That there was an exile government that handles the problems of the refugees and is ready to return at a moment's no­tice should China collapse and the "lib­erators" leave was truly impressive, even though the inevitable court in­trigues and power struggles had carried over from the ancient re­gime, the chain of access to His Holiness was jeal­ously guarded, and, as Khandro Chazotsang, a woman in the Home Of­fice in charge of the re­habilitation of new arri­vals, told me, a "babuji element," the British-in­ fluenced clerk mentality that makes the Indian bureaucracy so impossible to deal with, had crept in.

       The seed money for the exile govern­ment came from the treasure brought out by the thousand-plus pack animals in 1950, stashed in a stable in Sikkim, and cashed for-accounts vary-$l million or $8 million. All Tibetan exiles every­where (there is a sizable contingent in Switzerland, for instance) send contribu­tions. The orphans at the Tibetan Chil­dren's Village above Macleod Ganj, run by one of the Dalai Lama's sisters, have individual sponsors. The Indian govern­ment gives relief, and there are some private Western donors. (Although it hasn't had a vogue the way the rain for­est has, the Tibetan cause has ardent supporters ranging from Abe Rosenthal to Richard Gere.) The dollar goes a long way here.

       But there is no help from the United States government. In the beginning, America perceived that the Tibetan free­dom movement could be useful in the war against Communism and backed it, as it did the contras and the mujahideen. Tibetan freedom fighters, kept in the dark about where they were going, were flown to Camp Hale, Colorado, where they were trained by the C.I.A. under utmost secrecy in techniques of guerrilla warfare, armed with the latest sophisti­cated equipment, and flown back to the plateau. But then, in 1971, Henry Kis­singer advised Nixon to buddy up to Mao so they could work together against the Russians, and 'aid to the freedom movement was abruptly terminated. A pawn in a larger power game, Tibet as sacrificed. A vedon relates how the guerrillas were hunted down and, fi­nally, sandwiched between Chinese and Nepali troops, slaughtered, and how their bravest leaders, ordered by the Dalai Lama to desist from vio­lence, slit their own throats rather than disobey him.

       George Bush was Nixon's envoy to the People's Republic, and he remains its loyal fan. In 1977 he was taken to Lhasa and snowed by the Tibetan Revo­lutionary Museum, below the Potala, where amputated hands of criminals, flayed skin, implements of torture, hu­man-thighbone trumpets monks had blown, and evidence of other alleged atrocities of the "liberated Lamaist feu­dal state" were on display. The State Department refused the Dalai Lama vi­sas in 1960 and 1977 for fear of upset­ting the Chinese. Finally, in 1979, he was let in, but to date no American pres­ident has dared to shake his hand. The Soviet peril has subsided, but China still contains a quarter of the world's market.
 

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