Ending Human Rights Abuses in Tibet

Embassy, May 5th, 2004
COLUMN
By David Kilgour

On the occasion of the Dalai Lama's recent visit to Parliament Hill, Thubten Samdup, president of the Canada-Tibet Committee, said "Tibet has had enough sympathy. What we need now is action." One immediate step in this direction will be taken Wednesday when the Human Rights Sub-Committee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee begins hearings on Tibet and human rights in China. The scheduled witnesses are experts from Amnesty International and the Canada-Tibet Committee.

One witness the committee should also seek to hear is the Buddhist nun, Ngawang Sangdrol, 26, who was last year permitted to leave Tibet for medical reasons and whose case appears to be exemplary of what is happening to many in Tibet.

At the age of 13, she was sentenced to eleven years for demonstrating peacefully for a free Tibet. Released a year or so later, following beatings with iron pipes and having electric batons put in her mouth, she was soon back in prison for chanting slogans demanding independence. There appears to be little doubt that similar treatment continues to await any Tibetan who refuses to submit to the Beijing orthodoxy on subjugation or to denounce the Dalai Lama.

The president of the Canadian NGO Rights and Democracy, Jean-Louis Roy, noted on the eve of the Dalai Lama's visit, "Silence in response to any abuse of human rights is unacceptable and it is especially objectionable in response to abuses that amount to cultural genocide ­ as in Tibet. These abuses continue to taint Canada's flourishing economic relationship with China, not to mention our reputation as a defender of human rights and democratic freedoms." Who can disagree?

The enormous public interest in the Dalai Lama's continuing visit to Canada should inspire all 165 MPs and senators who signed letters to Prime Minister Martin urging him to seek to facilitate negotiations between China and representatives of the Tibetan people.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao himself declared last year that the "door to communication between the central government and the Dalai Lama is wide open." The premier and the world know that an estimated one million Tibetans have died as a result of China's invasion in 1950; that the "Seventeen-Point Agreement" a year later, which guaranteed limited autonomy to Tibetans, was ignored by Beijing.

His Holiness has put forward two proposals for a substantive negotiation process on behalf of six million Tibetans living inside Tibet. Among those calling for full negotiations are the European Commission the UK, Germany and France individually and a bipartisan consensus in the US Congress. In Canada, the Canada-Tibet Committee has launched "The Tibet-China Negotiation Campaign," which calls for our prime minister as a mediator. Pursuing this would enhance our reduced international stature in a world too full of violence.

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