Tibet: Ten Die In Protests
Yesterday, the Tibetan people protested against the authoritarian and inhumane rule (read: oppression) put on them by China. Buddhist monks and others protested in Lhasa; the Chinese government decided to oppress the protests quickly and violently. All in all, ten people died.
China appointed a leader over Tibet, and this criminal said yesterday that the protesters are “a separatist Dalai Lama clique, inside and outside the country,” and that they will not be allowed to succeed. “We will challenge them firmly, according to law,” the chairman of the Tibet government, Qiangba Puncog, told reporters in Beijing on the sidelines of China’s annual parliamentary session.
The Dalai Lama himself, meanwhile, called on the Chinese government to stop using force. He also said that he isn’t responsible for the uprising in Lhasa. The Chinese government isn’t willing to accept that, of course, because admitting that it’s not a conspiracy but a popular movement would make it virtually impossible for China to defend its rule over Tibet.
O, and it could encourage others in China / under Chinese rule to rise up in protest.
Tibetans are seizing on the opportunity given to them by the Olympic Games. The Chinese government wants to use these games to present their country as a modern, rich, innovative country. Tibetans, meanwhile, want to use the OG to show the world that China is still oppressing Tibetan culture.
The history of Tibet in the 20th century isn’t pretty. The Chinese “liberated” the country of the Dalai Lama in the 1950s, meaning that they had to accept communist rule, that Tibetan culture and Buddhist religion were oppressed (many thousands of monks were killed), that hundreds of thousands of other Tibetans were killed as well (just to make a point), that Buddhist temples were destroyed, and that ethnic Chinese were moved into Tibet in an attempt to change the demography of this peaceful region.
And the West stood by and did nothing. As usual.
It seems to me that if the West would make Tibet a major issue - and there’s no question in my mind that we should make it a major issue - we could help Tibetans a great deal. First more autonomy, then full independence. Tibetans aren’t Chinese, and the Chinese government doesn’t have the right to oppress them / to rule over them. Tibet was a country, a nation-state, and it should be a country once again… But for that to happen, the West has to stop accepting whatever it is China does and to make Tibet just as important an issue, as, say, Israel / Palestine.
Not just Tibet, but China itself should be an issue. It’s the utmost of hypocrisy to act as if the Cuban communist regime was the utmost of evil, so bad that sitting down to negotiate with them is treason, and visiting the country is forbidden of US citizens, and yet communist China, which kills and oppresses more than Cuba could ever dream of doing, is seen as an ally.
Yet another example of "we’re against dictatorships…except the ones that give us what we want". Much the same way we do with Saudi Arabia, we should at least admit that we deal on friendly terms with the most abhorrent regimes on the planet because we need something that they’ve got; oil in the case of Saudi Arabia, and cheap (read- slave) labor and a sizable part of the debt in the case of China. I’m well aware we can’t afford not to deal with them, but shying away from calling things by their name, and not officially decrying the odious human rights abuses China regularly does, makes us seem cowardly as a nation.
As for the Olympic games, we see once more that bringing the games to oppressive regimes doesn’t necessarily encourage more openness and better behavior. One would think the IOC would have learned that lesson in the 1936 Berlin games, but apparently not.
The way it works is we stand on principle only when it doesn’t jeopardize our economic or security interests. China, our biggest trading partner and owner of a big chunk of our debt, is financing our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, therefore we turn a blind eye to their human rights aberrations.
Saudia Arabia and Pakistan are repressive, brutal states with large numbers of islamic radicals who hate the West as much as al queda does, yet they are necessary allies because of our need for security in the ME, and our relationship with OPEC.
Cuba is a tiny nation, which is geographically close to Florida, yet poses no danger to us as a nation. Our outdated Cold War policy stems more from the need of presidential candidates to win over the large and vocal Cuban exile population in Miami than from a rational security standpoint.
Um. You think that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are similar? Comparable?
I think that both are repressive states that tolerate human rights abuses, yes.
Freedom of Speech isn’t free and in China it is brutally repressed. Tibetens are willing to give up thier lives to highlight this continued repression of thier people. Reminds me of the one guy who stood in front of a long line of tanks sent to massacre a peaceful protest. Seems like the US should do more to acknowledge we haven’t supported freedom in China because it may upset the cheap products we so freely enjoy.