It is likely for those supportive of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq to call the operation an act of liberation. Appearing on NBC’s ”Meet the Press” hosted by Tim Russert, former US Vice-President Dick Cheney confidently postulated that Iraqis would greet the US military as liberators. Not to deny that there were Iraqis who celebrated the fall of Saddam Hussein the dictator, the days, months and years that followed greeted the invading force with bullets and bombs instead of flowers.
He said: ”Now, I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” Four days later, the US troops with its Coalition of the Willing began what they would identify as the liberation of Iraq.
The former vice-president and many supportive of the war from the beginning were not alone in tricking themselves into believing that their actions would be appreciated by the invaded. Farther to the east, Tibetan legislators loyal to the central government of the People’s Republic of China just last month declared March 28 as an annual holiday in Tibet. Known as Serfs’ Emancipation Day, it is designed to celebrate the official narrative of the central government of the PRC.
It is an act of pretension equivalent to Cheney’s.
It was 50 years ago on that day that the independent government of Tibet fled the country after a failed rebellion against the occupying PRC force. It was already nine years since the communist PRC first invaded Tibet in 1950 since effective Tibetan independence decades ago.
The invasion was predicated on a pillar: Tibet has always been part of China. To morally support the invasion if the idea of first rationale is unpalatable, the PRC claimed that it was freeing Tibetan serfs from a feudalistic system practiced there.
These two assertions are controversial. Here today in light of the newly announced Serfs’ Emancipation Day, the claim of liberation requires attention.
For a country whose liberty has never been its strong point, the claim of liberation is highly inappropriate. What is the value of such liberation when it led to another kind of occupation? What is the value of forced freedom?
There is a political cartoon first published at the height of the Bush administration. I feel that the author wanted to paint the usefulness of exporting freedom and democracy to the Middle East. In it, former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ran a plebiscite among Arabs. While she proudly witnessed the Arabs finally practicing democracy and free choice, to her great surprise she learned that the Arabs voted to kick the US out of the Middle East and democratically rejected democracy. The cartoon is of course filled with hyperbole but the message is clear.
Societies in the Middle East are undoubtedly unfree. Those societies and especially those holding the levers of powers maintaining the status quo there deserve criticism. Nevertheless before the societies can be free, individuals in those societies have to yearn to be free first. What is the point of forcefully doing away with an unfree societal structure when the majority of individuals in those societies after that waste no time in returning to the old ways of disrespecting individual liberty?
For a society to be truly free, freedom has to be born organically and not introduced exogenously through force. Freedom has to be freely and sincerely embraced before true change towards a freer society can happen. A society forced to be free would become an unsustainable society that would only regress farther away towards a coercive top-down approach, making the arduous journey towards a free society harder than it should be.
Iraq today is not free but occupied. That is why there is opposition in Iraq. The same goes with Tibet. The truth is that the story in Tibet is a story of occupation. Freedom shoved down a person’s throat is no freedom at all. To say otherwise is an attempt at dishonesty.
And surely, the PRC’s claim of serfs’ liberation in Tibet itself is not consistent with its own previous effort at collective farming and people’s communes. Such systems tied individuals to the land: that is unarguably serfdom.
The many inconsistencies are observable. Forced liberation is an oxymoron and the Serfs’ Emancipation Day is a celebration to legitimize illegal occupation of Tibet.
Many Tibetans went out and voiced what they really think of the liberation on March 28, 2008. That day is instructive of how much freedom Tibetans have in a liberated Tibet. Not only has the right to self-determination has always been denied, freedom of expression was brutally suppressed. Those who care would remember that Tibetans peacefully took to the street last year to exercise their inalienable right to freedom of expression to remember the events of 1959. Unfortunately, the desire for freedom of expression on one side and the effort to contain it on the other side ended in a deadly riot.
For many Malaysians, we were lucky to have the courage to exercise our freedom in the face of state power and then coming out on top. For many Tibetans, they do not share this sweet liberty. The suffocating grip on liberty was not loosen but tightened. They have a long way to go, just like Palestinians who wish only to be free.
As the inaugural oxymoron day approaches, already the PRC authority in Tibet is mindful of last year’s event. At this very moment, homes, businesses and other places are being raided in the name of fighting crime. In reality, it is an act of intimidation.
That is the reality of a supposedly liberated Tibet.
First published in The Malaysian Insider on February 2 2009.