China gags Tibet expo in Bangladesh

A week ahead of Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama’s visit to Arunachal Pradesh, which China tried to thwart, signs of Beijing’s extra-territorial muscle-flexing are being seen in the neighbouring Bangladesh, too.

On Sunday, armed police in Dhaka barricaded a private gallery to thwart the inauguration of a photo exhibition on Tibet that Chinese embassy officials didn’t want organised.

The exhibition, ‘Tibet 1949-2009’, was organised by Students for a Free Tibet (SFT) with support from Drik, an independent gallery. It was to be inaugurated in the evening, but special branch officers and armed police barricaded the gallery to stall the inauguration.

Organisers, nevertheless, staged a symbolic inauguration on the streets outside the gallery and posted a live webstream on their website.  “People are totally enraged that a foreign government’s influence is determining what can and cannot be shown in an independent gallery,” media activist and Drik gallery director Shahidul Alam told DNA on the phone from Dhaka.

“That a democratic government took such a heavy-handed approach because of sensitivity to a foreign government’s whims is disgusting,” he said. Chinese embassy officials first approached Alam with gifts and offers of collaborative projects if the show was cancelled. But when he refused to back down, and instead invited them to the exhibition, they changed tack and worked the levers of the government. “They tried bribery as well as coercion,” Alam recalls. The Drik website was also hacked.

On Monday, the police returned to the gallery with an intimidating show of force, which forced the organisers to cancel the exhibition.  

“We’ve been screening works since 1993, but this is the first time a foreign embassy has come out in this way to stop a show,” Alam told DNA. Responding to the argument advanced by some sections that it was foolish for a poor country like Bangladesh to provoke an economic power like China, Alam added: “I have no problems with having differences, but I have serious problems with being a slave.”
The kind of pressure that the Chinese embassy brought to bear over the event “is indicative of many other things that are happening in reality”.
“We strongly believe that governments should have the courage to present their views at cultural platforms and should to try and convince people by arguing their case,” Alam said. “That is, by acting democratically, rather than using intimidation and heavy-handed tactics.”