and room for outside actors to influence developments within. Instead of targeting the junta, the widening sanctions have sought to choke off industries — from tourism to textiles — on which the livelihood of millions of Burmese depends. Many female garment workers made jobless by sanctions are being driven into prostitution, as one US official, Matthew Daley, warned as far back as 2003.

Yet, in the face of a visibly deteriorating humanitarian situation in Burma, Laura Bush has championed more sanctions, roping in the EU. Her husband, underscoring how power respects power and the weak get bullied, spits fire at Burma but accepts despotic China’s invitation to the Olympics. He should see how the Burma sanctions are holding its people “economic hostage”, as Burmese author Ma Thanegi told Stanley Weiss in an interview.

Such is Laura Bush’s ability not only to influence US policy but also to orchestrate an international campaign that she announced last December 10 that, “India, one of Burma’s closest trading partners, has stopped selling arms to the junta”. New Delhi has still to confirm that. Nor has it repudiated the ban. Who can contradict a first lady whose fury on Burma reputedly flows from a meeting with a minority-Karen rape victim and information from a relative with an erstwhile connection to that country?

If the Burmese are to win political freedoms, they need to be first freed from sanctions that rob them of jobs, cripple their well-being and retard civil-society development. Years of sanctions have left Burma bereft of an entrepreneurial class but saddled with the military as the only functioning institution. To avert a humanitarian catastrophe, the same international standard applicable to autocratic, no-less-ruthless regimes in next-door China, Laos and Bangladesh should apply to Burma — engage, don’t isolate.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=a9c9f792-f519-4cb3-9505-8e0c45ae326c&&Headline=Engage%2c+don%u2019t+isolate+

Tibet exposes China’s Achilles heel

Posted on March 31, 2008 by Chellaney

Repression May Unravel China’s Monocracy

Beijing faces moment of truth on its brutal occupation of the vast Tibetan
plateau

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age,
March 29, 2008

Growing authoritarianism
more often than not rebounds. The monk-led Tibetan uprising, which has spread
across Tibet and beyond to
the traditional Tibetan areas forcibly incorporated in Han provinces, marks a
turning point in communist China’s
history. It comes as a rude jolt to the world’s biggest and longest-surviving
autocracy, highlighting the signal failure of state-driven efforts to pacify Tibet through
more than half a century of ruthless repression, in which as many as a million
Tibetans reportedly have lost their lives.

The
open backlash against the Tibetans’ economic marginalization, the rising Han
influx and the state assault on Tibetan religion and ecology constitutes, in
terms of its spread, the largest rebellion in Tibet
since 1959, when the Dalai Lama and his followers were forced to flee to India. Even in
1989, when the last major Tibetan uprising was suppressed through brute force,
the unrest had not spread beyond the central plateau, or what Beijing since 1965 calls the Tibet Autonomous
Region. Now, the state’s intensifying brutal crackdown across the Tibetan
plateau — an area more than two-thirds the size of Western Europe — dwarfs
other international human-rights problems like Burma
and Darfur, Sudan.

Indeed,
the latest revolt is a challenge to China’s totalitarian system in a
year when the Beijing Olympics are supposed to showcase the autocracy’s
remarkable economic achievements. It is a defining moment for a system that has
managed to entrench itself for 59 long years and yet faces gnawing questions
about its ability to survive by reconciling China’s contradictory paths of market
capitalism and political monocracy. The longest any autocratic system has
survived in modern history was 74 years in the Soviet
Union.

The recent events have laid bare the strength of the Tibetan grassroots
resistance despite decades of oppression, including the demolition of
monasteries, the jailing of independent-minded monks and nuns, the state’s
wanton interference in the mechanics of Tibetan Buddhism, and the forced
political re-education of Tibetan youth and monks. Tibet’s rapid Sinicization today
threatens to obliterate the Tibetan culture in ways the previous decades of
repression could not. That threat has only sharpened the Tibetan sense of
identity and yearning for freedom.

For President Hu Jintao, who owes his swift rise to the top of the party
hierarchy to his martial-law crackdown in Tibet in 1989, the chickens have
come home to roost. The fresh uprising, coinciding with Hu’s re-election as
president, epitomizes the counterproductive nature of the Hu-backed policies —
from seeking to change the demographic realities on the ground through the “Go
West” Han-migration campaign, to draconian curbs on Tibetan farmland and
monastic life. The Tibetans’ feelings of subjugation and loss have been
deepened as they have been pushed to the margins of society, with their
distinct culture being reduced to a mere showpiece to draw tourists and boost
the Han-benefiting local economy.

Tibetans
also have been incensed by atheistic China’s growing intrusion into their
religious affairs, as exemplified by Beijing’s 2007 proclamation making itself
the sole authority to anoint lamas — traditionally a divine process to select a
young boy as a Buddha incarnation. Having captured the institution of the
Panchen Lama, the second-ranking figure in Tibetan Buddhism, Beijing is preparing the ground to install
its own puppet Dalai Lama after the present aging incumbent passes away. So
short-sighted is this approach that the rulers in Beijing
don’t realize that such a scenario will surely radicalize Tibetan youth and
kill prospect of a peaceful settlement of the Tibet issue, thereby spawning an
enduring violent campaign.

The
ongoing Chinese crackdown, behind the cover of a Tibet
that has been cut off from the outside world, symbolizes what the communist
leadership itself admits is a “life and death struggle” over Tibet. The
likely further hardening of the leadership’s stance on Tibet, as a
consequence of the uprising, will only help mask a serious challenge that
carries wider political implications for the Chinese state. In the Tibetan
plateau — about half of which has been hived off from Tibet and merged with Qinghai,
Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces — the crackdown by a regime wedded to the
unbridled exercise of state power promises to exacerbate the situation on the
ground.

The tepid global response thus far to the bloodletting and arbitrary
arrests in Tibet is a reflection of China’s growing international clout,
underscored by its burgeoning external trade, rising military power and
unrivalled $1.5 trillion foreign-exchange reserves, largely invested in U.S.
dollar-denominated assets. Given that even the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre did not
trigger lasting international trade sanctions, the lack of any attempt to
penalize China for its
continuing human-rights violations in Tibet should not come as a
surprise.

But Tibet’s future
will be determined not so much by the international response as by developments
within China.
After all, the only occasions in history when Tibet
was clearly part of China
was under non-Han dynasties — that is, when China itself had been conquered by
outsiders: the Mongol Yuan dynasty, from 1279 to 1368, and the Manchu Qing
dynasty, from 1644 to 1912. It was only when the Qing dynasty began to unravel
that Tibet
once again became an independent political entity.

