And the killings in Tibet continue…

Posted by Lhasa Rising in Protests in Tibet on 03 25th, 2008 | no responses

The killings in Tibet continue. As usual, Tibetan protesters are massacred, and China’s state-run media tries to make China the victim (claiming a police officer was killed by the “lawless mob”).

This reminds me of how China once claimed no one was killed in Tiananmen Square, and then changed the story to how innocent soldiers were killed by those “counterrevolutionary” students.

From The Times:

Paramilitary police opened fire on hundreds of monks, nuns and Tibetans who tried to march on a local government office in western China yesterday to demand the return of the Dalai Lama.

Residents of Luhuo said that a monk and a farmer appeared to have been killed and about a dozen people wounded in the latest violence in Tibetan areas of China. Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, said that one officer was killed when police confronted a “lawless mob” in Luhuo.

The demonstration began at 4pm when about 200 nuns from Woge nunnery and a similar number of monks from Jueri monastery marched towards the Luhuo Third District government office. They were joined by several hundred farmers and nomads, witnesses said.

Shouting “Long Live the Dalai Lama” and “Tibet belongs to Tibetans”, they approached the office. The paramilitary People’s Armed Police appeared and ordered the crowd to turn back. Witnesses said that shots were fired and two people appeared to have died. They identified one as Congun Dengzhu, a farmer, and the second as an unknown monk.

Clearly, the message we are getting from Tibetans in Tibet is very consistent. One, they want His Holines the Dalai Lama back. Two, they want Tibetan independence. End of story.

What is really aggravating, however, is how the media is twisting the story of Tibetan violence on ethnic Chinese colonists. This is what The Times reported:

Security was already tight in Luhuo county, as in other Tibetan communities in China. The turmoil began with a riot in Lhasa on March 15, in which Chinese officials say 19 people were killed when Tibetans rampaged through the Tibetan capital, stabbing ethnic Han Chinese and setting fire to Chinese shops and offices.

We are not excusing violence committed by any party (we addressed this issue here). But The Times conflates a few days of violence in Lhasa with weeks of largely peaceful protests all over Tibet, following five decades of oppression and largely nonviolent resistance. The protests started on Monday, March 10, not the 15th as The Times reported. They were peaceful (at least from the Tibetan side — not from the Chinese soldiers) until that Friday. That day, the BBC revealed, there was a confrontation between unarmed monks and armed Chinese forces that set off the violence.

So let’s get some perspective here. Any oppressed people, after five decades of occupation, will rise up. Tibetans have been remarkably nonviolent, considering what the Chinese government has perpetrated on them. So if we want to talk about Tibetan violence on ethnic Chinese colonists in Lhasa over the course of a few days, fine. Let’s also talk about the overwhelming, state-sponsored violence perpetrated by the occupying Chinese forces.

And in any case, there’s no excuse to paint the whole uprising we are seeing all over Tibet to have been started by a violent “riot” in Lhasa. It is much more than that, and it does an incredible disservice to the brave Tibetans risking their lives to call for their county’s freedom.

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