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Hate Crimes

When we consider how the earth’s resources are dwindling quickly, how wars have plagued mankind for centuries, how incurable diseases have become more virulent and how melting Arctic ice threatens to destroy vast habitable lands, we may begin to understand that there is more that binds human beings together than separates them. Humankind is fragile and increasingly so in such a dangerous climate, and there is now a desperate need for the people of the world to come together and try to turn things around. However, before we can even hope to fix the problems looming before us, there is one thing we must get command of – our mentality.

Everything we do is determined by our minds and thoughts, and therefore what shapes our thinking is something we must all watch, to ensure that it is the kind of thinking that leads to solving problems not creating new ones. There has never been a more important time in history to foster thoughts that promote solidarity and peace and the creation of an environment where reasoning, logic and rationality pervades. And the bedrock for this culture of reasoning and logic leading to peaceful coexistence, is ‘tolerance’.

Unfortunately, as progressive nations of the world gather to take steps that foster peaceful, inclusive societies, there are those who have chosen instead to cultivate extremism. One example of this is how the Russian people seem to have become more intolerant towards gays and lesbians. A recent news piece published by an online site for the LBGTI community reported that nearly half of Russians polled said that the Russian authorities should take steps to ‘exterminate the phenomenon’ of gay people in the community, meaning to say that the Russian authorities should persecute people with ‘untraditional’ sexual orientations. The same news report revealed that the percentage of people who did not care about other people’s sexual orientation has dropped from 10 years ago; and at the same time there is an increase in the percentage of those who regard members of the LBGTI community dangerous and should be isolated and dealt with.

An anti-gay activist disrupts a gay event in St. Petersburg

Corresponding to this report, there has been an increase in incidences of gay people being assaulted, beaten and even murdered at record rates. If anyone wonders how this ill-will towards the gay community has come about, the answer is very simple – it is state-sponsored. In 2013, Russian lawmakers proposed an anti-gay law that essentially strips same-sex couples of their parental rights in conjunction with a myriad of other draconian laws that essentially rob a gay person of his legal rights.

This is essentially a reversal of the decriminalization of homosexual relationships in 1993 after the fall of the Soviet Union, which saw Russia taking small but assured steps towards liberalization. That is, until the openly homophobic Vladimir Putin assumed the Russian presidency in 2000. It is no coincidence that in the 15 years that Putin has been in power, negative sentiments and hate-crimes against the LBGTI community have risen. Clearly a government does effectively shape the mentality of the community and can effectively influence it towards a culture of tolerance or intolerance.

But Putin is not the only perpetrator of hate crimes against people based on their sexual orientation, race, color, nationality or religion. We see the same vicious intolerance being practiced, ironically, by the government of a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, the 14th Dalai Lama.

In 1996, for reasons that have never been adequately explained, the Dalai Lama all but outlawed the practice of Dorje Shugden, a Tibetan Buddhist deity held sacred by the majority of the Yellow Hat sect, the Gelugpas, to which the Dalai Lama is also an adherent. Following the Dalai Lama’s pronouncement, monks and laypeople who had kept up the monastic and familial tradition of propitiating Dorje Shugden for over three centuries, were forced to make the unenviable choice of either denouncing the deity as a demon or face expulsion from the monasteries and ostracization from the community. Neither was a palatable choice. To denounce a deity and abandon the practice bestowed onto the practitioner by his spiritual teacher is to commit karmic suicide. Neither can they as refugees live away from the settlements allocated them.

Soon after the Dalai Lama’s diktat, his ‘government’ the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) declared a jihad against Shugden Buddhists, stating amongst other things:

“…that the departments, their branches and subsidiaries, monasteries and their branches that are functioning under the administrative control of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile should be strictly instructed, in accordance with the rules and regulations, not to indulge in the propitiation of Shugden. We would like to clarify that if individual citizens propitiate Shugden, it will harm the common interest of Tibet, the life of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and strengthen the spirits that are against the religion.”

At the same time, the Cabinet of the CTA declared,

“…The inclination of this spirit is to harm, rather than benefit, the cause of Tibet. However, some people have continued to propitiate Dolgyal [derogatory name given to Dorje Shugden, meaning spirit], either because they failed to appreciate the threat it poses to the Tibetan cause or because they have decided to disregard it. There are yet others who not only propitiate Dolgyal themselves, but also actively encouraged others to follow suit. This has impaired the sacred relationship between the people of Tibet and their protector-deities. Today, this is one of the greatest dangers to the cause of Tibet and the life of His Holiness the Dalai Lama…”

In essence, the CTA had declared practitioners of a benign and compassionate deity to be enemies of the Tibetan people wishing their beloved Dalai Lama an early death. Both Putin and the Dalai Lama have clearly imposed their personal prejudices onto the people and forced their compliance. The difference is, the Dalai Lama’s CTA, as a beneficiary of asylum, is not regarded as a proper government and therefore does not possess the legal and administrative tools that it can bend to serve its will. The CTA does not have law enforcement forces nor penal facilities that it could use against Shugden worshipers. And so, it leveraged instead on the unquestioned authority of the Dalai Lama as the Tibetan people’s God-King to turn the people against the population of Shugden Buddhists that it had declared to be the enemy.

While Vladimir Putin persecutes Russians based on their sexual orientation, the 14th Dalai Lama attacks Shugden Buddhists for their beliefs

This strategy proved more effective than Putin’s in a few ways:

• First, it turned the populace of the Tibetan settlements into mobs that are free to do as they wish without having to remain within the confines of legality.
• Second, the CTA, by not having and therefore not using state-owned facilities to violently punish its victims, found itself outside the ambit of Amnesty International and other international human rights bodies who, by their governing charter, could only act on governments and regimes.

