What Is a Uighur "Refuge"?

To understand the context of this tweet from Human Rights Watch's Ken Roth:

'Kenneth Roth ‏@KenRoth 17h

Growing number of #Uighurs trying to flee to Southeast Asia speaks to severe repression in #China. Refuge needed. http://trib.al/RhN3crS

it might be useful to understand that the United States maintains a refugee channel through Nepal for Tibetans from inside the PRC's Tibetan Autonomous Region to make their way to Dharmsala.

The PRC is not happy with this arrangement, since most of the adults return to Tibet after their visit (the children stay in school in India).  

The benign explanation is the parents got a shot of religious exhaltation by obtaining an audience with the Dalai Lama and go home to go on with their quotidian occupations.  The explanation that the PRC government probably leans toward is that these Tibetans are receiving training and resources in Dharmsala to make the PRC occupation of Tibetan regions more difficult.

A similar arrangement for Uighurs is pretty unlikely since no neighboring countries seem inclined to attract the PRC's anger by granting refugee Uighurs an official haven.  There are unofficial havens across the Karakorum Pass, but they produce Uighur terrorists (or, if you prefer, Uighur freedom fighters;  the Uighurs at Guantanamo were considered combatants, but "non-enemy combatants", therefore worthy of release since their intention was to target the PRC, not the US) as well as Uighur activists.  As far as I know, the PRC has not yet exercised its regional power prerogative to raid these camps; but the existence of camps and militants inside Pakistan and Afghanistan are the subject of frequent representations to Islamabad and Kabul by the Chinese government and its security services.

In the incident referenced by Mr. Roth, a group of PRC Uighurs (men, women, & children) were being returned to the PRC from Vietnam after entering illegally (the term of art here is "refoulement", something that the Nepalese government is not supposed to do with Tibetan refugees); the men apparently seized some weapons from the Vietnamese border guard.  Two guards and five Uighur refugees were killed in the ensuing fracas.

This is unlikely to increase the enthusiasm of Vietnam for providing the refuge Roth is proposing.  Nor is the fact that the perpetrators of the knife attack that killed 27 in Kunming were apparently trying to exit the country thataway before they returned to Kunming for their rampage (the local PSB said they were trying to leave the country through Guangdong Province, which appears unlikely; they may have been trying to double back through Guangxi to Vietnam).

Given this context, and the continued acquiescence of the Obama administration to the "terrorist" designation for Uighur separatists (granted, apparently with some good reason, by President George W. Bush), it seems unlikely that any government will throw itself behind Mr. Roth's proposal.

Below is an excerpt from a piece I wrote on the Tibetan refugee arrangement for Asia Times in 2011 (the full piece, with links, can be read here):

China tests Nepal's loyalty over Tibet
By Peter Lee

Nepal is caught in a tug-of-war between India and China that threatens to tear it apart.

The big picture is dominated by the rivalry of Asia's two great rising powers; but how and why that rivalry plays out in Nepal has a lot to do with the Tibetan issue and China's anxiety over the potential for increasingly militant Tibetan emigres in Nepal and India to cause problems for Beijing.

A potentially exacerbating factor is the so-called "gentleman's agreement" that has informally governed the treatment of Tibetan refugees within Nepal for over a decade. 

...

Nepal is home to 20,000 Tibetan refugees, the second largest Tibetan exile community; it is also a key link between the Tibetan diaspora and the Chinese-controlled homeland.

Treatment of Tibetan refugees residing in and transiting through Nepal is the subject of a long-standing "gentleman's agreement" between the West, India, the UN, and Nepal.

The "gentleman's agreement" allowed for the de facto refugee status for Tibetans fleeing the TAR. Per the agreement, Tibetans who make it across the border are supposed to be escorted by Nepalese police to Kathmandu, turned over to the Department of Immigration, passed on to the Tibetan Refugee Reception Center in Kathmandu, processed by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR), and dispatched to India on a one-way transit visa.

Nepalese policemen were paid a modest stipend funded by the UNHCR office (largely through the financial support of the United States State Department) for this time-consuming and - when the Maoist insurgency was at its height - dangerous duty through the Nepalese Department of Immigration, the DofI.

