The criminal masterminds of China’s policy in Tibet
There are three shadowy Chinese officials tasked with their government’s merciless policy toward Tibet and the restive region of Xinjiang. One day, these three men will be high on the list of indicted criminals when there’s a trial under universal jurisdiction or perhaps (one can dream) in a future democratic China.
As Slobodan Milosevic could have attested (before he died alone in a cell in The Hague), the world just isn’t safe like it used to be for people responsible for crimes against humanity. Justice has a way of catching up…
The real mastermind of Chinese policy towards the restive ethnic minorities is a 67-year-old lifetime communist functionary named Wang Lequan (bio here).
[...]on March 10 he gave away the extent of his responsibility by telling China Central Broadcasting: “No matter what nationality, no matter who it is, wreckers, separatists and terrorists will be smashed by us. There’s no doubt about that.”
His henchman, now applying the master’s methods in Tibet, is Zhang Qingli (bio here), the region’s sharp-tongued party secretary. Zhang is the man who called the Dalai Lama “a wolf in monk’s clothes, a devil with a human face”. [...] Zhang is on record as saying that “those who do not love the motherland are not qualified to be human beings”.
The third most influential figure is Li Dezhu, the party’s racial theoretician. [...]he unfolded a radical change in Chinese policy, stating that its aim was no longer to preserve minority cultures such as the Tibetans but to refashion them.
Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch says Li is the first leader explicitly to state that the problem of minorities would be “definitively solved” by mass Chinese migration.
This is not to let Preident Hu Jintao (bio here) off the hook either. In addition to being responsible for the current crackdown due to his command-responsibility role, Comrade Hu brutally implemented martial law in Tibet in 1989 as party secretary there.
Interestingly, both Comrade Hu and Comrade Zhang covered their tracks in an attempt to avoid criminal liability and responsibility for the massacres in Tibet. Maybe they are afraid of being brought to justice (not a bad idea: Slobodan Milosevic never thought he’d die alone in a cell in The Hague):
Mr. Hu actually made himself unavailable during the 1989 [Tibet] riots when the paramilitary police needed guidance on whether to crack down. The police did so and Mr. Hu got credit for keeping order, but he also assured himself deniability if the crackdown had failed, the biographer wrote.
Mr. Zhang also has an excuse; he was at the National People’s Congress in Beijing. [...] It is unclear when Mr. Zhang was told of the violence, or if he made the final decision on how to respond.
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[...] certain Chinese officials who have made their careers on this hard-line policy (click here for the three masterminds). Why aren’t these simple truths more obvious? Phuntsog Wanggyal, a Tibetan now retired in [...]