What Beijing today asserts are regions
“integral” to its territorial integrity are really imperial spoils of earlier
foreign dynastic rule in China.
Yet, revisionist history under communist rule has helped indoctrinate Chinese to think of the Yang and Qing empires as Han, with
the result that educated Chinese have come to feel a false sense of ownership
about every territory that was part of those dynasties.

The truth is that the once-idyllic Tibet
came under direct Han rule for the first time in history following the 1949
communist takeover in China.
Just as the politically cataclysmic developments of 1949 led to Tibet’s loss of its independent status, it is
likely to take another momentous event in Chinese history for Tibet to regain
its sovereignty.

That event could be the unravelling of the present xenophobic
dictatorship and the synthetic homogeneity it has implanted, not just in
institutional structures but also in the national thought process. Today, the
Chinese autocrats are able to fan ultra-nationalism as a substitute to their
waning communist ideology because the central tenet of the communists’
political philosophy is uniformity, with Hu’s slogan of a “harmonious society”
designed to underline the theme of conformity with the republic. The Manchu
assimilation into Han society and the swamping of the natives in Inner Mongolia have left only the Tibetans and
Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang as the holdouts.

With 60 per cent of its present landmass comprising homelands of ethnic
minorities, modern China has come a long way in history since the time the
Great Wall represented the Han empire’s outer security perimeter.
Territorially, Han power is at its pinnacle today. Yet, driven by
self-cultivated myths, the state fuels territorial nationalism, centred on
issues like Tibet and Taiwan, and its claims in the East and South China Seas
and on India’s Arunachal Pradesh state — nearly thrice the size of Taiwan. Few
realize that China occupies
one-fifth of the original state of Jammu
and Kashmir.

Tibet, however, is a reminder that
attempts at forcible assimilation can backfire. That was also the lesson from Yugoslavia, a
model of forced integration of nationalities. But once its central autocratic
structure corroded, Yugoslavia
violently fell apart. It will require a similar collapse or loosening of the
central political authority in China
for Tibet
to reclaim independence. Until then, the Tibetans’ best hope is to strive for
the kind of autonomy Beijing has granted Hong
Kong and Macao.

Those who gloomily see the battle for Tibetan independence as
irretrievably lost forget that history has a way of wreaking vengeance on
artificially created empires. The Central Asian states got independence on a
platter, without having to wage a struggle. Who in Central
Asia had dreamt of independence in mid-1991? Yet months later, the
Soviet empire had unravelled. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and
Lithuania twice lost their independence to an expanding Russian empire, only to
regain it each time due to a cataclysmic event — World War I, and the 1991
Soviet collapse.

The post-1991 flight of Russians from large parts of Central
Asia is a testament that the Sinicization of the Tibetan region is
not an unalterable process.

The Tibetan struggle, one of the longest and most-powerful resistance
movements in modern world history, exposes China’s Achilles heel. The
reverberations from the latest bloodshed on the land of the pacifist Tibetan
Buddhist culture will be felt long after Chinese security forces have snuffed
out the last protest.

Hu knows that the Tibetan uprising has the potential to embolden Han
citizens in China
to demand political freedoms — a campaign that would sound the death knell of
the single-party rule. The last time he suppressed a Tibetan revolt, his then
boss, Deng Xiaoping, had to borrow a
leaf from Hu’s Tibet book to
crush pro-democracy protestors at Tiananmen Square
two months later. Hundreds were slain.

This year could prove a watershed in Chinese history. Just as the 1936
Berlin Olympics set the stage for Nazi Germany’s collapse, the 2008 Beijing
Games — communist China’s coming-out party, already besmirched by the Tibet
crackdown — may be a spur to radical change in that country. Given that
recurring protests are likely to greet the Olympic torch during its global tour
of 135 cities, 2008 promises to be, at a minimum, the year Tibet came back
into international spotlight.

Beijing faces moment of truth on its brutal occupation of Tibet

Posted on March 27, 2008 by Chellaney

Prolonged unrest in Tibet could unravel China’s monocracy

The scrutiny that will accompany the 2008 Beijing Olympics could be the spur that brings change to China.

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Japan Times, March 27, 2008

The monk-led Tibetan uprising,
which spread across Tibet and beyond to the traditional Tibetan areas
incorporated in Han provinces, marks a turning point in communist
China’s history. It is a rude jolt to the world’s biggest and longest
surviving autocracy, highlighting the signal failure of state-driven
efforts to pacify Tibet through more than half a century of ruthless
repression, in which as many as a million Tibetans reportedly have lost
their lives.

The open backlash against the Tibetans’ economic
marginalization, the rising Han influx and the state assault on Tibetan
religion and ecology constitutes, in terms of its spread, the largest
rebellion in Tibet since 1959, when the Dalai Lama and his followers
were forced to flee to India. Even in 1989, when the last major Tibetan
uprising was suppressed through brute force, the unrest had not spread
beyond the central plateau, or what Beijing calls the Tibet Autonomous
Region. Now, the state’s intensifying brutal crackdown across the
Tibetan plateau — an area more than two-thirds the size of Western
Europe — dwarfs other international human-rights problems like Burma
and Darfur, Sudan.

Indeed, the current revolt openly challenges China’s
totalitarian system in a year when the Beijing Olympics are supposed to
showcase the autocracy’s remarkable economic achievements. It is a
defining moment for a system that has managed to entrench itself for 59
long years and yet faces gnawing questions about its ability to survive
by reconciling China’s dual paths of market capitalism and political
monocracy. The longest any autocratic system has survived in modern
history was 74 years in the Soviet Union.

The latest events have laid bare the strength of the
Tibetan grassroots resistance despite decades of oppression, including
the demolition of monasteries, the jailing of independent-minded monks
and nuns, the state’s wanton interference in the mechanics of Tibetan
Buddhism, and the forced political re-education of Tibetan youth and
monks. Tibet’s rapid Sinicization today threatens to obliterate the
Tibetan culture in ways the previous decades of repression could not.
That threat has only sharpened the Tibetan sense of identity and
yearning for freedom.

For Chinese President Hu Jintao, who owes his swift
rise to the top of the party hierarchy to his martial law crackdown in
Tibet in 1989, the chickens have come home to roost. The fresh
uprising, coinciding with Hu’s re-election as president, epitomizes the
counterproductive nature of the Hu-backed policies — from seeking to
change the demographic realities on the ground through the "Go West"
Han migration campaign, to draconian curbs on Tibetan farmland and
monastic life.