Hence, eventually when the Shugden community organized itself and filed a complaint to Amnesty International, AI responded by stating that whilst it had received large amounts of complaints, it could not act as the material it received did not “fall within AI’s mandate for action — such as grave violations of fundamental human rights including torture, the death penalty, extra-judicial executions, arbitrary detention or imprisonment, or unfair trials”. Clearly, for AI to intervene, state vehicles and systems need to have been involved but in the case of Shugden practitioners, the violence and persecutions took place in the streets and in homes, inflicted by Tibetans against their own, spurred on by their government. However, there is no question that it is the Dalai Lama’s war executed by his government declared on a segment of the Tibetan people because he dislikes of their choice of deity.

The sufferings of these victims cannot be underestimated as vigilante groups formed to conduct door-to-door searches for Shugden practitioners, smashing statues of the deity as they found them and punishing his worshippers. During the early days of the ban, a Tibetan parliamentarian who questioned the credibility of the reasons given for the ban was stabbed outside his home. Homes belonging to worshippers of this deity were padlocked from the outside, stoned and then set on fire. An octogenarian monk who served in the household of a prominent Dorje Shugden lama was attacked.

More recently, it was reported that a Tibetan man was attacked just for wearing a pendant with the image of Dorje Shugden. Private businesses denied service to those suspected to be Shugden worshippers and government hospitals forbade Shugden practitioners from entering to receive medical treatment. The CTA casually amended its constitution to block the appointment of Shugden practitioners into governmental positions. Anyone with Shugden practitioners in the family would similarly be denied employment in anything the CTA controlled.

This 84 year old monk was attacked for being a Dorje Shugden practitioner. These hate crimes follow the anti-Shugden sentiments promoted by the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA)

Just as Putin’s government likened homosexuality to alcoholism and drug addiction, CTA officials compared being a Shugden worshipper to disease.

When privately owned restaurants and stores carry signs that say the Dholgyal worshippers are not welcome, then that is the freedom of the owners. That is their Fundamental Human Rights. […] Let alone that, in the hospitals, people infected with contagious diseases are quarantined and not allowed to meet with other people.- Samdhong Rinpoche, former Prime Minister of the Central Tibetan Administration, 26 July 2014, India.

Soon, it was a crime even to have Shugden practitioners as friends. Later on, fearing that anti-Shugden hatred might lose traction, especially after the Dalai Lama was seen to be celebrating one birthday after another despite the “Dalai Lama-killing-Shugden-practice” prevailing, the CTA changed tack and claimed that Shugden practitioners were in fact paid ‘agents’ of the enemy Chinese government. That riled the Tibetan people even more and enrolled all those who had sympathized with the Tibetan people’s loss into anti-Shugden campaigns. How exactly a religious practice that preceded the Sino-Tibetan conflict by some three centuries can be equated to political activism has never been explained.

There are many similarities between Putin’s scorn of homosexuals and the Dalai Lama’s despise of Dorje Shugden practitioners. However, in many ways, the Dalai Lama’s campaign is far more sinister. Whilst it cannot be said that Putin introduced hatred against gay people into the Russian people’s minds, it CAN be said that the CTA planted the seeds of malignance towards Dorje Shugden worshippers in the minds of the Tibetan people, when there was none to begin with. This is, after all, a religion that had been practiced peacefully for 360 years without incident until the Dalai Lama decided that Dorje Shugden was a viable target for persecution. And worst of all, whilst it is clear that there are willful acts of violence and discrimination against worshippers of this deity, the language of the CTA’s official resolutions justify such criminality as acts of loyalty in defense of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan cause.

Both the Dalai Lama and CTA attempt to deny that Dorje Shugden practitioners are being systemically persecuted. Although the CTA has acknowledged that Shugden people are being harassed and discriminated against, the CTA contends that these are acts of individuals and not the policy of the government. If this is true, then it is surprising that the Dalai Lama, who has cultivated an image of peace and tolerance and has travelled the world advocating dialogue and acceptance of different religions, has not once spoken against the abuse and aggression directed at Shugden practitioners as a result of his government’s proclamations. On the contrary, he was heard congratulating monasteries that had wrongfully expelled monks simply because they were practitioners of the deity.

Neither has the CTA intervened to mollify anti-Dorje Shugden sentiments. Instead they remain the only government in the world that has purposefully allocated space on their official website to publish anti-Dorje Shugden propaganda material.

There is yet another aspect to the Shugden persecutions. The Dalai Lama represents a valuable asset to both India and Western nations who are eager to curb the rising influence of China as a world economic power. So, whilst global human rights groups have voiced their concerns over the plight of the gay population in Russia, those who could have intervened to alleviate the suffering of Tibetan Shugden people have stayed mum over the tragedy. As the old adage goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The interests of these nations in such a high-stakes geopolitical play demands their complicity, and the misery of Dorje Shugden practitioners is dismissed as acceptable attrition. So it looks like we have to wait a while yet before we can (to paraphrase Martin Luther King) judge a person not by the color of his skin, or his race, nationality, sexual orientation or religion, but by the content of his character.

Meanwhile we continue to live in a world suffocated with farcicality, prejudice, bias, distortions, lies, deceptions, manipulations, short-sightedness, close-mindedness, righteousness and superficiality. So, what is it like to be a gay person living in Russia? Well, just like a Shugden Buddhist living under the Dalai Lama, it means to be silent, to be afraid, and to not expect the same rights that world wars have been fought to protect.

Disclaimer: This article was submitted by a third party author and does not necessarily reflect the official opinion of DorjeShugden.com. We accept submissions from the public, please send in your articles to [email protected].