As of 2008, after the embarrassment of mass Tibetan demonstrations in Nepal against its hosting of the Olympics, China significantly tightened its control of the border. It also became more demanding of Kathmandu, the Nepalese government became more compliant, and the Department of Immigration became less tolerant of refugees. Police interpreted the "border" more loosely, as a zone rather than a line, and began chivvying Tibetan refugees back to the TAR even if they were several days walk inside the borderline. This process, known as "refoulement" or forcible repatriation, is illegal treatment of acknowledged refugees; however, in the murky world of Nepalese immigration, the issue was not that clear-cut.

In addition to tightened controls on the China side of the border and concerted Chinese pressure on the Nepalese government, the Chinese government allegedly deployed financial incentives: it was rumored to pay bounties to Nepalese policemen to take refugees back to the border instead of to Kathmandu. [2]

The number of refugees appearing at the Kathmandu reception center has decreased significantly, from a peak of almost 3,000 per year in 2006 to 2008 (when the Maoist insurgency plunged border enforcement in disarray) to 770 in 2010. [3]

In this fraught situation, friction has arisen between the Nepalese government and the UNHCR. By 2010, the majority of Tibetan refugees reaching the reception center were coming in directly, not through the Department of Immigration. According to an article in Republica, a leading local English-language paper, the UNHCR had taken to paying bounties of around $350 to policemen bringing Tibetan refugees to them directly, instead of through the DofI, perhaps to counter an unstated government tilt toward refoulement and to compete with Chinese bounty payments. [4]

Presumably this did not sit well with the Nepalese government. From the perspective of the Department of Immigration, the UNHCR bounty was dividing the loyalties of the police and incentivizing a flow of Tibetan refugees that was diplomatically onerous to the Nepalese government, while depriving the DofI of a revenue stream.

In April 2010, the Department of Immigration in Kathmandu detained nine Tibetan refugees and gave each a fine of 2,600 Nepal rupees for illegal entry - less than $40 per head. If the fine could not be paid, the nine would be detained for 107 days. However, it does not appear that the Nepalese government was prepared to deport the refugees back to China after the fine was paid or the period of incarceration ended.

According to TibetInfoNet, a European advocacy and news site, the Chinese embassy took a close interest in the nine, indicating that China is engaged in enhanced, systematic intelligence gathering as part of its investment in intensifying and modernizing TAR border enforcement ... but found that cooperation from the Nepalese government still had its limits:

A representative of the Chinese embassy, who presented himself as a security officer but wore plain clothes, visited the immigration office three times. On his first visit, he spoke with the Tibetans in Chinese, trying to convince them to go back to Tibet and promising them immunity if they did so. However, the Tibetans refused to speak to him or simply ignored him. On his second visit, the Chinese officer asked the Nepali immigration officers to copy photos and the files on the detained Tibetans onto a USB memory stick that he had brought especially for this purpose. This was refused to him. The Tibetans had, in any case, provided fake names to the Nepali immigration, as is common practice. On the third visit, the Chinese officer appeared with a camera and the intention of taking photos of the detained Tibetans. Also in this case, permission was refused to him. [5]

As the story made it into the key issue appears to have been resentment of the Department of Immigration towards the UNHCR.

The UNHCR declined to pay the fine to spring the nine; instead of $360 for the DofI, an embarrassing wave of diplomatic pressure hit the Nepalese embassy in Washington:

The detention evoked so much diplomatic pressure from Western countries, mainly the US, that the Tibetans were released after five days in jail.

The pressure was so intense that officials at the Nepali embassy in Washington DC had to call up the Immigration Office in Nepal, asking it to release the arrested.

Following the release, Nepali immigration authorities have not detained any more Tibetans though there is a sustained flow of Tibetans to Kathmandu. The DofI these days quietly hands over Tibetans illegally coming to Nepal to UNHCR-Nepal without taking legal action as it used to in recent years. [6]

There is a barely suppressed note of indignation in the reporting that the Tibetans couldn't pay the $40 fine, even though they had reportedly each paid the equivalent of US$2,000 to get smuggled into Nepal for "the promise of a comfortable life".

This intense US commitment toward maintaining a channel to Dharamsala for less than 1,000 Tibetan transit refugees per year invites scrutiny of another alleged element of the "gentleman's agreement": the West's apparent acquiescence to the Nepalese government's suppression of "anti-China" political activity by members of the 20,000 or so "resident refugee" Tibetan exile community.

Tibetans who made it to Nepal before 1989 are given formal refugee status, distinguishing them from later arrivals, who fall under the "gentleman's agreement" as transit refugees.