The Tibetans’ feelings of subjugation and loss have
been deepened as they have been pushed to the margins of society, with
their distinct culture being reduced to a mere showpiece to draw
tourists and boost the local economy, which benefits the Hans.

The natives also have been incensed by atheistic
China’s growing intrusion into Tibetan Buddhist affairs, as exemplified
by Beijing’s recent proclamation making itself the sole authority to
anoint lamas — traditionally a divine process to select a young boy as
a Buddha incarnation. Having captured the institution of the Panchen
Lama, the second-ranking figure in Tibetan Buddhism, Beijing is
preparing the ground to install its own puppet Dalai Lama after the
present aging incumbent passes away. So shortsighted is this approach
that the rulers in Beijing don’t realize that such a scenario will
surely radicalize Tibetan youth and kill prospect of a peaceful
settlement of the Tibet issue.

The ongoing crackdown, behind the cover of a Tibet
that has been cut off from the outside world, symbolizes what the
communist leadership itself admits is a "life and death struggle" over
Tibet. The likely further hardening of the leadership’s stance on
Tibet, as a consequence of the uprising, will only help mask a serious
challenge with wider political implications. At a minimum, the
crackdown by a regime wedded to the unbridled exercise of state power
promises to exacerbate the situation on the ground.

The muted global response thus far to the bloodletting
and arbitrary arrests in Tibet is a reflection of China’s growing
clout, underscored by its burgeoning external trade, rising military
power and unrivaled $1.5 trillion foreign-exchange reserves, largely
invested in U.S. dollar-denominated assets. Given that even the 1989
Tiananmen Square massacre did not trigger lasting international trade
sanctions, the lack of any attempt to penalize China for its continuing
human-rights violations in Tibet should not come as a surprise.

But Tibet’s future will be determined not so much by the international response as by developments within China.

After all, the only occasions in history when Tibet
was clearly part of China was under non-Han dynasties — that is, when
China itself had been conquered by outsiders: the Mongol Yuan dynasty,
from 1279 to 1368, and the Manchu Qing dynasty, from mid-17th century
onward. It was only when the Qing dynasty began to unravel at the
beginning of the 20th century that Tibet once again became an
independent political entity.

What Beijing today asserts are regions "integral" to
its territorial integrity are really imperial spoils of earlier foreign
dynastic rule in China. Yet, revisionist history under communist rule
has helped indoctrinate Chinese to think of the Yang and Qing empires
as Han, with the result that educated Chinese have come to feel a false
sense of ownership about every territory that was part of those
dynasties.

The truth is that Tibet came under direct Han rule for
the first time in history following the 1949 communist takeover in
China. Just as the politically cataclysmic developments of 1949 led to
Tibet’s loss of its independent status, it is likely to take another
momentous event in Chinese history for Tibet to regain its sovereignty.

That event could be the unraveling of the present
xenophobic dictatorship and the synthetic homogeneity it has implanted,
not just in institutional structures but also in the national thought
process. Today, the Chinese autocrats are able to fan ultranationalism
as a substitute for the waning communist ideology because the central
tenet of the communists’ political philosophy is uniformity, with Hu’s
slogan of a "harmonious society" designed to underline the theme of
conformity with the republic. The Manchu’s assimilation into Han
society and the swamping of the natives in Inner Mongolia have left
only the Tibetans and Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang
as the holdouts.

Territorially, Han power is at its pinnacle today.
Yet, driven by self-cultivated myths, the state fuels territorial
nationalism, centered on issues like Tibet and Taiwan, and its claims
in the South and East China Seas and on India’s Arunachal Pradesh state
— nearly thrice the size of Taiwan. Few realize that China occupies
one-fifth of the original state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Tibet, however, is a reminder that attempts at
forcible assimilation can backfire. That was also the lesson from
Yugoslavia, a model of forced integration of nationalities. But once
its central autocratic structure corroded, Yugoslavia progressively but
violently fell apart. It will require a similar collapse or loosening
of the central political authority in China for Tibet to reclaim
autonomy.

Those who gloomily see the battle for Tibetan
independence as irretrievably lost forget that history has a way of
wreaking vengeance on artificially created empires. The Central Asian
states got independence on a platter, without having to wage a
struggle. Who in Central Asia had dreamed of independence in mid-1991?
Yet months later, the Soviet empire had unraveled. The Baltic states of
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania twice lost their independence to an
expanding Russian empire, only to regain it each time due to a
cataclysmic event — World War I and the 1991 Soviet collapse.

The post-1991 flight of Russians from large parts of
Central Asia is a testament that the Sinicization of the Tibetan region
is not an unalterable process.

The Tibetan struggle, one of the longest and most
powerful resistance movements in modern world history, exposes China’s
Achilles’ heel. The reverberations from the latest bloodshed on the
land of the pacifist Tibetan Buddhist culture will be felt long after
Chinese security forces have snuffed out the last protest.

Hu knows that the Tibetan uprising has the potential
to embolden Han citizens in China to demand political freedoms — a
campaign that would sound the death knell of single-party rule. The
last time he suppressed a Tibetan revolt, his then boss, Deng Xiaoping,
had to borrow a leaf from Hu’s Tibet book to crush prodemocracy
protesters at Tiananmen Square two months later. Hundreds were slain.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the
privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the
author, most recently, of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India
and Japan."

The Japan Times

Tibet: Core Issue Between India and China

Posted on March 21, 2008 by Chellaney

India should bring the Tibet issue to the centrestage

Brahma Chellaney

Expert, strategic affairs

Economic Times, March 21, 2008

No event since independence has more adversely affected India’s security than the fall of Tibet. Tibet’s annexation by China created a new geopolitical reality by bringing Han forces to India’s frontiers for the first time in history. Within 11 years of extending its full control over Tibet, China invaded India — a war whose wounds have been kept open by Beijing’s aggressive claims to additional Indian territories.

Today, China’s occupation gives it control over Tibet’s vast mineral and water resources. Tibet not only has 126 different minerals, but is also the source of rivers like the Brahmaputra, Sutlej and Indus — the ongoing damming of which allows Beijing to fashion water into a political weapon against India. Indeed, China’s reckless exploitation of Tibet’s natural resources carries serious ecological and climatic implications for India.

