Activists say two killed in Tibetan monastery crackdown

[News_Editor]

Activists say two killed in Tibetan monastery crackdown

2011-04-23 22:39:25 GMT+7 (ICT)

BEIJING (BNO NEWS) -- Two elderly Tibetans were killed after Chinese police raided a Buddhist monastery located in the Ngaba area of the country's southwestern province of Sichuan, activists said Saturday.

The US-based International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) said paramilitary police raided the Kirti monastery on Thursday and took away more than 300 monks. A group of people, who have been gathered around the entrance gate since April 12, were beaten "mercilessly" by police after they tried to prevent the trucks with the detainees from leaving.

A 60-year-old male and 65-year-old female were killed.

"People had their arms and legs broken, one old woman had her leg broken in three places, and cloth was stuffed in their mouths to stifle their screams," an exiled Kirti monk said, according to the organization.

Exile sources said the detainees were taken to 10 large military trucks and driven away. Most of them were released Friday, but a group of younger people was detained.

The ICT said all shops and restaurants in Ngaba county town remained closed, and only military and official vehicles can be seen on the roads. Provincial public security authorities issued a notice banning foreigners from entering various Tibetan areas of southwest Sichuan.

The incident is the latest development in an escalating crisis at Kirti. The Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy also reported that a 24-year old Tibetan man died of his injuries after being beaten severely by police after he protested together with two other youths outside the local police station on April 7.

Last month, a monk set himself on fire in an apparent anti-government protest.

-- © BNO News All rights reserved 2011-04-23

[rwhoov]

I'm still waiting to hear the "historical" validity for the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Because one is militarily superior does not give China or anyone else validity for anything. They need to recognize Tibetan sovereignty over their own land.

[swerver]

I'm still waiting to hear the "historical" validity for the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Because one is militarily superior does not give China or anyone else validity for anything. They need to recognize Tibetan sovereignty over their own land.

In a nutshell

Understanding the origin, helps us understand the distortions

Tibet, an independent country until 1950, was not suddenly occupied by China. The history of its relations with China is long and complex, with China often acting as a protective overlord – the anti-Communist Kuomintang also insisted on Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. (The term “Dalai Lama” bears witness to this interaction: it combines the Mongolian dalai – Ocean – and the Tibetan bla-ma.)

Before 1950 Tibet was no Shangri-la, but a country of harsh feudalism, poverty (life expectancy was barely 30), corruption and civil wars (the last, between two monastic factions, was in 1948 when the Red Army was already knocking at the door). Fearing social unrest and disintegration, the Tibetan ruling elite prohibited any development of industry, so all metal had to be imported from India. This did not prevent the Tibetan elite from sending their children to British schools in India and transferring financial assets to British banks there.

The Cultural Revolution which ravaged the Tibetan monasteries in the 1960s was not imported by the Chinese. Fewer than a hundred of the Red Guards came to Tibet with the revolution, and the young mobs burning the monasteries were almost exclusively Tibetans in the employ of the CIA.

Since the early 1950s there has been systematic and substantial CIA involvement in stirring up anti-Chinese troubles in Tibet, so Chinese fears of external attempts to destabilize Tibet are not irrational.

As television images show, what is going on in Tibetan regions is no longer a peaceful “spiritual” protest of monks, but also gangs burning and killing.

The Chinese invested heavily in Tibetan economic development, as well as infrastructure, education and health services. Despite undeniable oppression, the average Tibetan has never enjoyed such a standard of living as today. Poverty is now worse in China’s own undeveloped western rural provinces than in Tibet.

In recent years the Chinese changed their strategy in Tibet: depoliticized religion is now tolerated, often even supported.

A main reason why so many in the West have taken part in the protests against China is ideological: Tibetan Buddhism, deftly spun by the Dalai Lama, is a major point of reference of the New Age hedonist spirituality which is becoming the predominant form of ideology today. People’s fascination with Tibet makes it into a mythic place upon which they project their dreams. When people mourn the loss of the authentic Tibetan way of life, they don’t care about real Tibetans: they want Tibetans to be authentically spiritual on behalf of Westerners so they can continue with their crazy consumerism.

Nothing against you Tibet people or their Buddhism but separatism is playing into the hands of the NEOCONS in the West in NATO and in Washington who will instantly exploit any chance to either align themselves militarily with Tibet or to invade and occupy Tibet themselves.

The consequences should be obvious. One just has to look at Iraq or Afghanistan to see what will undoubtedly happen if the Chinese depart Tibet. Tibet people would be used ruthlessly and abandoned uncaringly. That is not Tibet history with China even when the Mongols (Mongolians) ruled.

Nor do the exiled Tibet separatists give a dam_n about their own people in Tibet. All that they want to do is to find a way to grab power again for them selves.

Independence won’t save Tibet; it will only bring the New World Order (NWO) one step closer to breaking up China, and put its people even further away from any prospect of regaining the ground they’ve lost since the death of Mao.

[Steely Dan]

Whatever the internal politics of Tibet were pre-1950, they had their own currency, own flag, own language, own religion and attendant institutions, in other words they were a sovreign nation that much is clear. What is also clear to me having visited the place is the major ecological damage the Chinese have wreaked there, just as they have done in bona fide Chinese provinces. Then we have the concious policy of ethnic dilution in the form of a deliberate policy of encouraging Han Chinese to settle in Tibet to the point where ethnic Tibetans will cease to be a majority in their own land. I won't argue the economics of occupation, save to say that a veil of silence prevails in China over the history of Tibet - Try searching the internet there and see it grind to a halt due to all the monitoring of any external commentary regarding Tibet and nothing will ever justify the annexing of an independant nation just because you are large enough to be immune from external sanction.