Icons under fire

From Economist.com

Both the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi face criticism from their own sides

BORN to leading roles among their people; one a devout Buddhist, the other a reincarnate Buddha; Nobel peace prize-winners; championed by the famous; admired around the world: Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and Myanmar’s detained opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, have much in common.

Add two more items to the list. Both, so far, are political failures. And both are now facing quiet criticism for that from their own supporters.

The Dalai Lama’s policy of negotiating with China about the status of Tibet seems to be leading nowhere, as he himself has admitted. And Miss Suu Kyi’s long, lonely vigil in Yangon seems not to have weakened the junta ruling Myanmar. Indeed, the generals seem as solidly entrenched as at any time since they brutally crushed the pro-democracy movement in 1988.

In Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama’s seat in exile in northern India, exiled Tibetans have convened this week to discuss the future. Many have long felt uneasy at the Dalai Lama’s policy of offering to accept Chinese sovereignty in Tibet in return for the promise of genuine autonomy.

Two setbacks, probably related, have made the Dalai Lama’s efforts seem even more futile. Late last month, the British government, the only one in the world not to recognise China’s full sovereignty in Tibet, came as close as it could to doing so.

This undermined the historical basis of the talks the Dalai Lama’s envoys have been holding sporadically with China. At the eighth round, the latest, in Beijing this month, China’s position seemed to harden, and it denounced the Tibetans’ proposals for autonomy as a bid for “disguised independence”.

Similarly, Burmese activists have long whispered grumbles about Miss Suu Kyi—criticised either for not being flexible enough when there have been opportunities for talks with the junta; or for being too docile, and refusing to call for an uprising.

Some of the grumblers spoke to journalists who were writing a long feature on Miss Suu Kyi that appeared in The Guardian this month. Entitled “Not such a hero after all”, it has created, as its writers clearly intended it to, a bit of a stir, with its attack describing Miss Suu Kyi as recalcitrant, ineffective, “authoritarian and proud”.

The article is deeply unfair. It ignores the much more stringent conditions of her detention and isolation in recent years. And it accuses her of some things she never did—of, for example, “drumming out” NGOs working on humanitarian calamities, such as an HIV epidemic.

But, as with the Dalai Lama’s critics, the authors and the disillusioned Burmese activists they quote have a point. Miss Suu Kyi’s strategy, articulated in a brief period of relative freedom in the late 1990s, has failed. Encouraging international sanctions to isolate the regime has not brought it close to collapse. Rather it has reduced the influence of the West in favour of that of Myanmar’s regional neighbours.

Behind the sniping at both Miss Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama is an important argument that is rarely made explicit: about whether non-violence can ever effect change. This is fundamental to what they both stand for. Both loathe violence.

The Dalai Lama is famous for his good-humoured optimism, even in the most trying circumstances. Yet a leading Indian politician, who was attending a series of religious lectures that he gave in March, as Lhasa erupted in bloody riots, recalls that the Dalai Lama found teaching almost impossible.

Similarly, this columnist met Miss Suu Kyi several times in the 1990s. Only once did she lose her poise, when the government had mobilised thugs to menace her supporters on the streets, and a nasty confrontation seemed to loom.

Many Tibetan and Burmese activists believe pacifism does not work. In fact, one surprising recent study by two American academics, Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth, suggests non-violent campaigns are more effective than armed uprisings. They analysed 323 resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006, and found that non-violent campaigns achieved success 53% of the time, compared with 26% for campaigns of violent resistance.

This is scant comfort to Tibetan and Burmese activists impatient for change. And both groups face another difficulty in common: that there is no alternative or individual in place to succeed Miss Suu Kyi or the Dalai Lama. Their passing will be a huge blow to both movements.

Yet it would also remove the only credible interlocutors available to China and the Burmese junta. They tend to see the Dalai Lama and Miss Suu Kyi respectively as the embodiment of their problems with restive populations. In fact, they may represent the only hope of a peaceful solution.