China Massacres

When I first saw "Les Miserables," in Los Angeles in the spring of 1989, I couldn't enjoy it. The sets, costumes and staging were great; the music and lyrics were fine--nothing you'd leave the theater singing, but fine enough. The problem was, history kept intruding.

When I first saw "Les Miserables," in Los Angeles in the spring of 1989, I couldn't enjoy it. The sets, costumes and staging were great; the music and lyrics were fine--nothing you'd leave the theater singing, but fine enough. The problem was, history kept intruding.

The titles of these two books--"Freedom in Exile," a simple and powerful autobiography by the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, and "My Tibet," a sumptuous and touching glimpse of his country and people--are themselves simple, powerful and quite disarming. They are also quite paradoxical. Exile, after all, seems a sort of inverted imprisonment in which one is held captive by exclusion. So long as one is exiled, how can one be free? Similarly, since the Dalai Lama has been excluded from his rightful rule by an army of occupation, can he really call the land his own?

The governments of North America and Western Europe, including the United States, "have become increasingly restrictive in granting asylum" to political refugees, Amnesty International said Tuesday. Where the problem is "most critical," the London-based human rights organization's refugee coordinator, Nicholas J. Rizza, said in a news conference in Los Angeles, is in the efforts of political refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala to seek asylum in the United States.