Formal refugee status has yield resident Tibetans in Nepal little more than the opportunity to reside on land in the outskirts of Kathmandu, Pokhara and other towns in the Kathmandu Valley arranged through the Swiss Red Cross - land that they cannot own - and to occupy a socially marginalized position as non-citizens in Nepalese society.

Many Tibetans residing in Nepal fled Tibet as China took over in the 1950s. Some of the residents belong to families relocated from Mustang when the Central Intelligence Agency and the Dalai Lama shut down the secret war against the Chinese in Tibet in the 1970s. The community is organized by activist emigre groups like the Tibetan Youth Congress and Tibetan Women's Association; and it reliably turns out to condemn historical and current crimes of the Chinese government against the Tibetan people.

An in-depth analysis of the plight of Tibetan refugees in Nepal, prepared in 2002 by the Tibet Justice Center, contained this admission by the US Embassy in Kathmandu:

In the Embassy's view, the paramount objective of its policies in Nepal is to ensure that Tibetans can continue to escape persecution in China through Nepal, even if this sometimes means restricting the rights of Tibetan refugees who reside more permanently in Nepal. "... [I]t is more important morally to have the open border than to have every form of cultural freedom of expression." The tradeoff, in other words, is that Nepal will continue to permit the gentleman's agreement to operate provided the political expression of Tibetans within Nepal does not jeopardize Nepal's relationship with China. The gentleman's agreement therefore must remain low-profile. "Protesting in Nepal,"... is "counterproductive." [7]

In sum, the price of the "gentleman's agreement" appears to be a hands-off attitude toward Nepal's vigorous and frequently violent police action against this none-too-popular minority.

This policy has not been publicly reaffirmed in recent years; however, the low-key Western response to highly visible clashes between resident refugee Tibetans and the Nepalese authorities in anti-Chinese protests implies it is still in effect.

In the last month, Nepal has witnessed two incidents of forceful government suppression of resident Tibetan political activity in Nepal.

On March 10, perhaps 1,000 Nepalese Tibetans gathered at a monastery in Kathmandu to hear the broadcast of a speech by the Dalai Lama on the 52nd anniversary of the anti-Chinese uprising in Lhasa. According to a photo-essay by Dharamsala-based journalist Rebecca Novick, the Nepalese government turned out 1,000 riot police (their high-tech equipment allegedly "a gift of the Chinese Embassy") to quash any political manifestations, including display of the Tibetan flag. [8]

The Tibetan flag was defiantly displayed and the police duly moved in, triggering a series of angry confrontations. The police responded with South Asia's signal contribution to public order, the lathi (baton or stick) charge.

Despite the presence of numerous international observers and some spectacular video footage, Western governments apparently were uninterested in making an issue out of the plight of Nepal's resident Tibetan refugees. [9]

The Nepal government followed up on this incident with another apparently high-handed action against the resident Tibetan community on March 20: stopping Nepalese Tibetans from voting in the epochal elections for the new Kalon Tripa - prime minister - who will serve as the Dalai Lama's successor as the political leader of the Tibetan diaspora.

There are 84,000 registered Tibetan voters worldwide; about 10% of these voters reside in Nepal, and have been successively disenfranchised to some extent in the national primary (October 3, 2010) and local (February 12) elections, as well as the national elections held on March 20 by Nepalese government interference in balloting. [10]

In contrast to the rapid and massive application of pressure upon the Nepalese government in the virtually invisible matter of $360 in squeeze to free nine transit refugees, the wholesale and highly publicized thrashing of dozens of Tibetan activists in the streets of Kathmandu and, subsequently, the seizing of ballot boxes in the most important election in the history of the Tibetan diaspora, apparently at the behest of the People's Republic of China, excited little conspicuous official interest or comment from Tibet's traditional government defenders in Europe or the United States.

...

