US Must Strengthen Rights Policy Toward Tibet

Posted on March 15th, 2008 by Lhasa Rising in Politics, Protests in Tibet

The AFP just issued an interesting article noting that “China’s crackdown on Tibetan protests has dealt a major embarassment to US President George W. Bush’s administration, which removed the Asian giant from a human rights blacklist just three days before the bloody repression.” Oops!

At the time of the delisting, there was this Q&A between an AFP reporter and the Assistant Secretary of State, Jonathan Farrar:

Q: Why was China removed from the worst offenders? They were on the list last year, but they’re not there this year.

A: I think if you look at the introduction to the report, the — describes China — that its human rights record remain poor.

Doesn’t quite answer the question though! A former State Department official, quoted in the AFP article, had some insight into what really was going on: “if your only priority is North Korean nuclear weapons, you subordinate everything else to what China wants and that’s unfortunately what seems to have happened here.”

Hopefully, the US government will develop some backbone now that it can’t escape the massacres on the streets of Lhasa. President Bush can start by refusing to attend the Beijing Olympics, which would give legitimacy to the Chinese regime with blood on its hands in Tibet.

Republican Congressman Frank Wolf notes that Bush’s presence in Beijing would be akin to President Roosevelt sitting in the same stands as Adolf Hitler in the 1936 Munich Olympics. Congressman Wolf plans legislation banning US officials from traveling to the Beijing games at taxpayers’ expense, which Congress should quickly pass.