The occupying power now is creating new demographic realities on the ground that would help accentuate India’s security challenge. Not content with having turned Lhasa into an overwhelmingly Han city, Beijing is pursuing a vigorous “Go West” Han-migration campaign, which is being facilitated by the new railway. Tibet’s Sinicization is helping marginalize Tibetans, sympathetic to India. Is it any surprise thus that Tibetans have risen in revolt against Beijing’s relentless repression?

With the Tibetan rebellion having spread to remote parts of Tibet, and even beyond to the areas forcibly incorporated in Han provinces, China has responded with brute force, cutting off the Tibetan plateau from the rest of the world, killing scores of protestors and arbitrarily arresting many in an ongoing crackdown. India cannot stay a mute spectator to the bloodletting on the land of the pacifist Tibetan Buddhist culture. The autocrats in Beijing will not ease their crackdown unless international pressure is brought to bear on them. The world has no second option.

Tibet is the core issue between India and China. So India should not hesitate to bring Tibet to the centerstage, and plan for the time when its ally, the aging Dalai Lama, is no longer on the scene.

Why Tibet Matters to India

Posted on March 18, 2008 by Chellaney

New Delhi has a major stake in Tibet, with its security tied to the developments there

India’s Muddle Path

By Brahma Chellaney

The Hindustan Times, March 19, 2008

When Burma’s junta last September killed at least 31 people during monk-led protests in Rangoon, it triggered international outrage and a new wave of US-led sanctions. Now the junta’s closest associate, the world’s largest autocracy in Beijing, has cracked down on monks, nuns and others in Tibet, with an indeterminate number of people killed. The muted global response thus far raises the question whether China has accumulated such power as to escape international censure over highly repressive actions.

For India, the Chinese crackdown on monk-led pro-independence protests in Tibet — the biggest in almost two decades — is an opportunity to highlight a festering issue that is at the heart of the India-China divide. That divide cannot be bridged unless Beijing begins a process of reconciliation and healing in Tibet by coming to terms with the reality that nearly 60 years of oppression have failed to crush the grassroots Tibetan resistance. By laying claim to Indian territories on the basis of alleged Tibetan ecclesiastical or tutelary links to them, Beijing itself underlines the centrality of the Tibet issue.

While China unabashedly plays the Tibet card against India, such as by staking a claim not just to Tawang but to the whole of Arunachal Pradesh — a state nearly thrice the size of Taiwan — New Delhi fights shy to even shine a spotlight on the Tibet issue. Worse, India has unwittingly strengthened China’s Tibet-linked claims to Indian territories, including occupied Aksai Chin, by recognizing Tibet as part of the People’s Republic. Even when the Dalai Lama backs the Indian position on Arunachal, New Delhi is too coy to translate such support into diplomatic advantage.

It is a testament to India’s pusillanimity that, even as Chinese security forces arbitrarily arrest and publicly parade young Tibetans, New Delhi has received fulsome praise from Premier Wen Jiabao, who, while calling the Tibet issue a “very sensitive one in our relations with India”, said, “We appreciate the position and the steps taken by the Indian government in handling Tibetan independence activities masterminded by the Dalai clique”. The orchestrated, Cultural Revolution-style attacks on the Dalai Lama are a reminder that a line of moderation vis-à-vis Beijing is counterproductive. Two decades after he changed the Tibetan struggle for liberation from Chinese rule to a struggle for autonomy within the People’s Republic, the Dalai Lama has little to show for his ‘middle way’, other than having made himself a growing target of Chinese vilification.

It is past time India reclaimed leverage by subtly changing its stance on Tibet. It can do that without provocation. Indian policy has been held hostage for long by a legion of panda-huggers, who bring discredit to our democracy and comfort to our adversary. These Sinophiles believe the only alternative to continued appeasement is confrontation. They cannot grasp the simple fact that between appeasement and confrontation lie a hundred different options. A false choice — pay obeisance to Beijing or brace up for confrontation — has been used to block any legitimate debate on policy options.

Today, several developments are underscoring the need for a more nuanced approach on Tibet that adds elasticity and leverage to Indian diplomacy. These include China’s frenetic build-up of military and transport capabilities on the vast Himalayan plateau; its refusal to clarify the frontline with India; and its latent threat to fashion water as a weapon.

Tibet’s vast glaciers and high altitude have endowed it with the world’s greatest river systems. With global warming likely to aggravate water woes, China’s control over the riverhead of Asia’s waters carries major security implications for lower-riparian states like India. As World Bank Vice-President Ismail Serageldin warned in 1995, “If the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water.”

Tibet’s forcible absorption not only helped China to expand its landmass by one-third, but also has given it a contiguous border, for the first time in history, with India, Bhutan and Nepal, and an entryway to Pakistan and Burma. By subsequently annexing Aksai Chin, China was able to link Tibet with another vast, restive region, Xinjiang, home to Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic groups and seat of a short-lived independent East Turkestan Republic up to 1949. Today, China is recklessly extracting Tibet’s immense mineral deposits, unmindful that such activities and its new hydro and railway projects are playing havoc with Tibet’s fragile ecosystem — critical to the climate security of India and other regional states.

Tibet’s security and autonomy are tied to India’s own well-being. If the ‘Roof of the World’ is on fire, India can hardly be safe. Tibet indeed symbolizes that a sustainable regional order has to be built on a balance among the market, culture and nature. Tibet is likely to determine whether we will see a more cooperative or a more competitive Asia — a stable, peaceful Asia that expands its economic and cultural renaissance, or an Asia riven by Great Power rivalries and the continued suppression of conquered nationalities.

Against this background, India needs to do at least three things. First, softly put the focus on the core issue, Tibet, including on China’s denial of autonomy to that region, in breach of the ‘17-Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet’ imposed on the Tibetans in 1951. New Delhi could sugar-coat this by saying China’s own security would be advanced if it reached out to Tibetans and concluded a deal that helped bring back the Dalai Lama from his long exile in India. The onus must be placed squarely on Beijing to ensure that Tibet, having ceased to be a political buffer, now becomes a political bridge between India and China.

The choice before India is to either stay stuck in a defensive, unviable negotiating position, where it has to fend off Chinese territorial demands, or to take the Chinese bull by the horns and question the very legitimacy of Beijing’s right to make territorial claims ecclesiastically on behalf of Tibetan Buddhism when it still has to make peace with Tibetans.

