Tibet: 1,000 arrested, hundreds “disappeared”

CounterVortex

Days after the harsh crackdown on protests in Lhasa, Chinese authorities are now arresting hundreds of Tibetans elsewhere in Tibet and Tibetan regions of neighboring Gansu and Sichuan provinces. The Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy reports that in addition to those detained in the riots, 24 have been arrested in Lhasa “on a basis of pre-trial detention.” The official Chinese news agency Xinhua reports that 170 “rioters” in the city have surrendered to police following days of unrest “that killed 13 innocent civilians.” While Chinese authorities say “leniency” will be applied to those who surrender, the TCHRD questions this, noting the experience of 1989. The TCHRD says over 1,000 have been arrested throughout the Tibetan region, with hundreds more “disappeared.” Homes have been raided and ransacked, and monasteries generally remain under occupation by the security forces. (TCHRD, March 21; Xinhua, March 19)

Some 300 activists from the Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC) in India’s northeast India have started on a peace march from Siliguri in West Bengal to Nathula Border in Sikkim, in an attempt to join the protest movement in Tibet. The marchers are planning to cover some 170 kilometers in eight days before reaching Nathula, a border post sealed by India after the 1962 Sino-Indian War and re-opened in 2006 following bilateral agreements. However, the Sikkim regional government has already announced plans to stop the march from entering the territory. The marchers plan to arrive in Sikkim on March 24.

The TYC is pressing three demands:

1. To put pressure on the Chinese government to immediately stop violent crackdowns on Tibetan protesters in Tibet.

2. To urge for investigation by the UN into the brutal killings, detention, torture and arrests in Tibet since the protest started on March 10.

3. To boycott the Beijing Olympics as China has failed to improve its human rights record.

(Phayul, March 20)

See our last post on the Tibet crisis.

  1. New ultimatum against Tibetans in Gansu
    After days of protests in the Tibetan areas of Gansu Province which saw the death of scores of Tibetans, the Chinese government has sent thousands of troops on foot, trucks and helicopters into the region. Through public notices pasted on walls and broadcast over loud speakers, authorities have issued an ultimatum in Gansu’s Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (TAP) similar to that issued in Lhasa days ago, demanding all who participated in protests to turn themselves in by March 25. The notice says those who turn themselves in will be treated leniently, but those who do not will be treated harshly—as will those who shelter them. House-to-house raids are already underway in the TAP. (TCHRD, March 21)

  2. Chinese dissidents call for dialogue with Dalai Lama
    A group of 29 Chinese dissidents urged Beijing to open dialogue with the Dalai Lama in a March 22 open letter. “We appeal to the country’s leaders to directly engage in dialogue with the Dalai Lama,” the group said in a letter e-mailed to reporters. “We hope to eliminate misunderstanding between Han and Tibetans.” The pro-democracy activists, led by writer Wang Lixiong and dissident Liu Xiaobo, also urged the government to invite UN investigators to Tibet, and allow journalists into the region. It said those arrested should be given an open and fair trial, and called upon the government to produce evidence to substantiate accusations that the Dalai Lama premeditated the unrest. It accused the government’s invective against the Dalai Lama of inflaming “ethnic hatred,” and being part of a generally “failed” policy on ethnic minorities within China’s borders. (Reuters, March 22)

  3. Whaddya make of this?
    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/22/opinion/22french.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

    These groups hate criticism almost as much as the Chinese government does. Some use questionable information. For example, the Free Tibet Campaign in London (of which I am a former director) and other groups have long claimed that 1.2 million Tibetans have been killed by the Chinese since they invaded in 1950. However, after scouring the archives in Dharamsala while researching my book on Tibet, I found that there was no evidence to support that figure. The question that Nancy Pelosi and celebrity advocates like Richard Gere ought to answer is this: Have the actions of the Western pro-Tibet lobby over the last 20 years brought a single benefit to the Tibetans who live inside Tibet, and if not, why continue with a failed strategy?

    1. Preaching to the oppressed from the Times op-ed page
      Thanks for bringing this little propaganda nugget to our attention; I’ll post the complete text below. There are some valid points, but the overall tone is utterly obnoxious. Yes, the US exploits the Tibetan movement for moral leverage against China (which has as its ultimate aims market penetration and military domestication, not Tibetan freedom), but is not going to risk a complete break with Beijing by supporting Tibet to the ultimate consequences. The Tibetans should have learned this after the betrayal of the CIA-backed insurgency in the ’60s. Just as the Hungarians learned it after ’56 and the Iraqi Kurds did after ’91. This March 18 AP photo says it all: Wen Jiabao’s giant face spews forth anti-Tibet invective from a screen overlooking a Beijing mall—directly above a McDonald’s golden-arches symbol!

