World Must Give Serious Attention to Tibet

Editorial
The Irrawaddy News
www.irrawaddy.org

March 19, 2008 - Last year, the world watched in horror as images of a brutal crackdown on street demonstrations in Burma flowed out of the secretive country over the Internet. Now the international community is witnessing new unrest in the region, this time in Tibet.

The current situation in Tibet is, if anything, even more desperate than it was in Burma last September, when monks mounted the greatest challenge to military rule in nearly twenty years. Already, at least 13 people have been killed in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, according to the Chinese state-run news agency, Xinhua. The Tibetan government in exile, based in the northern Indian town of Dharamsala, estimates the death toll is closer to 100.

The protests began in Lhasa last week, and by Friday the demonstrations had turned violent. Resistance to Chinese rule has escalated to a scale not seen in Tibet in nearly two decades, and has spread to the neighboring provinces of Sichuan, Qinghai and Gansu. Dramatic footage of Tibetan protesters rampaging on horseback and hoisting their national flag has also emerged, much to the consternation of Beijing.

The trouble started on March 10, on the annual commemoration of a failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule. The Tibetan religious leader, the Dalai Lama, fled to India to escape a harsh crackdown on the rebellion. Although Beijing says that Tibet has always been a part of China, Tibetans argue that the Himalayan region was virtually independent for centuries. They also accuse China’s communist rulers of trying to crush Tibetan culture by encouraging ethnic Han, who make up the majority of China’s population, to migrate to the region.

Beijing has made no secret of how much it despises the Dalai Lama, who it accuses of seeking to destroy China’s territorial integrity. In an editorial in the Tibet Daily, Tibet’s Communist Party leader Zhang Qingli said, “We are currently in an intensely bloody and fiery struggle with the Dalai Lama clique, a life or death struggle with the enemy.”

For Tibetan dissidents, the stakes are even higher. With China deploying massive security forces to quash the uprising and sealing off hotbed areas from foreign media, activists, supporters and rights groups have warned that hundreds of Tibetans believed arrested may be at risk of torture.

However, the international community, including the United Nations, has been slow to wade into the dispute over Tibet, despite calls from the Dalai Lama for a UN-led international inquiry.

Many countries appear reluctant to stand firmly on the side of human rights and democracy when dealing with China. Even governments which expressed outrage at the crackdown on Burma are reluctant to take the same tack with China, which is emerging as an economic powerhouse and important trading partner to countries around the world.

It is a shame that powerful countries have put their own economic self-interest ahead of the fundamental rights of a people to self-determination. The Tibetan people deserve greater respect, both from China and from the international community.

The world must help to end the violence in Tibet by pushing China to negotiate with the Dalai Lama, the leader of the Tibetan people, instead of treating the region like a colony whose native inhabitants are entirely at the mercy of their distant rulers.

If China does not change its approach to Tibet, the world must let it know where its sympathies lay. Simply playing host to the Olympics is no guarantee that China’s place among the community of nations is secure, as long as it refuses to recognize the aspirations of others.