A WikiLeaks 2010 cable from the US Embassy in New Delhi provides the basis for some intriguing speculation as to the higher (transit refugee) and lower (resident refugee) priorities of the West's Tibet policy. Over half of the Tibetans arriving in Dharamsala cannot, by any interpretation, be classified as genuine refugees. Why? Because after they escape from Tibet ... they go back to Tibet:

XXXXXXXXXXXX [source blanked out in the cable] told PolOff on February 4 that an average of 2,500 to 3,500 refugees from Tibet typically arrive in Dharamsala each year, with most returning to Tibet after receiving an audience with the Dalai Lama. XXXXXXXXXXXX confirmed that from 1980 to November 2009 87,096 refugees were processed by the Dharamsala Reception Center (RC) and that 46,620 returned to Tibet after a short pilgrimage in India. Most of those who do stay in India are children who then attend schools run by Tibetan Children's Villages. [11]

That this reverse flow exists passes through Nepal is documented by the exasperated attempt of the Nepalese government to extract fines and fees from the ostensibly impoverished transit refugees they detain while passing through Nepal on their way back to Tibet, as the Tibet Justice Center's 2002 report notes:

Finally, it should be noted that Nepalese officials emphasized that, today, the government's largest concern about Tibetan refugees is not necessarily those in transit to India; it is rather the growing number of Tibetans who return to Tibet through Nepal after visiting India and thus reenter Nepal from India. The government apparently fears that these Tibetans will remain in Nepal. Director-General Mainali said that Tibetans caught reentering Nepal from India, while eventually returned to UNHCR custody, at times will be arrested, fined, and jailed.
...
In late 2000, the government detained 19 Tibetans for this reason, charging them with high fines and imprisoning them for inability to pay. On the basis of this "precedent," in August 2001, the government detained several other Tibetans seeking to return to Tibet after visiting India and assessed fines - totaling several thousand dollars, comprised of visa fees, late visa fees, and fines for each day of alleged illegal residence - on the presumption that these Tibetans had been resident in Nepal illegally for the duration of their visit to India. Because none of the Tibetans could afford to pay, the Nepalese Department of Immigration imprisoned them.

UNHCR is reportedly negotiating with the Ministry of Home Affairs to ensure that this practice does not continue and to develop a means for "Tibetans coming from India [to] safely cross Nepal on their way to Tibet in [the] future." [12]

This amazing exercise in religious tourism is, one would expect, rather suspicious to the Chinese government.

Tens of thousands of Tibetans spend thousands of dollars apiece to smugglers, risk their lives crossing the Himalayas, endure the hostile ministrations of the Nepalese police, make it to Dharamsala, receive the Dalai Lama's blessing - and then run the same gauntlet of danger, abuse, and expense in reverse to return to the well-advertised living hell of the Tibetan Autonomous Region.

Only the children stay, to be educated in Dharamsala.

The intense Chinese interest in assembling detailed dossiers on the nine detainees in April 2010 was perhaps related to a desire to be able to identify them as anti-China activists inside Tibet for possible extradition requests.

However, it does not appear likely that Nepal will agree to extradite Tibetan refugees back to the TAR in the near future. It would also not appear to be a priority to document who was leaving Tibet permanently to join the emigre community railing, for now impotently, against the PRC.

It appears most likely that Chinese security wanted to know exactly who the nine detainees were because many of them were expected to return to Tibet after a visit to Dharamsala.

Plans to return via Nepal - and the need to prevent unfriendly security services from acquiring their true identities - probably also explains why the detainees engage in the "common practice" of providing false identities to the Department of Immigration.

A 2009 profile of refugees in Dharamsala in the Tibet Post International, while describing the mistreatment suffered with the TAR and the hardships endured along the route, also touched on the motivations of some refugees, and why the people leaving Tibet are assumed to be probable returnees and a threat to Chinese rule:

Topjor's cot is next to 32-year-old Tenpa Dhargye, who arrived from Tibet three days ago. This is his second time in India, in 2000 he came for the first time and upon his return to Tibet was caught carrying political [sic], documents for which he received a four year and 10-month prison sentence. [13]

The author also interviewed four 15-year old boys who made the arduous trek out of Tibet, reporting "They all plan to return to Tibet at some point in the future".

The director of the reception center roughly confirmed the situation described in the cable disclosed by WikiLeaks, telling the Tibet Post, "Every year 300-400 refugees return to Tibet from India, but this too is dangerous, and the number changes based on the political situation inside Tibet and the security on the border area."

The gentleman's agreement provides a humanitarian service by providing a path to freedom for Tibetans who find it impossible to continue to live under Chinese rule, and for young people seeking an education and environment more in keeping with their Tibetan identity than what they can get in the TAR.

