For those of you that don't know and I'll admit I had to look it up on a map Bhutan is a small mountainous country located between Bangladesh and China. Throughout its long history Bhutan has been run as a full monarchy under the control of its king. Over recent years though as he has been getting older and coming to the end of his reign the current king has decided that rather then passing his crown onto his heir he would like to see the kingdom become a democracy.
The problem is that the Bhutanese people love their king and didn't want universal suffrage instead begging the king to remain on the throne. In his wisdom though the king decided to push on with democracy and last year they held practice elections to prepare the people for the responsibility of voting. The kings subjects responded by voting, in overwhelming numbers, for the red and gold party, the party which bore the royal colours. Despite this setback though the king pushed ahead and over the Easter weekend Bhutan held it's first proper democratic elections and voted the kings party into 46 of the 48 available parliamentary seats.
At this point I have to say that without doubt Bhutan is my favorite country in the world because all these stories of a wise old king in a land far, far away makes the whole thing sound like something of a fairytale. I mean throw in a few magic elves and beautiful young princess and you have the perfect tonic to the unpleasantness which normally pervades modern geopolitics and I have to say in a week that has featured the charity case, my father deciding that he really wants to start yet another war with the neighbours and me smashing myself in the shin with a hammer during an attempt to out-butch and couple of middle aged lesbians a tonic is exactly what was needed.
On the subject of international unpleasantness though we have the current situation in Tibet where as you all know there has been something of an uprising against Chinese rule. This uprising has taken the form of three to four days rioting in Lhasa, the regions capital. By Chinese standards this rioting was met with a measured response with troops only firing a few rounds over the heads of the crowds.
As the Free Tibet campaign has for a long time been a cause celbre from the western liberal elite with it's posters adorning the university walls of students who found Che Guevara to be too distasteful and Adam Smith to been far to highbrow I can only conclude that the recent violence in Tibet has been as a result of the actions of British Intelligence who by using Tibet as something of a slipshod attempt to wash away the liberal guilt acquired by the same agency's repeated attempts to erode democratic freedoms, criminalise protest and suppress dissent within the UK are disrupting more effective solutions to the problem.
For this reason I cannot in good conscience support the Tibetan uprising because as with last years uprising in Burma, for which the force depletion reports make very grim reading I cannot see a way in which this uprising will have a positive outcome for the Tibetian people.
In fact the only upside to this sorry state of affairs I can see is the truly outstanding denial of the obvious by a Chinese government spokesman who said that he didn't think the Tibet protests had become a global issue on the day that 17 Chinese embassies around the world had been vandalised including one which recieved a treatment that can only be described and "Olympic torched!"
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