Dalai Lama: "I Have To Accept Failure"

Sometimes pragmatists prevail; but not always. Other times, they are ruthlessly and cynically played. As the Dalai Lama marks the 50th anniversary of his exile, in the "New York Review of Books" Pico Iyer recounts the Tibetan spiritual leader's anguished reappraisal of the moderate line he has followed on cultural autonomy for his homeland.

While in his carefully written article, Iyer doesn't come right out and say that Beijing accommodated the Dalai Lama and his representatives strictly for PR reasons in the run-up to the Olympics in the summer of 2008, it sure looks that way. China has now savaged him with the apparently unfair charge of promoting independence. Iyer writes:

"The situation inside Tibet is almost like a military occupation," I heard the Dalai Lama tell an interviewer last November, when I spent a week traveling with him across Japan. "Everywhere. Everywhere, fear, terror. I cannot remain indifferent." Just moments before, with equal directness and urgency, he had said, "I have to accept failure. In terms of the Chinese government becoming more lenient [in Chinese-occupied Tibet], my policy has failed. We have to accept reality."