Here are in a few points the situations in China and in Tibet on the eve of 2008 Beijing Olympics, if they take place. To end with the phrase: “we didn’t know”, to better understand the Tibetans’ revolt and that of Human rights’ defenders in China and all around the world, don’t forget these few elements:
Beyond more than a million dead after the Chinese invasion during the XXth century,
- The cultural genocide: a policy led by the CCP permitting the displacements of populations and encouraging racial hatred.(Tibetans are muzzled by the power and despised by the displaced Han populations).
- The demographic control is applied to the Tibetan women, while it is not applied to the women belonging to the other minority ethnic groups. They are forced to abort and be sterilized. You have correctly understood: they are led away despite their will and their babies are killed. These abortions take place in unsuitable places, with no aftercares, inducing many post-operative deaths. Some women, more than three months pregnant and often until the ninth month, are aborted by a forced injection of “levanor”, a chemical substance, unknown in occident. Even more horrifying, there are testimonies of attested infanticides, practiced by an injection in the head, at the birth of the child.
- The children who escape from the control have no legal existence: they won’t have official documents, or any access to medical care…
- The Tibetan language is bound to disappear because, from college, Chinese is the only authorised language.
- 6000 monasteries were devastated by the “liberation” army and the few rebuilt ones are under narrow watch; the monks entering them are sorted out.
- It is forbidden to detain a portrait of the Dalai Lama.
- Monks are compelled to intensive rehabilitation sessions.
- A very old tradition, the discovery of the Tulkous, reincarnated lamas, is traditionally made by erudite in strict conditions. This tradition is now forbidden in Tibet and some members of the communist party install cheap religious in order to watch the monks and the practicing persons. It is one of the most violent attacks to the Tibetan culture because in this culture, the notion of spiritual lineage, uninterrupted since the historic Buddha, is of first rank importance. It is just as if you were compelled to boo your own father and mother and to worship unknown people; evil-minded, moreover.
- Torture is generalized in prisons; the rape of women is usual and the rape of nuns is systematic. When prisoners are too much in a sorry plight, they are freed to prevent them from dying in prison: otherwise there are troubles with Amnesty International.
- Tibetans are not allowed to have contacts with foreign tourists and even less to accommodate them.
- During 50 years of occupation, 85% of forests were exploited and have now disappeared.
- Large nuclear wastes depositary bonds lead to new pollutions.
- Is it necessary to add that in Tibet, even more than in the rest of China, there is:
- No freedom of expression,
- Of opinion,
- No independence of lawyers,
- No freedom of the press,
- No right, obviously, to defend Human Rights,
- No right of association and particularly no independent union,
- Religious “liberties” are extremely controlled,
- There is no democracy and the CCP is the only political party.
In these times of protest upon the 2008 Beijing OG, Human Rights’ defenders are regularly attacked. They are reproached a partial and anti-Chinese attitude. We can read and hear, for instance: and what about the invasion of Iraq?
You have to know that the invasion of Iraq is far from winning unanimity in the US; that the American book-shops are full of extremely virulent books against G.W.Bush and his politics; that since the beginning of the invasion, not one week elapses in the United States without anti-Bush demonstrations and that France was opposed to the invasion from the start (even if it was because they had huge investments in process there).
Don’t be doubtful about the fact that European and American streets would have been overcrowded with demonstrators in case the US would have been appointed to organise the 2008 Olympic Games, particularly in France, an a priori anti-Bush country.
Concerning Robert Ménart, his association is called “reporters sans Frontières” and is devoted to the denunciations of the exactions committed against journalists.
Some people expose Mr Ménart as being an anticommunist (China is a communist country?? Oh, well!! And the Olympic Games, a commercial operation led by sponsors like Coca cola, Mac Donald’s, EDF, Française des jeux, Adidas etc…, are the expression of the Socialist International?!); journalists are muzzled in China and banned from circulating freely in Tibet; that’s all.
Given the repressive politics of the CCP in Tibet, even if journalists had the right to circulate, any Tibetan who would talk to a journalist, or simply with a tourist, would be for it!