To fight the Monsoon
by Kåre Hitland

The Chinese entered Tibet in 1949 “to liberate the downtrodden masses from imperialist aggressors”. There had not been any foreign army in Tibet since the Manchu army in 1912 and there were only a handful of foreigners in the entire country. The United States entered Iraq “to find weapons of mass destruction”. When they didn’t find any, the rhetoric gradually morphed into “to remove Saddam Hussein and bring peace and democracy”.

My own government in Norway claimed “to be strictly against war”. This didn’t prevent them from sending both personnel and equipment to Iraq.

I’ll leave it to the reader, if they choose, to believe the rhetoric or not, but my personal experience is that foreign politics is much more predictable if you just ignore it and start looking at “interests” instead.

What interests does China have in Tibet? First of all the natural resources: wood, minerals, uranium and hydroelectricity. And second, Tibet is a highly strategic place to put troops if you expect to attack or defend against India. The United States wants a stable oil supply and maybe also contracts for their own industry. So I suppose Saddam was a bit too unpredictable. You never knew if he could suddenly invade Kuwait or do other things to block the stable supply of energy. And Norway? We have an ongoing dispute with Russia on how to split the Arctic Ocean with its oil resources between us. We assist the USA with whatever they consider important and in return we hope they will support our position.

This game of interests is of course very exciting. If it had been a board game, it could even have been quite fun. Unfortunately it is not. This game affects reality; real Iraqis are dying as a result of our decisions. And real Tibetans are tortured in prison and forced into exile. And we can’t really blame the politicians either. It is WE who have elected them, and it is OUR whim they must satisfy to be reelected. If we, as seems to be the case in Norway, complain louder about high gas prices or the establishment of a new toll road than about violations of human rights, it is the success in those areas that determines if the politicians are reelected.

Sometimes when I look at this picture, I get completely disillusioned. Opposing it feels like trying to stop the monsoon with your bare hands.

So what can we do? What options have we got?

We CAN say that the current world order is perfectly fine. We support a world where the strong dictate the weak. Or at least we do as long as it is us who are the strong. The only thing is that then we should at least have the grace to feel a bit embarrassed when we are out looking people in the eyes here in McLeod. Well… maybe not only in McLeod, but anywhere outside our own countries.

We CAN say that it is wrong, but far too difficult for us. There is nothing we can do. We are small and the forces working to consolidate the current world order are way too strong. We can resign, and retreat into our private or spiritual spheres, stay there and let the world outside go on as it pleases.

We CAN also say that even if we don’t contribute much, we can at least do SOMETHING that is right – if not for any other reason than to save our own soul. We maybe don’t hope to achieve much from our efforts, but we still know we must do it so we don’t loose our personal integrity.

There is also a fourth option. But just speaking it out loud seems to carry such responsibility that I am not sure if I dare, or have the right. But then again, I am in the same town as a man and a people who has been struggling for 57 years. So I don’t really have the right to shut up either.

It is nothing I, or anyone else, can do just by ourselves. But basically it doesn’t require more than the third option. It only requires that enough of us do it, and that we confirm each other’s beliefs so that it is possible.

Then we could become the monsoon, and let the others try to stop us.

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