Second, if Tibet is to be the means by which India coops up the bull in its own China shop, it has to treat the Dalai Lama as its most powerful ally. As long as the Dalai Lama is based at Dharamsala, he will remain India’s biggest strategic asset against China. The Tibetans in Tibet will neither acquiesce to Chinese rule, as their latest defiance shows, nor side with China against India. If after the death of the present incumbent, the institution of the Dalai Lama gets captured by Beijing (the way it has anointed its own Panchen Lama), India will be poorer by several army divisions against China. To foil China’s scheme, India should be ready with a plan.

Third, India has to stop gratuitously referring to Tibet as part of China. From Nehru to Vajpayee, no Indian PM returned from a Beijing visit without referring to Tibet, in some formulation or the other, as part of China. Last January, Manmohan Singh became the first PM to return from Beijing without making any unwarranted reference to Tibet to please his hosts. The ‘T’ word is conspicuously missing from the joint communiqué — a key point the media failed to catch. If this is not to be a one-shot aberration, Indian policy has to reflect this change, however unobtrusively.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=3f44c623-a1cb-43ee-8b50-e421ec3d3bff&&Headline=India%e2%80%99s+muddle+path

Nuclear Power: Hype and Reality

Posted on March 16, 2008 by Chellaney

Energy reality beyond the nuclear hype

Brahma Chellaney The Hindu March 17, 2008

India’s zeal for reactor imports needs to be tempered by the fact that more than half a century after U.S. Atomic Energy Agency Chairman Lewis Strauss claimed that nuclear energy would become “too cheap to meter,” the nuclear-power industry everywhere subsists on generous state support and shows the slowest rate of advancement among all energy technologies.

The American-inspired multilateral export controls, including on high-technology flow, that have blocked India from importing even reactors and fuel for power generation, need to go in full — not just partially and conditionally as under the proposed Indo-U.S. nuclear deal. India is keen to boost nuclear power generation by buying reactors from all the three principal countries that can make such exports — the U.S., France and Russia. In consecutive months this year it has finalised agreements to buy reactors from France and Russia, subject to a rule change by the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), a U.S.-led cartel. Its hopes of opening up international civil nuclear trade, however, have been dealt a blow by uranium-rich Australia’s U-turn on yellowcake exports to India — an ill-founded decision by its new Prime Minister that is to stand even if the NSG changes its rule.

Mix of energy sources needed

India needs a mix of energy sources as a commercial hedge against unforeseen risks, and nuclear power certainly deserves a place in a diversified energy portfolio. But India needs to temper its new-found enthusiasm for nuclear power, which currently supplies barely 2.5 per cent of its electricity.

First, generating power from imported reactors dependent on imported enriched-uranium fuel makes little economic or strategic sense. Had the proposed import of such light water reactors (LWRs) — the only type on offer — been part of India’s planned transition to autonomous capability, akin to China’s, the purchase of that model could have been justified. But India has no intention to design and build LWRs locally.

Second, just as lucrative arms export contracts oil the military-industrial complex of any major international power, reactor exports are integral to the French and Russian nuclear power business and to America’s efforts to revive its moribund industry, which has not received a single domestic reactor order since the 1970s. The political salesmanship on reactor exports thus is no less intense than on arms sales, with the sales pitch on both centred on the word “security,” although energy or national security does not mesh with import dependency.

Arms import

Today, India is under pressure to replicate in the energy sector the very mistake it has made on armaments. One of the world’s top arms buyers, India now annually imports weapons worth between $4 billion and $6 billion, many of questionable value, even as its own armament production base remains weak and underdeveloped. Despite the rising arms imports bill, the Indian military is becoming less capable of winning a decisive war against an aggressor-state. Nuclear power, which was unappealing until imports were not possible, with the domestic industry actually starved of necessary funds for expansion through much of the 1990s, is now touted as an answer to India’s energy needs. But why should India compound its mistake on armaments by importing high-priced reactors when it can more profitably invest in the development of its own energy resources?

Third, the share of nuclear power in worldwide electricity supply has been stagnant at 16 per cent for the past 22 years. A 2003 MIT study put it thus: “Today, nuclear power is not an economically competitive choice.” The industry is still dependent on generous state subsidies for survival. To be sure, every energy source relies on some state subsidy. But nuclear power involves the most significant external costs, which are usually passed on to the taxpayers, including on accident liability cover, anti-terrorist safeguards, radioactive waste storage, retirement of old reactors, research and development, and international safeguards. To know the true cost of nuclear-generated electricity, the eclectic state subsidies need to be factored in.

Such is the reality that even External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee was compelled to admit in the Rajya Sabha last December: “Yes, it is proved, everybody admits that nuclear energy… is definitely costly.” This is borne out by India’s indigenous power reactors: escalating construction costs have resulted in all the newer nuclear plants pricing their electricity at between 270 and 285 paise a kilowatt hour (kWh). Compare those tariffs with Reliance Energy’s coal-fired Sason plant project, which has contracted to sell power at 119 paise a kWh, or even with the poorly-run Dadri plant, which supplies electricity to Delhi at 225 paise a kWh, although coal has to be hauled for the plant over long distances. When India produces electricity from reactors it wishes to import, the already wide price differential will increase.

Mr. Mukherjee, however, tried to put an interesting gloss, claiming that nuclear power “technology is moving ahead… With the advancement of the technology… nuclear energy, if it appears to be too costly today, perhaps, it will not appear that costly tomorrow.”

In a rapidly changing world, technological advances are inevitable. But international studies have shown that nuclear power, although a 50-year-old mature technology, has demonstrated the slowest “rate of learning” among all energy sources, including newer technologies such as wind power and combined-cycle gas turbines. It remains highly capital-intensive with comparatively long lead times for construction and commissioning, which prolong the start of returns on capital and put off private investors.

Global warming concerns

Fourth, the nuclear power industry, after being in decline for a quarter century, lacks the capacity to undertake a massive construction programme that could make a noticeable difference to global warming. Even at the current slack rate of reactor construction in the world, bottlenecks are a problem for key components. The industry relies on a few international manufacturers. At least nine power reactor components, including giant pressure vessels and steam generators, are made in only one facility owned by Japan Steel Works. A recent U.S.-based Keystone Centre report pointed to a six-year lead time for some parts.

To control one-seventh of the global greenhouse gas problem, according to calculations by Princeton University Professors Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, the world will need to triple its installed nuclear power capacity by building more than 1,300 reactors. And the U.S. share of that project (including replacing plants reaching the end of their lifespan) will entail building five power reactors a year for 50 years. Yet, notwithstanding all the tax breaks, loan guarantees, liability cover and other subsidies on offer, no reactor construction has begun in the U.S.

