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By Kerry Tremain Tenzin Bhuchung’s memories of his childhood in the mountain village of Shekar, in southwestern Tibet, are fearful ones. When he turned five, he was put to work clearing stones from the barley fields of Shekar’s collective farm, which was run by Chinese communists. Other days, Bhuchung and an elder herded the village’s 200 cows over a mountain bridge across the Tsangpo River, which is the largest river in Tibet. Bhuchung remembers being crowded on the wobbly bridge by cows taller than he was, and he remembers staring down sheer cliffs straight to the bottom of the violent, pristine river below. Some fears were less palpable, like those conveyed in the shivering silence of village elders huddled under a night sky to honor a small photograph of the Dalai Lama. That same inchoate chill spread through Bhuchung when he heard knocks on the door and watched his father dash to lock up the cupboard that held the family’s Buddhist shrines. When Tenzin was seven--he is 31 now, and a Rotary World Peace Scholar at Berkeley--the Chinese temporarily liberalized emigration laws. The family wanted Bhuchung to attend a boarding school in northern India established by the exiles with international assistance, because it is largely in these exile schools and communities that Tibetan culture survives. After a harrowing yak journey with his uncle that required bribing authorities and culminated in a nighttime dash across the bridge to Nepal in the back of a truck, Bhuchung arrived at the school, in Dharamsala, and spent the next several years in one of the dorms named for its sponsoring country—in his case, New Zealand. Once there, he could not return safely to Shekar, and until recently he had not spoken to his parents, or to hi
Bhuchung’s story is extraordinary, but many of his fellow Rotary World Peace scholars also have dramatic tales to tell. One scholar is a former governor of Easter Island and archaeologist who is designing a program that combines economic development with preservation of the world-famous monuments there. Another works for the Ethiopian foreign ministry, founded a respected NGO called Law Forum for Peace, and is working to create a structure for regional security and democracy in the Horn of Africa. Still others have monitored elections or participated in relief efforts in Cyprus, Serbia, or Mozambique. All have been sponsored by a local Rotary Club—in Bhuchung’s case it was a club in Tasmania, Australia, where he attended college after winning a scholarship in Dharamsala. Berkeley is one of seven Rotary Centers for International Studies in Peace and Conflict Resolution and, according to its director, Edwin Epstein, is the most sought-after such program in the world. That’s in part because of the University’s international reputation, but also because Berkeley encourages each student to tailor the program to his or her needs, across departments and disciplines. Epstein, who has served in various faculty and administrative positions at Berkeley for 40 years, says, “This is the most exciting group of graduate students with whom I’ve worked. I view them as colleagues in a very important mutual learning experience.” The program itself has a Berkeley provenance. Cliff Dochterman, M.A. ’50, a past California Alumni Association board member, a former administrator and assistant to Clark Kerr, and president of Rotary International in 1992–93, was a driving force behind the program. According to Dochterman, Rotarians share a rich history with the University, including, remarkably, four alumni elected as international presidents. He personally served on the Rotary committee that developed scenarios for how the business and professional association might further its commitment to world peace. Ultimately, the committee settled on sponsoring 70 students annually--ten at each university--with fully paid scholarships for a two-year graduate program. After being nominated locally, candidates compete regionally and finally internationally for the 70 slots. Dochterman has seen many war zones first hand. “Wars occur when people have no other options, and the temptation is to fight,” he says. “We work with the instruments of peace, assisting people who are hungry or sick, with no water or no hope. And we have long realized that education is fundamental to better understanding and better relations among people. That sounds rather idealistic, but that’s the way we feel.” Dochterman’s travels for Rotary International have taken him to 90 countries, raising money and promoting relief efforts. He has facilitated polio prevention programs--one of the organization’s major goals is to eradicate the disease by 2005--and in January he delivered wheelchairs to Mexico on behalf of another initiative. At the time of the Bosnian war, a Rotarian in Austria called him about the refugees pouring into Croatia. “There are several thousand people here with virtually nothing. It’s winter and they are living in tents. Can you help?” the friend wrote, then added a postscript: “If you can’t, I’ll understand, but please don’t appoint a commission.” Dochterman got on a plane to Croatia, saw the desperate situation on the ground, and in a matter of weeks rallied 500 Rotary leaders to raise $8 million for the relief effort. That pragmatic spirit animates the World Peace scholars, even as they discover and debate advanced theories of neo-liberal economic development, international human rights law, or “agro-ecology.” The latter term describes an approach developed by Berkeley professor Miguel Altieri (see California Monthly, June 2001),
