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Hubert von Goisern - Tibet 2009

10th March 2009 | Text: Hubert von Goisern
HvG - TIBET

50 years ago
exactly to the day,
a peaceful tibetan rebellion against the chinese occupying power was bloodily struck down.
to this day a never-ending trail of blood marks this tyranny.
how should one deal with this? aside from with fainting despair!
my dealings with the dalai lama have taught me to be peaceful,
in thought, speech and deed.
but when this approach has failed to bear fruits for 50 years, and achieves no forward motion in the matter,
is the question warranted, as to whether it is the wrong way?
however, i do not know any other.

can one do anything nonetheless?
can we do anything?
yes!
we can make sure that tibet is never forgotten.
in that we never stop talking about it.
in that we remind our politicians,
to make tibet a subject of discussion,
in particular with dealing with china
time and time again.

the story of tibet is a disgrace for china.

let us not fool ourselves, china has the upper hand, but they are a proud people and it is here that one must make a start. the china of today has inherited this situation from mao tse-tung.
when mao tse-tung came to power in 1949, one of his first crimes was to invade tibet, in order to - in his words - liberate the country. (from the tibetans?).
mao's rule over china cost - according to conservative estimates - 20 million people their life. some maintain that it was twice as many. either way - it is an unimaginably high number.

but even more incredible is the fact that mao is still revered. because in china there is no accounting for the past. measured against the number of victims that mao's policies claimed among the chinese, the number of tibetans seems almost reasonable: in tibet alone more than 150,000 were executed and another 200,000 died in prisons and work camps.

the disgrace of tibet cannot be denied or silenced and unfortunately
neither can it be meditated away.
tibet is not china and the tibetans are not chinese.
tibetans have their own language, their own script and their own way of life.

politics that derives the right from its military and economic strength,
to suppress a peacable people such as the tibetans, is inhumane,
is uncivilised.

hubert von goisern