But a majority of the so-called "refugees" use the facility to pay brief visits to Dharamsala to obtain the blessing of the Dalai Lama before returning to the TAR; of these returnees, an unknown number are activists whose motives and mission for making the round trip are no doubt the subject of the most unfavorable speculation by Chinese security services.

In the most generous interpretation, the United States supports the Nepalese facility so that every year a few hundred Tibetans from the TAR are able to achieve direct contact with their revered leader.

In the worst case, China could envisage the Nepal conduit as a conveyor belt for activists transporting information, advice, and money between Dharamsala and Tibet - and delivering Tibetan youth for indoctrination in Dharamsala - a mechanism knowingly enabled by the United States through its diplomatic and financial support of the UNHCR operation in Nepal, and through its direct and intense pressure on the Nepalese government to protect the anonymity of these peripatetic refugees from attempts by China's security apparatus to learn their identities.

The truth is perhaps somewhere in between, more towards the humanitarian end of the spectrum, since the Indian government is serious about discouraging anti-PRC activities by the Tibetan exile community within its borders.

Tibetan Refugees and the Gentleman's Agreement in Nepal

I wrote a piece entitled China tests Nepal's loyalty over Tibet for Asia Times.  The article’s hook is that hundreds of Tibetans make the dangerous, arduous, and expensive trek from the TAR through Nepal to Dharamsala every year...and over half of them go right back to the PRC after a short visit.

"Returning to oppression" doesn't quite fit the refugee profile of "fleeing oppression".

You’re curious, I’m curious, the Chinese are more than curious as to the motivations and, more importantly, the identities, of these ostensible religious tourists. 

It’s an interesting article about an interesting subject: the “gentleman’s agreement”, enabled by US government financial and diplomatic support,  which allows the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to shelter Tibetan "transit" refugees in Nepal and facilitate their circular trek to and from India and back to the PRC.

The unspoken quid pro quo appears to be that, in return for Nepal's acquiescence to the "gentleman's agreement", the West turns a blind eye toward the Nepalese government's efforts to please Beijing by vigorously thumping the "resident" refugee Tibetans who live in Nepal and demonstrate against China.

How long the gentleman's agreement will continue as emigre Tibetans become more militant and China becomes more entrenched in Nepal's politics is...an interesting question.

Has the Tipping Point in US-China Relations Been Reached?

All Sticks, No Carrots, and the Occasional High Profile Insult

This looks like a calculated slap in the face:

The US president has accused China of "wilful blindness" in remaining silent over North Korea's suspected sinking of a South Korean warship in March.

Barack Obama said he hoped that Hu Jintao, his Chinese counterpart, would recognise that North Korea crossed a line in the sinking of the Cheonan warship, which killed 46 South Korean sailors.

...

He said he understood that North Korea and China were neighbours, "there's a difference between restraint and wilful blindness to consistent problems".

Obama held talks with Hu on the sidelines of the summit and said he had been "blunt" with him on the issue of North Korea.

"My hope is that President Hu will recognise as well that this is an example of Pyongyang going over the line," he said.

...
China, which is Pyongyang's main international ally, has so far remained non-committal on the issue, prompting Obama to say that shying away from the harsh facts about North Korea's behaviour was "a bad habit we need to break".

Obama said he wanted the UN Security Council to produce a "crystal-clear acknowledgment" of the North's alleged action, which would require the co-operation of veto-wielding member China.
...

Obama, who met Lee Myung-Bak, the South Korean president, on the sidelines of the G20 summit, said it was "absolutely critical that the international community rally behind him and send a clear message to North Korea that this kind of behaviour is unacceptable".

It looks like President Obama has decisively put his eggs in the ROK basket, backing South Korean president Lee Myung-bak on the Cheonan sinking, putting aside his previous doubts about the KORUS FTA (US-South Korea Free Trade Agreement) to push for its ratification, and encouraging South Korea's ambitions to upgrade its regional profile to what looks like parity or more with the PRC.

I was struck with Korea Times' coverage of President Lee's remarks at the Toronto summit:

South Korea to represent voices of emerging countries at Seoul summit

TORONTO ― President Lee Myung-bak said Sunday (local time) that Korea will help countries reach an agreement on establishing a global financial safety net at the next Group of 20 Summit, slated for November in Seoul, to prevent the recurrence of a global financial crisis.

Korea will also host a meeting of 100 CEOs from globally renowned companies ahead of the G-20 Summit to discuss ways to boost private investment and the issues of global trade, investment and corporate responsibility.