Rapu’s people, the Rapanui, descended from the Polynesian explorers who arrived around 400 A.D. and built the island’s giant monolithic stone heads, called moai. Rapu calls the statues “the living faces of our ancestors,” and says their inlaid eyes (many of which he found and restored) “look over your head in an attitude of arrogance. Standing in front of them gives you goose bumps.” After 1722, when a Dutch explorer landed on the remote South Pacific island—the closest inhabited island is tiny Pitcairn, 1,600 miles away—the Rapanui population began plummeting. From a high of 25,000, there were only 111 Rapanui by 1877. Peruvian slave raiders, smallpox, and the overgrazing of sheep introduced by Chilean companies all contributed to the decline. Chile and its navy controlled Easter Island from 1888 to 1956, when Rapu’s older brother, Alfonso, led an insurrection that forced the Chileans to return land rights to the Rapanui. Rapu’s evolving agro-ecological development plan for Easter Island involves a mix of tourism and agricultural products, both for local consumption and export. He’s rallying international organizations and the Chilean government to help restore the island’s 20,000 archaeological sites, hoping that by paying farmers to preserve the sites, and educating them about their Rapanui heritage at a local junior college, the moai will be saved by local engagement, not external enforcement. While at Berkeley, he’s enlisting his professors and contacts to help advise and develop the project. Program director Epstein says this kind of long-term relationship building is an explicit goal of the program, particularly among the scholars themselves. Often, they get to know each other at International House, where many of them live. Several Rotary World Peace scholars, like Britain’s Sarah Williams, decided to pursue the program after a career in another field.
By studying patterns of world relations and law at Berkeley, Williams hopes she will one day help craft laws to guide international institutions in ways “idealistic in their goals, but realistic in practice.” So much international law, she says, is not actually written, but divined from what states think it should be. Her inspiration, a friend and fellow barrister named David Marshall, helped design legal remedies for problems arising from the war in Kosovo. (More recently, he worked on similar problems in Iraq, and barely survived the explosion in the U.N. building in Baghdad.) Williams herself has never been to war, but believes that people who want to prevent its horrors must be willing to face them squarely and with courage. “In the West, we often see suffering as an abomination, but it is a reality for many people,” she says. “Humanitarianism has to be hard-core; it can’t be of a fluffy-kitten type. My goal is not to live a long life, but to do something worthwhile.” That sentiment is common among the scholars. Tenzin Bhu-chung plans to devote his life to a peaceful settlement in Tibet. As a student at Dharamsala, he thought the Dalai Lama’s strategy of nonviolence and compassion for one’s enemies were nice sentiments, but unrealistic. (Many Tibetans were disillusioned by their leader’s declaration of nonviolence during the early years of the civil war; some who had fought the Chinese even committed suicide in despair.) Now Bhuchung believes the Dalai Lama’s approach not only saved Tibetan culture, but also was the only realistic strategy for confronting the power of the Red Army. At Berkeley, Bhuchung has been exposed for the first time to a wide range of international students, some of them Chinese. He has sought out those willing to speak about the conflict, and taught himself how to engage them using what he has learned in the program and through his Buddhist training in India. He believes greater freedom for Tibetans to travel and speak can be negotiated while remaining within the Chinese state. For Bhuchung personally, the stakes are high. His parents are now 72 years old. As an educated exile, if he returned to Tibet he could be imprisoned or killed. Three months ago, through a friend in Lhasa, he learned there is now a telephone in Shekar, and he arranged to speak with his mother and father for the first time since he left the village in 1981. He called his brother first to prepare his parents, because he was worried the call would upset them. When he phoned, he avoided any subject that could be construed as political. He kept the conversation light and told jokes. They told jokes, too. But in the background, he says, he could hear them crying. Lisa Wang ’04 contributed to the reporting for this article. |
 April 2004
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