Today,the Dalai Lama warned of "Cultural Genocide" by the Chinese against the Tibetans. All last week in the United Nations Millennium Summit, leaders of the world’s nations, no fewer than 189 of them, made statements in the General Assembly.  Long on generalities, short on implementable changes, fearful of diplomatic snafus, but hopeful in the main, many of these focused on the need for more effective ways to resolve disputes, between and within nations.  Some, like Rwanda lamented the lack of proactive strategies to prevent ethnic strife between the Hutu and the Tutsi. Others like Sri Lanka, asked member states not to give succor to  terrorist  sympathizers of the Liberation Tamil Tigers, agitating for a separate ethnic homeland.   

At the same time as the ponderous General Assembly Sessions, the UNESCO (The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization) staged its own one-day Roundtable to kick off its grandly dubbed Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations. Proposed by Iran, hardly the first nation that comes to mind when one thinks of dialogue, the morning and afternoon sessions strove to “promote and develop international cooperation on the basis of recognition of the equal dignity of individuals and societies.   It is in the nature of UN deliberations to continually assert in public what would be foolhardy to dispute except in private.  At the same time, while publicly asserting such truisms, the cumbrous world body also demonstrated publicly once again that pious pronouncements to the contrary, it has perfected the art of The Missed Ethical Moment. 

Such a moment came when the United Nations, under pressure from China excluded Dalai Lama, winner of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize from attending the World Peace Summit of more than a thousand world religious and spiritual leaders just the week before.  The charismatic monk’s hold on the proceedings was made all the more palpable by his enforced absence, and news reports as well as the delegates themselves mentioned him more often and more favorably than they mentioned the Chinese bureaucrats who had banned him. Beijing’s butcher boys received the full weight of Tibetan ire whenever they ventured forth on First Avenue, where Free Tibet protesters, mainly women in long braids and striped aprons held the stage. 

The fact is globalization has wrought some unanticipated consequences.  Persons and places assume a proximity and a significance for each of us that was unthinkable before.  A few degrees of separation, yet worlds apart.  And though worlds apart, we have become intimate with those places and persons who have become the repository of our ideals.  We ask them, in this case Tibet and the Tibetans, to hold on, to cling to, to assert gently, as we navigate the coarse, everyday world.   And so, Tibet has taken on many of the discernible features of a moral landscape – pristine ecology, closeness to both the earth and spirit worlds, stoic resistance, a giant protagonist.  Tibet has become our conscience, our ethical sense, a space within each of us from where we can assert our unique and common humanity. 

The UNESCO has for the past two decades maintained and expanded a  list of World Heritage sites in many nations.   Professing to “protect natural and cultural properties of outstanding universal value against the threat of damage in a rapidly developing world” the UNESCO, as an organ of the UN has helped to preserve the Great Wall of China, The Taj Mahal, churches and mosques, forts and palaces, ruins and excavations, as well as natural wonders -- The Galapagos Islands, the mangrove swamps known as the Sundarbans in both Bangladesh and India, Kilimanjaro National Park in Tanzamia among others.   To these may perhaps now be added spaces and places in which we find moral membership even as we live thousands of miles away or deep within such spaces.  These spaces cannot be said to be owned, in any territorial sense by any national entity, be it government or ethnic group or religious faction, because they belong within each one of us, regardless of nationality or belief.   Perhaps divested of the urgent need to own them as property of any one state, these same frustrated claimants who draw maps to enclose them and accords to bind them can now save face, and be free to preserve them for all of us, with the help of UNESCO, philanthropists, cyber millionaires and the very people who live within them, or fled them long ago and can now feel free to return, or tourists or the faithful who just come for a brief visit.  

Tibet today, Kashmir tomorrow, Jerusalem a month later. World Heritage Site candidates, every last one of them, if UNESCO will broaden and deepen that definition. 

Chithra Karunakaran, a post-colonial sociologist who teaches at CUNY, is the United Nations correspondent for World Parliamentarian magazine published from Brussels.

Wednesday, September 27, 2000