      Yes, it pains us to see the Dalai Lama cozying up to Washington, just as it pains us to see Evo Morales and Hugo Chávez cozying up to Beijing. However, there are reasons behind such alliances…

      Patrick French betrays his own muddled analysis in several ways. The finger-wagging at Beijing is not “arranged mostly to make American lawmakers feel good.” Strategic and imperial interests are always behind such showmanship. And while he admonishes the Dalai Lama for not engaging in a strategy of direct action, he writes that instead of the “Hollywood strategy” he “should have…focused on back-channel diplomacy with Beijing.”

      Preaching to the Tibetan leadership from the safety of London is pretty condescending. If not for the stick of either direct action (now favored by the TYC) or the “Hollywood strategy,” what incentive would Beijing have to accept the carrot of “back-channel diplomacy”? But then sounding like an arrogant policy wonk is manifestly the way to get onto the op-ed page of the New York Times…

      A New York Times op-ed, March 22, by Patrick French:

      He May Be a God, but He’s No Politician
      LONDON — Nearly a decade ago, while staying with a nomad family in the remote grasslands of northeastern Tibet, I asked Namdrub, a man who fought in the anti-Communist resistance in the 1950s, what he thought about the exiled Tibetans who campaigned for his freedom. “It may make them feel good, but for us, it makes life worse,” he replied. “It makes the Chinese create more controls over us. Tibet is too important to the Communists for them even to discuss independence.”

      Protests have spread across the Tibetan plateau over the last two weeks, and at least 100 people have died. Anyone who finds it odd that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has rushed to Dharamsala, India, to stand by the Dalai Lama’s side fails to realize that American politics provided an important spark for the demonstrations. Last October, when the Congressional Gold Medal was awarded to the Dalai Lama, monks in Tibet watched over the Internet and celebrated by setting off fireworks and throwing barley flour. They were quickly arrested.

      It was for the release of these monks that demonstrators initially turned out this month. Their brave stand quickly metamorphosed into a protest by Lhasa residents who were angry that many economic advantages of the last 10 or 15 years had gone to Han Chinese and Hui Muslims. A young refugee whose family is still in Tibet told me this week of the medal, “People believed that the American government was genuinely considering the Tibet issue as a priority.” In fact, the award was a symbolic gesture, arranged mostly to make American lawmakers feel good.

      A similar misunderstanding occurred in 1987 when the Dalai Lama was denounced by the Chinese state media for putting forward a peace proposal on Capitol Hill. To Tibetans brought up in the Communist system — where a politician’s physical proximity to the leadership on the evening news indicates to the public that he is in favor — it appeared that the world’s most powerful government was offering substantive political backing to the Dalai Lama. Protests began in Lhasa, and martial law was declared. The brutal suppression that followed was orchestrated by the party secretary in Tibet, Hu Jintao, who is now the Chinese president. His response to the current unrest is likely to be equally uncompromising.

      The Dalai Lama is a great and charismatic spiritual figure, but a poor and poorly advised political strategist. When he escaped into exile in India in 1959, he declared himself an admirer of Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance. But Gandhi took huge gambles, starting the Salt March and starving himself nearly to death — a very different approach from the Dalai Lama’s “middle way,” which concentrates on nonviolence rather than resistance. The Dalai Lama has never really tried to use direct action to leverage his authority.

      At the end of the 1980s, he joined forces with Hollywood and generated huge popular support for the Tibetan cause in America and Western Europe. This approach made some sense at the time. The Soviet Union was falling apart, and many people thought China might do the same. In practice, however, the campaign outraged the nationalist and xenophobic Chinese leadership.

      It has been clear since the mid-1990s that the popular internationalization of the Tibet issue has had no positive effect on the Beijing government. The leadership is not amenable to “moral pressure,” over the Olympics or anything else, particularly by the nations that invaded Iraq.

      The Dalai Lama should have closed down the Hollywood strategy a decade ago and focused on back-channel diplomacy with Beijing. He should have publicly renounced the claim to a so-called Greater Tibet, which demands territory that was never under the control of the Lhasa government. Sending his envoys to talk about talks with the Chinese while simultaneously encouraging the global pro-Tibet lobby has achieved nothing.