Lee made the pledges in his closing remarks at the final session of the two-day Toronto summit.

The initiatives are in line with Korea's efforts to represent the voices of emerging and poorer nations on the global stage so that countries, rich or poor, can work together under a shared goal of achieving sustainable, balanced long-term growth, according to Seoul officials.

"Representing the voices of emerging countries" used to be China's self-assigned role.

Beyond the ROK-USA strategic romance, Beijing probably noticed that one other country that has yet to endorse the Cheonan report was not accused of "wilfull blindness": Russia.

That would lead one to believe that Russian President Medvedev had--upon the conclusion of a successful US visit during which he became "the first iPhone 4 owner in Russia" and President Obama was apparently unfazed by the uncovering of a large Russian spy ring operating within the United States--either signed on to the US position, or the Obama administration was staking out its Cheonan stance pre-emptively, expecting that Russia would decide to line up with the United States in order to avoid endangering the reset.

People's Daily English edition promptly ran a Global Times editorial pointedly titled "Blindness to China's efforts on the Peninsula ".

"Blindness". Get it?

It went on to say:

US President Barack Obama groundlessly blamed China for "blindness" to North Korea's "belligerent behavior" in an alleged attack on the South Korean navel vessel the Cheonan while speaking at the G20 summit Monday.

His words on such an important occasion, based on ignorance of China's consistent and difficult efforts in pushing for peace on the peninsula, has come as a shock to China and the world at large.

As a close neighbor of North Korea, China and its people have immediate and vital stakes in peace and stability on the peninsula. China's worries over the North Korean nuclear issue are by no means less than those of the US.

The US president should have taken these into consideration before making irresponsible and flippant remarks about China's role in the region.


Characterizing the US president as "irresponsible and flippant" is a convenient indicator that US-China relations are headed for the meat locker.

Another indication is the Chinese announcement that it will conduct live fire naval exercises as a riposte to the US-ROK joint exercises scheduled June 30 to July 5, which may or may not include a US aircraft carrier sailing around the Yellow Sea between the Korean peninsula and the Chinese mainland.

I came across another interesting and possibly telling news item relevant to the widening US-China rift.

I hazard most people don't get around to reading the Nepali press, but the news outlet Republica had an fascinating and carefully reported article by Kosh Raj Koirala entitled

Squeezed between China and West over Tibet

KATHMANDU, June 28: Department of Immigration (DoI) sent nine Tibetans to jail on April 30 after they refused to pay fines for illegally entering Nepal. The detention evoked so much diplomatic pressure from Western countries, mainly the US, that the Tibetans were released after five days in jail.

The pressure was so intense that officials at the Nepali embassy in Washington DC had to call up the Immigration Office in Nepal, asking it to release the arrested.

Following the release, Nepali immigration authorities have not detained any more Tibetans though there is a sustained flow of Tibetans to Kathmandu. DoI these days quietly hands over Tibetans illegally coming to Nepal to UNHCR-Nepal [UN High Commissioner for Refugees] without taking legal action as it used to in recent years.

...

Officials in Nepal fear that there could be a well-coordinated organization involved in bringing Tibetans illegally to Nepal and later sending them to Dharamshala, India and to Western countries through the help of UNHCR.

According to Koirala, it appears that the Tibetan Reception Center, which works with the UNHCR, is paying a bounty of Rs25,000 (about US$350) to policemen to bring Tibetans who have entered Nepal illegaly to the UNHCR-Nepal for eventual patriation to Dharmsala and the West, instead of turning them over to the Department of Immigration.

Interestingly, the DoI was not apparently planning to repatriate the Tibetans to China (although there had been rumblings of a China-friendly policy of shipping Tibetans back to the TAR); they simply wanted to fine them, and the Tibetans went to jail only because they refused to pay the fine.

Sordid commerce is apparently a factor in these escapes:

...arrested Tibetans said, during interrogations, that brokers brought them to Nepal with promises to take them to Western countries where they could lead comfortable lives. Those arrested even disclosed that they each paid Chinese Yuan 15,000 to 17,000 [US$2300 or so] to brokers.

So it's interesting that the UN is apparently helping Tibetan refugees to evade Nepalese jurisdiction. Nepal is under intense pressure from China to keep a lid on the flow and activities of Tibetans, so maybe UNHCR is just going the extra mile to shield Tibetans under new circumstances.