Carbon-intensive

Fifth, despite the industry’s efforts to latch on to the rising international concerns over climate change and present nuclear power as “clean,” the reality is greyer. While electricity generation itself is “clean,” the nuclear fuel cycle is carbon-intensive, with greenhouse gases emitted in mining and enriching uranium with fossil fuels.

Reactor construction also carries large carbon footprints. In addition, radioactive wastes from reactor operation pose technological challenges and environmental costs. Governments, environmentalists and industry still cannot agree on how best to dispose of radioactive waste. Reprocessing of spent fuel can help minimise, but not eliminate, such toxic waste.

While nuclear power proponents trumpet the emission-free front end, opponents cite the exceptionally problematic back end. A more balanced approach is called for, with the short-term benefit of generating more nuclear power weighed against the long-term environmental costs for future generations.

Sixth, a sobering fact is also the unflattering reactor construction record of France and Russia, both eager to bag Indian contracts. France is offering the same new model that the French firm Areva is building in Finland — the Olkiluoto-3 plant, the first Western European reactor construction since 1991. That much-hyped project is running at least two years behind schedule and $2.1 billion over its original $4-billion budget. What was trumpeted as a sign of a possible nuclear comeback in Europe is set to become the most expensive nuclear plant built in history. Such is the horror construction story that Areva and its partner, Siemens, have had to re-forge some key equipment and replace substandard concrete.

While India’s own indigenous programme has managed to reduce construction time, with the Tarapur 3 and 4 reactors coming up ahead of schedule, the two Russian VVER-1000 (V-392) reactors, being constructed since 2001 at Koodankulam under a Moscow-financed contract, are running far behind schedule. The first unit is now expected to be commissioned only at the beginning of 2009. The bottlenecks over Koodankulam — a $3.4-billion project — are partly due to the Russian industry’s struggle to recoup itself fully from the post-1991 problems.

Another reason is that although Russia is building an advanced VVER-1000 model at Koodankulam, with Western instrument and control systems, its own industry has moved to a third generation standardised VVER-1200 reactor of 1170 MWe for the home market.

Against this background, India needs to tone down its zeal for reactor imports. In the long run, the path to energy and climate security lies through carbon-free renewable energy, which by harnessing nature frees a nation from reliance on external sources of fuel supply. While seeking to prise open the international civil nuclear trade, India ought not to succumb to contrived deadlines. The deal with America can take effect only if it wins bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress — a fact that belies the attempt-to-hustle-India claim that it can be sealed only by the Bush administration.

(The writer, a Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, is the author, most recently, of Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.)

http://www.hindu.com/2008/03/17/stories/2008031755851000.htm

Strobe Talbott: Fact and Fiction on India

Posted on March 15, 2008 by Chellaney

The truth Talbott hides

Brahma Chellaney

The Asian Age, March 15, 2008

_________________________________________________________________________________

What 14 rounds of hush-hush negotiations during the Clinton years could not clinch, the Bush administration is seeking to pull off through aggressive public diplomacy, centred on marketing the nuclear deal as India’s “passport” to the world.

_________________________________________________________________________________

The Prime Minister has done well to assure Parliament that he will continue to "seek the broadest possible consensus within the country" over the nuclear deal with the United States. A critical matter like this, which is going to affect the future of India’s nuclear programme and tie the country to perpetual, legally irrevocable international inspections, demands such a consensus. The partisan rancour over what has become an increasingly divisive issue needs to be defused.

While giving that assurance, the Prime Minister referred to a recent claim by former US deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott that, had the Clinton team offered only "half" of what the Bush administration has proposed now, the Vajpayee government "would have gone for it." The truth is that Talbott says just the opposite in his detailed exposition in Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb, a book he published in 2004.

Talbott has a long record of mounting non-proliferation pressure on India. Before becoming deputy secretary, Talbott travelled to Moscow, as ambassador-at-large, to persuade the Russians to renege on their $75-million contract to sell cryogenic-engine technology to India — dangling carrots and warning that "a viable Indian missile capability could one day pose a security threat to Russia itself." It didn’t matter that cryogenic technology has civilian space applications and no nation has employed it in ballistic missiles.

To Talbott, India had to be penalised for retaining its nuclear-weapons option. Yet when India gatecrashed the nuclear club in May 1998, Talbott took the lead — after the shock over the tests had dissipated — to help shift the US policy goal. In place of the lost aim to stop New Delhi from crossing the threshold, a new objective was devised: Prevent India’s emergence as a full-fledged nuclear-weapons state by bringing it into the US-led non-proliferation regime.

With that purpose in mind, Talbott, as the Clinton administration’s troubleshooter, held extended, closed-door negotiations with then external affairs minister Jaswant Singh during 1998-2000. The discussions that stretched to 14 rounds at ten locations in seven countries have been described by the recently-retired US undersecretary, R. Nicholas Burns, in an article published in the November-December 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs, as "Washington’s first truly sustained strategic engagement with the Indian leadership."

That "sustained strategic engagement" was essentially about getting India to accept a set of rigorous non-proliferation benchmarks, by Talbott’s own admission. But where the Clinton administration failed, the Bush team is on the scent of success. The impulse to stitch up the deal before it unravels under wiser Indian reflection has triggered a crescendo of calls by US officials: "The clock is ticking;" "the timelines are short;" "we are kind of playing in overtime;" "there’s still a lot of work but not a lot of time;" "India must move ahead;" and it’s "now or never."

Let’s compare the benchmarks the Clinton team tried to impose with the non-proliferation conditions the Bush administration has attached to the deal.

Talbott says in his book, "If there is a deal to be done with India, my guess is that it will be a version of the one offered by the Clinton administration and rejected by the BJP-led government. The four US-proposed non-proliferation benchmarks put forward in 1998 — joining the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, making progress on a fissile material treaty, exercising strategic restraint (by that or some other name), and meeting the highest standard of export controls … should remain the basis of the American policy into the future. That means the US government should persist until the four areas of restraint become the basis of the Indian policy."

Here is Talbott admitting the Vajpayee government rejected the deal that was on offer then and saying the four Clinton-set benchmarks should remain the basis of US policy "into the future" — until India has caved in. In the book, Talbott presents himself as an unapologetic champion of hawkish positions — from mocking New Delhi for wanting to be grandfathered out of the NPT restrictions, to insisting the US cannot give India "a free pass into the nuclear club."