      When Beijing attacks the “Dalai clique,” it is referring to the various groups that make Chinese leaders lose face each time they visit a Western country. The International Campaign for Tibet, based in Washington, is now a more powerful and effective force on global opinion than the Dalai Lama’s outfit in northern India. The European and American pro-Tibet organizations are the tail that wags the dog of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

      These groups hate criticism almost as much as the Chinese government does. Some use questionable information. For example, the Free Tibet Campaign in London (of which I am a former director) and other groups have long claimed that 1.2 million Tibetans have been killed by the Chinese since they invaded in 1950. However, after scouring the archives in Dharamsala while researching my book on Tibet, I found that there was no evidence to support that figure. The question that Nancy Pelosi and celebrity advocates like Richard Gere ought to answer is this: Have the actions of the Western pro-Tibet lobby over the last 20 years brought a single benefit to the Tibetans who live inside Tibet, and if not, why continue with a failed strategy?

      I first visited Tibet in 1986. The economic plight of ordinary people is slightly better now, but they have as little political freedom as they did two decades ago. Tibet lacks genuine autonomy, and ethnic Tibetans are excluded from positions of real power within the bureaucracy or the army. Tibet was effectively a sovereign nation at the time of the Communist invasion and was in full control of its own affairs. But the battle for Tibetan independence was lost 49 years ago when the Dalai Lama escaped into exile. His goal, and that of those who want to help the Tibetan people, should be to negotiate realistically with the Chinese state. The present protests, supported from overseas, will bring only more suffering. China is not a democracy, and it will not budge.

      Patrick French is the author of Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land.

        1. You better free your mind instead
          Well, it is gratifying to see the fascistic International Action Center dissing the Tibetan freedom struggle. Now maybe some of their clueless liberal cannon fodder will wake up to the fact that they are totalitarian scum.

          Do you care to explain who the New Zealand 8 and the Finland five are?

          And is the US planning an invasion of Tannu Tuva? We seem to have missed that…

          1. FREE THE TANNU TUVA TWO!!
            NOW!!

            “Now maybe some of their clueless liberal cannon fodder will wake up to the fact that they are totalitarian scum.”

            If the media knows about it. I don’t see it in Google News anywhere.

              1. Pretty funny
                Dennis Prager writes in the above (apparently without irony):

                The world is unfair, unjust and morally twisted. And rarely more so than in its support for the Palestinians — no matter how many innocents they target for murder and no matter how much Nazi-like anti-Semitism permeates their media — and its neglect of the cruelly treated, humane Tibetans.

                Meanwhile, the Angry Arab writes March 24, below a photo of looted shops and burning debris in the streets of Lhasa (also apparently without irony):

                This picture was published in the New York Times today. When the rioters set Chinese stores on fire in Tibet. If the Palestinians did that to Israeli stores, the leftists and progressives in the US media would cry out: why do the Palestinians have to do that? Why can’t the Palestinians engage in non-violent struggle? Why can’t the Palestinians just stick to civil disobedience? Why do the Palestinians have to tarnish their cause like that? And then the Nation magazine would publish an editorial supporting Israeli right to shoot at the rioters. Spare me.

                Kind of like the blind men and the elephant, eh?

                  1. More Idiot Left malarky on Tibet
                    From the above link:

                    In the Dalai Lama’s Tibet, torture and mutilation—including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation of arms and legs–were favored punishments inflicted upon thieves, runaway serfs, and other “criminals.” Journeying through Tibet in the 1960s, Stuart and Roma Gelder interviewed a former serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who had stolen two sheep belonging to a monastery. For this he had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated beyond use. He explains that he no longer is a Buddhist: “When a holy lama told them to blind me I thought there was no good in religion.”

                    Assuming this is true, we’d love to know why it is relevant. The Dalai Lama has certainly come to terms with modernity, and says he doesn’t even aspire to be the ruler of a free Tibet. More to the point, whatever (apocryphal) abuses may have taken place at the hands of Tibetan lamas two generations ago, how does it let the Chinese off the hook for the tortures and massacres they are perpetrating against Tibetans today? This is a distraction, and very ugly—and, fortunately, very transparent—propaganda.

                    Down with Michael Parenti. Free Tibet.