Rev. Danny Fisher

Photo by Kanwal Krishna for the Agence France-Presse.
The New York Times reports on conversations that are preceding the inevitable search for His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama’s successor. Author Michael Powell writes:

The Dalai Lama has openly speculated about his next life, his reincarnation, musing that he might upend historical and cultural practice and choose his reincarnation before his death, the better to safeguard his exiled people.

But doubts creep in.

Can even so highly evolved a Buddhist as the Dalai Lama select his reincarnation? Will upending the old way of searching for the Dalai Lama’s incarnation, in which priests search for omens, portents and meteorological signs, undermine the legitimacy of his successor?

Since he fled Chinese rule by foot and horseback over the Himalayas in 1959, the Dalai Lama has traveled restlessly and spoken passionately about Tibet. The fruits of his labors are many: The world is spotted with Tibetan centers, and prayer flags flap from Delhi to London to Zurich to Todt Hill in Staten Island. Tibetan culture is celebrated in Hollywood and in popular art. (Exiles number about 130,000; about six million Tibetans live in Tibet and China).

But a darker vision of Tibet’s future is easily divined. This Dalai Lama dies and his successor is young and inexperienced and holds no sway in the chambers of the powerful. Slowly, ineluctably, the Tibetans become just another of the globe’s landless peoples lost in the shadow of a rising superpower.

Reuters has more on the plight of Burma’s “boatpeople,” who are living in surrounding countries illegally or in migrant camps.

The Rohingya, a Muslim minority group from predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, most often leave northwest Myanmar’s Rakhaine for Bangladesh first to escape persecution and then to find another country in which to build new lives.

Border officials say many of them take life-threatening risks in doing so and often go missing.

Their plight recently caught the world’s attention when hundreds were intercepted at sea in rickety boats. Many try to reach countries like Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore seeking jobs after being lured by human traffickers.

More than 550 are feared to have drowned in the past two months after being towed back out to sea by the Thai military.

The Thai army has admitted cutting them loose but said they had food and water and denied claims by survivors that the engines of their boats had been sabotaged.

A group of 78 Rohingya are in Thai police custody, while another boatload of 193 washed up on Indonesia’s Aceh coast.

[Haji Abdul Motaleb, a leader of the Muslim Rohingya] said international pressure needed to be put on Myanmar’s rulers to stop the persecution of the Rohingya, who are not recognised by the ruling military junta as one of the country’s 130-odd minorities.