However, what's really interesting was the concerted pressure from the US and the Western countries to make sure that this dubious arrangement is sustained, even to the point of demanding the release of some guys who were apparently in jail just because they refused to pay a fine.

Tibet is a core interest of China. Reaffirmation of the one-China policy (including Chinese sovereignty over Tibet) was supposed to be the key concession granted by the US in the laborious negotiations with China over participation in the UN Iran sanctions discussions.

I guess the Chinese are finding out they should have read the fine print, and "acknowleding PRC sovereignty over Tibet" does not preclude "promoting the establishment of protected emigration routes to offshore havens for potentially anti-PRC Tibetans".

Speaking of U.S.-China deals that aren't turning out the way Beijing prefers, I have an article up at Asia Times entitled China in US sanctions cross-hairs (my suggested title, Stuart Levey, father of the North Korean atomic bomb, is back, did not make the cut).

It makes the case that the Obama administration has done a much better job than the Bush administration in laying a solid legal and diplomatic foundation for using US national Iran sanctions to pressure China on energy-related business in Iran and, for that matter, what else it wants to (like North Korea, RMB revaluation, etc.) and China may find that the US may be preparing to honor the imputed "We'll support UN sanctions if you won't pursue national sanctions against us" deal in the breach, as it were.

What interests me as that, as far as I can see, the Obama administration policy toward China is all sticks no carrots. The consequences of crossing the United States are meant to be dire, but I haven't seen any significant proffered benefits to China for toeing the U.S. line, other than the intangible ones--like not having President Obama insult your President at high profile international forums.

It will be interesting to watch this play out, especially in the run-up to the 2010 US congressional elections.

The Nepalese Maoists Find Out...

Maybe a Revolution Is a Dinner Party After All

The Nepalese Maoists are inching closer to their goal of winning state power.

The United Communist Party Nepal--Maoist controls something like 65 to 75% of the countryside.

I haven't been able to find a map showing the territory controlled by or under the military shadow of the UCPN-M.

Maybe a map that would be a gigantic red blob except for the ethnicly Indian Terai districts bordering India and the capital region is just too depressing.

It's one thing to establish a Maoist government in remote, impoverished, and underpopulated districts where government control, services, and security are non-existent.

Going into the populous Khatmandu Valley and cracking the urban insurrectionary nut while surrounded by suspicious, relatively prosperous city dwellers and the openly hostile Nepalese Army is another matter entirely.

For the time being, it appears that the Maoists have decided to maneuver themselves into the central government as an intermediate as opposed to final stage in their political struggle.

As a result, they have supplemented their usual street muscle with a round of dinner parties seeking to split their enemies and enlist domestic and international allies.

They are getting some love from the United States, the EU, and China. The Western powers don't particularly like the Maoists, but see little upside in continuing the existence of the current government, an ineffectual rump organization supported largely by India.

India appears to be on the outside looking in, while China has managed to boost its profile inside Nepal by canny political maneuvering with local and foreign actors.

I cover the current situation in an Asia Times article entitled China and the West step into Nepal crisis.

Nepal in the News!

…Kinda

Nepal’s government has decided to notify the international community formally of numerous violations of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) by the Nepalese Maoists. The last straw was the declaration of two newly minted autonomous regional governments in Maoist strongholds in eastern Nepal.

Good.

Maybe then the world will take notice of Nepal’s slide back into civil war thanks to the calculated defiance of the Maoists and India’s uncontrollable compulsion to meddle in Nepalese internal affairs.

I have four pieces on the deteriorating political situation in Nepal, and the exacerbating effect that the regional power rivalry between China and India has had on the brinkmanship of the various political parties.

Three pieces are up at Asia Times Online (Sino-Indian Rivalry Fuels Nepal’s Turmoil, Nepal Rhetoric Warms to Violence, and Monarchy Re-enters Nepal’s Political Mix) and one on the ideological roots of the Maoists is in the Counterpunch print edition (you can subscribe here).

India is working non-stop to transplant sufficient financial, military, and diplomatic backbone into Nepal’s outgunned bourgeois democracy so that it will continue to defy the Maoists and deny China the services of a friendly regime in Kathmandu.

The Nepalese Maoists are not a bunch of grubby jungle insurgents; they are the biggest party in the Constituent Assembly and held the prime ministership for almost a year before they pulled out in response to the machinations of the democratic parties and India.

