The Next Saffron Revolution

The streets of Dharamsala, India, ordinarily a gantlet of signs for yoga schools and other New Age trekker traps, have turned into a huge open-air photo gallery of bloodied Tibetan corpses. It's a gruesome sight—awful enough, in fact, to crack the fabled composure of the Himalayan town's best-known resident, the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of some 6 million Tibetans. In a 45-minute interview with NEWSWEEK last week in Dharamsala, his first print exclusive since Beijing's latest brutal crackdown on ethnic-Tibetan unrest, he said he'd been driven to tears by images of the violence. "But at the deeper emotional level there is calm," he said. "Every night in my Buddhist practice, I give and take. I take in Chinese suspicion; I give back trust and compassion. I take their negative feeling and give them positive feeling … This practice helps tremendously."

Mantras may be a comfort to the Dalai Lama, but thousands of younger Tibetans are only hardening in their fury. Every attempt to silence the protests seems almost calculated to do the opposite. For decades Beijing has demonized the Dalai Lama, relentlessly exploiting the anti Tibetan prejudices of the country's Han ethnic majority against him. China's leaders have blamed him for every obstacle they've met in trying to subdue Tibet, fantasizing that the cause of Tibetan independence will die with its 72-year-old living symbol. "That is a total miscalculation," he told NEWSWEEK last week. "The older generation may go away, but the newer generations carry the same spirit. Sometimes it's even stronger … There are some young leaders—unfortunately even militant leaders—coming up."

But China's decision makers seem almost impatient for a showdown. They couldn't have been surprised by the outbursts of the past two weeks, in the run-up to this summer's Beijing Olympic Games. After all, the best time for protests is when the world is watching. Yet even as Chinese riot police battled Tibetans—amid a virtual communications blackout on all but China's state-run media, not only in the Tibet Autonomous Region but in cities across China's mountainous west—Beijing reaffirmed its plan to send the Olympic torch up Mount Everest and straight through Lhasa on the way to the Aug. 8 opening ceremonies.

There's no point staging such a spectacle (scheduled for early May, at the start of climbing season) unless the international press is there to tell the world about it. There will almost surely be demonstrators, unless half the population of Tibet is dead or in jail. Chinese authorities are no doubt hoping the current disturbances will help identify potential troublemakers. But every suspected organizer who's taken off the streets is likely to become a martyr in the eyes of other Tibetans.

No other Tibetan has the necessary stature to strike a deal with Beijing. But rather than negotiate with the Dalai Lama, China's top men have set out to rally public sentiment against him. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao blames him for the recent violence and denounces his calls for dialogue as "nothing but lies." Zhang Qingli, the autonomous region's party boss, goes further, calling the Dalai Lama "a jackal wrapped in monk's robes, a monster with a human face." Anti-Tibetan resentment is rising elsewhere in China thanks to Internet censorship and state-run TV's flimsy attempts to minimize the Tibetans' losses (approximately 99 dead by late last week, according to the Dalai Lama's aides).

Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama is losing his ability to rein in his more militant followers. The tension became visible when he spoke with representatives of five exile groups that had organized a nonviolent march from Dharamsala to the Tibetan border. While he stopped short of ordering them to stand down, the Dalai Lama said he tried to make clear the "consequences" of going ahead. "The situation is very, very critical," he said at a Thursday press conference. "Under such circumstances, if we create [an incident] on the border, that might help the Chinese." And he has even less control over the chants of "Free Tibet!" now ringing not only through the exile community but even across remote mainland cities. "I lack the authority to say 'Shut up'," he said. "And I don't want to."