He lampoons Indian leaders he met. "Vajpayee’s pauses seemed to last forever … I had never met a politician so laconic." Prime Minister Inder Gujral’s 1997 meeting with President Clinton was a washout "in part because Gujral spoke so softly that everyone on the US side had trouble hearing what he was saying." Defence minister George Fernandes "regaled us with the story" of how he had been strip-searched in the US. "He seemed to enjoy our stupefaction at this tale." Sonia Gandhi went from being "diffident and evasive" to being "steely."

If Talbott has kind words for anyone, it is Jaswant Singh, whom he describes as the "persistent and beleaguered champion of moderation." He indeed flatters and pumps up Jaswant Singh, "the Indian statesman," saying it was "Jaswant" (as he calls him) who promised India’s signature on the CTBT. Talbott candidly admits the US game-plan was "to get the Indians to accept the CTBT along with meaningful restraints on their nuclear and missile programmes in exchange for our easing sanctions and throttling back on the campaign of international criticism we were orchestrating."

Domestic opposition in India, however, put paid to Jaswant Singh’s CTBT pledge. Not only that, the American side ended up empty-handed on the other restraint measures despite the protracted, 14-round talks. Talbott, whose approach in the negotiations was to smooth-talk the other side into submission, rues that Jaswant Singh "lost out" to the "conservatives within the BJP."

Now let’s see where the four Clinton-prescribed benchmarks stand today. What sticks out is that the Clinton benchmarks have not only been embraced wholeheartedly by the Bush administration, but also deftly incorporated in the deal, with each benchmark finding unequivocal mention in one or more of the key documents — the July 18, 2005 joint statement, India’s Separation Plan, the Hyde Act and the so-called 123 Agreement.

Benchmark 1 — a permanent test ban. That benchmark is central to the Bush deal with India. The expansive Hyde Act drags India through the backdoor into the CTBT. The Act admits it goes "beyond Section 129 of the Atomic Energy Act" in mandating that the waiver for India will necessarily terminate with any Indian test. The test ban is also built into the 123 Agreement by granting the US the dual right to seek the return of exported goods and to suspend all cooperation forthwith. In fact, with the Hyde Act going beyond the CTBT to define in technical terms what constitutes a nuclear-explosive test, India is to be held to CTBT-plus obligations.

What Jaswant Singh could not deliver has been ceded by a government whose real centre of power, Sonia Gandhi, paradoxically, was instrumental in scuttling the Vajpayee-led effort to build a political consensus for CTBT signature. Vajpayee’s hopes collapsed the moment Sonia Gandhi spoke up at the consensus-building meeting he had called. She said, "Why hurry when the US Senate itself has rejected this treaty? Heavens will not fall if we wait."

Benchmark 2 — restraint on fissile-material production. The Bush deal imposes this check in eclectic ways — from getting India to shut down one of its two research reactors producing weapons-grade plutonium to securing New Delhi’s commitment to work "with the US for the conclusion of a multilateral Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty." The Hyde Act proviso for regular presidential reports on India’s "rate of production" of fissile material or on any changes in "unsafeguarded nuclear-fuel cycle activities" opens New Delhi to sustained pressure.

Much of India’s cumulative historic production of weapons-grade plutonium has come from the Cirus research reactor, to be dismantled by 2010 after having been refurbished at a cost of millions of dollars barely four years ago. Eight indigenous power reactors will also become unavailable for strategic-material needs.

Benchmark 3 — strategic restraint. The Bush deal seeks to hold India’s feet to the non-proliferation fire through the instrumentality of the Hyde Act and 123 Agreement. The controls built into the deal, as Senator Joseph Biden has admitted, will help "limit the size and sophistication of India’s nuclear-weapons programme."

While permitting conditional and partial civil nuclear cooperation, the Hyde Act, seeking to hobble the growth of Indian delivery capability, mandates the continued applicability of US missile sanctions law against India. The deal primarily is aimed at ensuring that India’s nuclear-deterrent capability remains rudimentary and regionally confined, thus helping promote security dependency on the US, including for missile defence and conventional weapons. Fostering security dependency is the key to winning and maintaining an ally.

Benchmark 4 — "meeting the highest standard of export controls." India has agreed under the deal to enact "comprehensive export-control legislation" and to unilaterally adhere to the rules of US-led cartels. While the original deal cited two such cartels, the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group and Missile Technology Control Regime — both of which continue to exclude India from their membership — the Hyde Act has expanded the list to include more, including the controversial Proliferation Security Initiative.

So, as is clear, all the four Clinton benchmarks are at the heart of the Bush deal with India.

In fact, the Bush deal has far more to show. While the Clinton team could not persuade the sphinx-like Vajpayee to place under international inspection more than the two indigenous power reactors he was willing to offer under a potential deal, the Bush administration has won the Manmohan Singh government’s agreement to subject 35 nuclear facilities, including eight existing indigenous power reactors, to permanent external inspection. New Delhi will also shut down Cirus and remove the fuel core from Apsara, Asia’s first reactor.

The Bush team could extract such commitments from India by taking the tack Talbott suggested in his book that he wrote with "the cooperation of the department of state," which later — in his words again — "subjected the manuscript to a review to ensure that the contents would not compromise national security."

With the benefit of hindsight, Talbott had advised that the White House use the dual bait of UN Security Council permanent membership and a strategic partnership to "coax India into the non-proliferation mainstream." That is exactly what President Bush did.

Before offering the deal, Washington led India up the garden path on UNSC membership and massaged its ego with statements that it was both "ready to help India become an important power in the 21st century" and open to "a decisively broader strategic relationship." Since the deal was unveiled, a growing number of publicists have been pressed into service to market it as "India’s passport to the world."

As a result, what hush-hush negotiations with Jaswant Singh could not achieve, aggressive public diplomacy may pull off, with Burns singing the ditty that the deal is "wildly popular among millions of Indians who see it as a mark of US respect for India." That explains why an inveterate non-proliferation ayatollah like Talbott today is hawking the Bush deal, betting that India’s short public memory will help obscure the inconvenient truths.

http://www.asianage.com/presentation/leftnavigation/opinion/op-ed/the-truth-talbott-hides.aspx

Engage Burma, Don’t Isolate

Posted on March 15, 2008 by Chellaney

Burma sanctions don’t work

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times, March 14, 2008

Burma today ranks as one of the world’s most isolated and sanctioned nations — a situation unlikely to be changed by its ruling junta scheduling a May referendum on a draft constitution and facilitating U.N. special envoy Ibrahim Gambari’s third visit in six months.