The Maoists have street muscle on tap for conventional political intimidation in the form of their Young Communist League and a hardened military force, their People’s Liberation Army, currently rusticating under UN supervision but ready to return to action.

If the Maoists resume the insurgency, it will probably be as a strategic move from strength, not desperation, and could be a bloody business.

In the previous iteration of the insurgency, from 1996 until 2006, the Maoists exploited Nepal’s vast, mountainous terrain and the Nepalese army’s lack of men and equipment to fight the government to a standstill in a conflict that claimed 16,000 lives.

I find the West’s lack of interest in this burgeoning crisis curious, particularly when contrasted with the media frenzy that greeted the Dalai Lama’s visit to another Himalayan flashpoint, Arunachal Pradesh (territory claimed by China but held by India), at the beginning of November.

The Western press, in its wisdom, has instead obsessed on three hot stories out of Nepal:

1. A female Nepal government minister vigorously slapped around a local bureaucrat for failing to arrange suitable transportation during her visit; the interesting but ignored backstory was that she felt that she had been intentionally insulted because of her membership in the aggrieved lowlander Madhesi ethnic group, which is perennially treated with condescension and suspicion by Nepal’s hilly elites;
2. The Nepalese government tried to trump the Maldives underwater cabinet meeting by strapping on oxygen tanks for a twenty-minute confab at 17,000 feet adjacent to the Mount Everest base camp to publicize global warming issues;
3. Elephant kills eleven (including one victim trying to worship it as an incarnation of Ganesh!) in rampage of terror in southern Nepal.

Meanwhile, the Nepalese Maoists helpfully provided the Telegraph Nepal with a scorecard of the thirteen autonomous districts they intend to set up, color-coded to show the two already declared and listing the scheduled dates for declaration of autonomy in the other eleven over the coming week.

That’s good. Given the level of Western coverage coming out of Nepal, we’ll need all the help we can get to follow the story.

The elephant, by the way, is still at large!

Nepal in Crisis: Article up at Asia Times

Nepal in Crisis: Article up at Asia Times

It began with snark…

Why Isn’t the Foreign Press in Kathmandu?

Wailing and gnashing of teeth greeted the Indian government’s withdrawal of permission for foreign journalists to cover the Dalai Lama’s mid-November visit to the disputed border territory of Arunachal Pradesh and the town and monastery of Tawang on the border of China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region, as the Guardian tells us:

Four passes to Arunachal Pradesh, previously given to foreign reporters, have been revoked and all other news organisations that applied for permits including the Guardian have been turned down.

"We are incredibly surprised and disappointed to learn that reporters' visas to Arunachal Pradesh have been cancelled ahead of the Dalai Lama's visit," said Heather Timmons, the president of the New Delhi-based Foreign Correspondents' Club.

But nothing was going to happen there—the Chinese and Indian governments have wisely decided to set the burner for “border tensions” on simmer—except an eruption of local color, devotional Buddhist droning, drinking of butter tea, and babbling in Tibetan and local dialects that, it is safe to say, no outside journo could understand.

At the same time, a lot is happening in Kathmandu.

Massive torchlight parades, clashes between the cops and demonstrators, vows to bring the Nepalese government to its knees, a tottering U.N. peace process, barely concealed great-power sparring between China and India—and all this in Kathmandu, a city one could probably walk across in half a day, filled by a tiny, compulsively chattering and confiding Anglophone elite.

…

So far, Western reporting has reported, remotely and somewhat uncomprehendingly—and, perhaps reflecting the shared desire of the Indian, Chinese, and Western governments not to inflame the situation with excessive attention and rhetoric, with a marked lack of interest--on the massive demonstrations in Kathmandu led by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). The CPNM has vowed to bring 300,000 activists to the capital to shut down the government.

Andrew Buncombe of the Independent chose to devote his Nepal reporting to the admittedly amusing story of a female government minister who administered a vigorous pummeling to a hapless local official after he failed to arrange a satisfactory luxury vehicle for her tour of a southern district (subsequently a warrant has been issued for her arrest).

Then I realized that the balance of the article was a useful overview of the situation in Nepal. Asia Times Online agreed and ran it today as Sino-Indian rivalry fuels Nepal turmoil -- minus the snarky bits, which I reproduce above for the amusement of China Matters’ loyal readers.