@msolga,
msolga wrote:Actually, I'm starting to see "the Dalai Lama issue" as a bit of a red herring. If China is actually successful in ostracizing him on the world political stage, on the basis of not being a "legitimate" representative of Tibetan Buddhists (who do, BTW, have legitimate human rights issues) , then China will have successfully silenced the major voice representing Tibetan Buddhists. (The question of whether he is "elected" or not is immaterial, in my opinion - do the Tibetans have any democratic right to elect anyone to represent their particular concerns under Chinese rule?)
Nobody said those were China's reasons. They ostracize him because they don't want their territory separated and for the same reasons you want him more visible they want him less.
The point of that was why he just isn't on the same level as Chavez et al that McGentrix was trying to equate him with. He was saying that by not meeting him we are failing to recognize or respect a "world leader" and contrasted it to several heads of state. My point is that the Dalai Lama
isn't recognized as a head of state by
any country and his "government in exile" isn't recognized by
any country as the legitimate government of Tibet.
So delaying a meeting just doesn't fail to recognize his legitimacy as leader of Tibet, because we and every other country on earth already fail to do so. Tibet doesn't meet either the constitutive theory of statehood or the declarative theory of statehood.
Quote:I also think the Chinese "line" on Tibet (getting better & better all the time under their rule) would have a LOT more credibility if they allowed journalists into the country to report on what is actually happening there. Which they won't allow, despite repeated requests .
In the meantime, we are expected to simply take their word that everything's just fine in Tibet! If you read the internet blogs of exiled Tibetans & also Amnesty International updates on Tibet, things are definitely not quite as the Chinese authorities would have us believe.
More freedom of press would certainly be a good thing, but it's pretty clear that they
are improving on these issues. During the 2008 uprising some Tibetans were burning Han Chinese alive and rioting, and it took China a lot longer to crack down than they would have in the past and their crackdown was a lot softer than it would have been in the past.
But that doesn't mean that everything is "just fine", Tibetans want independence and they aren't going to get it and this causes conflict with the Han Chinese that are being settled in Tibet by China to change the "facts on the ground". The Dalai Lama calls it "cultural genocide" and there is certainly a lot of truth to their complaints about minority oppression (religious, educational, etc). The Tibetans hate the Han Chinese in the region and the Han Chinese hate the Tibetans, there is undeniable ethnic conflict and human rights abuses on both sides. The pro-Tibetan crowd doesn't like to own up to it, but the "protesters" shot are often rioters who murdered police or Han Chinese civilians.
And before you say that this is just the Chinese account of it, no it is not, this is corroborated by several westerners who were present at the time. The Tibetans were attacking and murdering Han Chinese for hours before the Chinese government started firing on the "protesters".
Here is a Canadian traveler's first hand account of the attacks on Han Chinese:
'I can't just let this guy die on the ground'
Quote: A traveller from Toronto was walking on Beijing Road in Lhasa on Friday afternoon when he saw a crowd of Tibetans beating a young Han Chinese man and two women.
As he watched, stunned, the crowd with sticks and metal clubs beat the man, about 20, until he fell to the ground unconscious.
Economist reporter James Miles was on the scene when the ethnic violence erupted and
gave this CNN interview:
Quote:What I saw was calculated targeted violence against an ethnic group, or I should say two ethnic groups, primarily ethnic Han Chinese living in Lhasa, but also members of the Muslim Hui minority in Lhasa. And the Huis in Lhasa control much of the meat industry in the city. Those two groups were singled out by ethnic Tibetans. They marked those businesses that they knew to be Tibetan owned with white traditional scarves. Those businesses were left intact. Almost every single other across a wide swathe of the city, not only in the old Tibetan quarter, but also beyond it in areas dominated by the ethnic Han Chinese. Almost every other business was either burned, looted, destroyed, smashed into, the property therein hauled out into the streets, piled up, burned. It was an extraordinary outpouring of ethnic violence of a most unpleasant nature to watch, which surprised some Tibetans watching it. So they themselves were taken aback at the extent of what they saw. And it was not just targeted against property either. Of course many ethnic Han Chinese and Huis fled as soon as this broke out. But those who were caught in the early stages of it were themselves targeted. Stones thrown at them. At one point, I saw them throwing stones at a boy of maybe around 10 years old perhaps cycling along the street. I in fact walked out in front of them and said stop. It was a remarkable explosion of simmering ethnic grievances in the city.
He corroborates that the Chinese response was muted and delayed:
Quote:Well the Chinese response to this was very interesting. Because you would expect at the first sings of any unrest in Lhasa, which is a city on a knife-edge at the best of times. That the response would be immediate and decisive. That they would cordon off whatever section of the city involved, that they would grab the people involved in the unrest. In fact what we saw, and I was watching it at the earliest stages, was complete inaction on the part of the authorities. It seemed as if they were paralyzed by indecision over how to handle this. The rioting rapidly spread from Beijing Road, this main central thoroughfare of Lhasa, into the narrow alleyways of the old Tibetan quarter. But I didn't see any attempt in those early hours by the authorities to intervene. And I suspect again the Olympics were a factor there. That they were very worried that if they did move in decisively at that early stage of the unrest that bloodshed would ensue in their efforts to control it. And what they did instead was let the rioting run its course and it didn't really finish as far as I saw until the middle of the day on the following day on the Saturday, March the 15th. So in effect what they did was sacrifice the livelihoods of many, many ethnic Han Chinese in the city for the sake of letting the rioters vent their anger. And then being able to move in gradually with troops with rifles that they occasionally let off with single shots, apparently warning shots, in order to scare everybody back into their homes and put an end to this.
The media blackout doesn't just hide Chinese human rights abuses, it also serves to make the human rights abuses of Tibetans harder to report on.
Here is the
Wall Street Journal reporting on Chinese being burned alive in the rioting that they could not corroborate directly (but that I believe given the accounts of arson that
were corroborated):
Quote:In the early afternoon of March 14, the day the capital of China's Tibet Autonomous Region erupted in violence, a crowd of Tibetans broke into the clothing store owned by Mr. Peng's girlfriend's family, doused stacks of shirts and jackets with gasoline and set the piles on fire, says Mr. Peng. The details of his story couldn't be independently corroborated.
Mr. Peng's girlfriend, Liu Juan, and her parents, Liu Guobing and Wang Xinping, were hiding upstairs. As the fire spread, Mr. Liu and Ms. Wang jumped from a second-story window. Ms. Liu, who was 20 years old and the mother of their 9-month-old son, apparently was overcome by the smoke. Her body was found inside the burned-out shop the next day, says Mr. Peng, who wasn't in Lhasa at the time of the attack.
Mr. Peng spoke in a telephone interview Monday from Mr. Liu's bedside in the First People's Hospital of the Tibet Autonomous Region in Lhasa. Mr. Peng, 24 years old, says he related events as described to him by Mr. Liu. Mr. Liu, who is being treated for spinal injuries, was unable to speak on the phone.
Cases such as the Liu family's are fueling anger against Tibetans among the Han Chinese, the country's predominant ethnic group. Han are also voicing frustration with foreign media, which they feel are ignoring their suffering and instead focusing on Tibetans' grievances with the Chinese government.
China's response to this violence against the Hans and Muslims was more muted than it should have been and more muted than it would have been in the past. They have come a long way since Tiananmen and a big reason is their increasing engagement with the rest of the world.