The referendum and planned 2010 national elections are part of a touted road map to democracy. But the iconic opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, may not be able to contest because the still-undisclosed, military-drawn constitution — in the making for 15 years — is likely to bar anyone who married a foreigner.

Burma is an important state. This is not a Bhutan or a Brunei but a country that boasts
the largest Indochina land area. It is a resource-rich nation that can become an economic powerhouse if it can remedy its poisoned politics and ethnic divides and dispel international sanctions. And it is a land bridge between South and Southeast Asia. Such is its vantage location that Burma forms the strategic nucleus for India, China and Southeast Asia.

The military has run Burma, once the world’s leading rice exporter, for 46 long years. Indeed, Burma’s present problems and impoverishment can be tracked back to the defining events of 1962, when General Ne Win deposed elected Prime Minister U Nu, one of the founders of the nonaligned movement.

The callous Ne Win, a devotee of Marx and Stalin, virtually sealed off Burma, banning most external trade and investment, nationalizing companies, halting foreign projects and tourism, and kicking out the Indian business community.

It was not until nearly three decades later that a new generation of military leaders, motivated by Deng Xiaoping’s modernization program in China, attempted to ease Burma’s international isolation through tentative economic reforms without loosening political controls. Such attempts came much after the military’s brutal suppression of the 1988 student-led protests that left several thousand dead or injured — a bloodbath that coincided with the numerology-devoted Ne Win’s announcement of retirement on the "most auspicious" day of Aug. 8, 1988 (8.8.88).

While Western aid cutoffs and other penal actions began no sooner than the Burmese junta refused to honor the outcome of the 1990 elections, won by the detained Suu Kyi’s party, Burma became a key target of U.S. sanctions policy only in the Bush years.

The new missionary zeal in the U.S. approach, reflected in the 2003 Burma Freedom and Democracy Act banning all imports from that country and several subsequent punitive executive orders, has occurred because of the White House president’s wife. Laura Bush’s Burma fixation has put the policy establishment in a bind: The more the United States seeks to punish the regime, the more it undercuts its ability to promote political reforms in Burma, and the more its actions threaten to disrupt the lives of ordinary Burmese.

As then Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Daley told Congress in late 2003, many garment workers made jobless by U.S. sanctions "have entered the flourishing illegal sex and entertainment industries" in Burma or neighboring states.

While prohibiting new investment by American citizens or entities, Washington has protected the business interests of Chevron Corp., which acquired a stake in the Yadana natural-gas export project in Burma when it bought Unocal Corp. in 2005. Because Unocal’s investment in the project, in which France’s Total SA holds the biggest stake, predated the imposition of U.S. sanctions, Chevron has used a grandfather clause to stay put in Burma — one of the few large Western companies left there.

The junta, through its remarkable shortsightedness, has only aided Laura Bush’s activism. Its crackdown last September on monk-led protests — which, according to a U.N. special rapporteur’s report, left at least 31 dead — invited a new round of U.S.-inspired international sanctions. The regime not only continues to detain Suu Kyi, now 62, but also has isolated itself from the public by moving the national capital to remote Nay Pyi Taw, located between Rangoon and Mandalay.

The big losers have been Burma’s 58 million people, bearing the brunt of the sanctions, while the only winner is China, a friend of every pariah regime.

Democracy offers the only path to bringing enduring stability to diverse Burma. Genuine participatory processes are necessary to promote ethnic reconciliation in a country that has been at war with itself since its 1948 independence. While the ethnic Burmans, of Tibetan stock, constitute the majority, the non-Burman nationalities (including the Shan and the largely Christian Karen, the first to take up arms) make up one-third of the population.

The oversize Burmese military fancies itself as the builder of a united Burma. Given that ethnic warfare began no sooner than Japanese-trained General Aung San (Suu Kyi’s father) persuaded the smaller nationalities to join the union, the military has used the threat of Balkanization to justify its hold on politics.

It trumpets its successes between the late 1980s and early 1990s in crushing a four-decade-long communist insurgency and concluding ceasefire agreements with other underground groups, with just a few outfits left in active resistance. The period since has been viewed by the military as a time to begin state-building, while to the opposition it has been an unending phase of political repression.

Given Burma’s potent mix of ethnicity, religion and culture, democracy can serve as a unifying and integrating force, as in India. After all, Burma cannot be indefinitely held together through brute might. But make no mistake: The seeds of democracy will not take root in a stunted economy, battered by widening Western sanctions.

The junta restored the traditional name Myanmar for nationalistic reasons as a break from the colonial past. But Myanmar, meaning the Burman land, carries an ethnic connotation, and Suu Kyi’s party continues to use the name Burma. A name change ought to have the imprimatur of an elected government citing a national consensus in favor.

Sanctions have sent Burmese society into a downward spiral of poverty and discontent while strengthening the military’s political grip. Today, under the cumulative weight of sanctions, Burma has come full circle: Its 74-year-old senior general, the ailing and delusional Than Shwe, an astrology aficionado, has amassed powers to run a virtual one-man dictatorship in Ne Win-style.

Burma illustrates that sanctions can hurt those they are supposed to protect, especially when they are enforced for long and shut out engagement.

Such is Laura Bush’s ability not only to influence U.S. policy but also to orchestrate an international campaign in which she announced Dec. 10 that "India, one of Burma’s closest trading partners, has stopped selling arms to the junta."

New Delhi has neither confirmed or denied that. Who can contradict a first lady whose fury on Burma reputedly flows from a meeting with a Karen rape victim and information from a relative with an erstwhile connection to that country?

If the Burmese are to win political freedoms, they need to be first freed from sanctions that rob them of jobs, cripple their economic well-being and retard civil-society development. It is a growing civil society that usually sounds the death knell of a dictatorship.

Years of sanctions have left Burma bereft of an entrepreneurial class but saddled with the military as the only functioning institution — to the extent that the spokesperson for Suu Kyi’s party admits the military will have an important role to play in any future government.

To avert looming humanitarian catastrophes, the same international standard applicable to autocratic, no-less-ruthless regimes in next-door China, Bangladesh and Laos should apply to Burma — engage, don’t isolate.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author, most recently, of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."

The Japan Times: Friday, March 14, 2008

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/print/eo20080314bc.html

Stagecraft and Statecraft

Author Archives: Chellaney

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Engage Burma, Don’t Isolate