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Put Tibet On The World Agenda

By Harsh Dobhal

14 September, 2007
Free Press Journal

Mighty military and diplomatic exercises are on to resolve major festering conflicts of the world. Yet, international players have by and large excluded the Tibet issue from the list of major conflicts. While a good amount of attention gets focussed on Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Lebonon and other conflict ravaged regions, there appears to be little tangible efforts for any resolution for Tibetans where China continues to hunt down the local populace like rats in snow, without inviting any effective political protest from any part of the world.

Even India appears to have turned a blind eye to the blatant colonialism at its doorway, forgetting the strategic importance of Tibet, which nestles between China and India and, thus, can serve as a buffer zone between the two Asian powers.

Do international bodies such as the United Nations and the European Union have any tangible proposals for Tibet? There has been neither a solution nor any significant move towards resolution of this over five-decade-old problem. Despite the initial concern shown by the West, Tibetans have at best been forgotten by the US and Europe that are now far closer to China than ever before, leaving Tibetans to their own fate. This has been so ever since Gerald Ford took over from Richard Nixon when CIA withdrew support from Tibetan guerrillas as America eyed the vast business and investment opportunities that China had to offer.

Ever since China defeated the small Tibetan in 1949 and the Dalai Lama fled into exile in 1959, Tibetans have lived under the formidable shadow of Beijing. Over the years, as human rights bodies report, Chinese military authorities have unleashed a reign of terror in Tibet where tens of thousands have died, languished in Chinese prisons and labour camps, where photos of the Dalai Lama are banned, the Tibetan language is systematically eliminated from schools, where dissident monks have been arrested and tortured, the rich environment destroyed and the region repopulated with non-Tibetan Chinese arriving through new road and rail links laid out to annex Tibet more firmly.

All the while, the Chinese propaganda machine relentlessly pumps out the message that the Tibetan people are delighted and thriving while being part of the greater Chinese family. Indeed, the world has been getting more and more indifferent to Tibetans who virtually find themselves at sea because of being either silenced or thrown out of their homeland by China.

Tibetans have their own language, history, tradition, customs, culture, national flag and anthem. Although as a people, Tibet has the right to develop any action for freedom and to struggle for peaceful existence, the community has used non-violent methods so far. The Tibetan government in exile at Dharamshala in Himachal Pradesh has endeavoured to establish a dialogue with China for decades and sincere efforts have continued over the years, but no concrete result has thus far been achieved. So much so that the powers-that-be in China have turned cold to the Dalai Lama's offer to settle down even with autonomy within broader Chinese control.

As China presents a market savvy smiling face to the world, mainly the West, while gearing up to host the next Olympics, the international community should not forget about Tibetan people, about thousands of cases of human rights abuses, torture, arbitrary arrests, the wiping out of thousands of ancient monasteries and other artifacts of rich cultural and spiritual heritage that belong to and enrich the whole of humanity. In their struggle for freedom, in their pain and suffering, people from this snowland, including refugees now in exile in India, Nepal and other countries, are crying out to the world for help in order to regain their land and peace.

What has been happening to Tibet has much wider ramifications than what is generally perceived. The Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, indeed, shook the conscience of the world by ruthless and stern Chinese vendetta against its youth who yearned for just a bit of democratization of an otherwise iron-fist Communist rule. These students were dubbed as class enemies and mercilessly placed before gun squads for summary execution. The world even then hardly thought about what Tibet faced through decades, for nearly half-a-century, at the hands of the same Chinese regime.
Tibet's plight is symptomatic of what most of China faces when its people wish to voice an opinion that the State may not deem to be fit. The more immune the world remains towards this, the more its complicity will be in the injustices faced by not only Tibetan people but scores of others who may think differently from those who are ensconced in Beijing under the red flag that gives them the right to declare anybody as a class enemy. All the while merrily embracing the forces of market, disfiguring its Communist face with predatory neo-liberal policies. Indeed, an eastern colonial power bulldozing the roof of the world.

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