If We Had A Penny...

It's Time To Get Serious About Tibet's Occupation

The fact of the matter is that bake-sales, bumper stickers and outraged sensibilities will have no effect on the Red Chinese government, nor bring freedom for the oppressed Tibetans to an end.

Instead, in fact, the Chinese use the time, in a similar tactic to that used in the old Soviet Union before and during the Cold War, to empty the country of its native people and replace them with Chinese instead (though, of course, the Communist government claims that they are all Chinese anyway).

Meeting with the Dalai Lama last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, "Speaking for myself, I would say if freedom loving people throughout the world do not speak out against China's oppression in Tibet, we have lost our moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world."

In this she is absolutely correct, but the problem is not one that has just appeared as a result of the recent rioting and protests in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.

The Chinese occupied the country in 1951 and have oppressed the native-born Tibetans ever since. Since then, almost one and a half million people in Tibet have been slain, and over six thousand religious buildings have been demolished with little reaction in the Western world bar bake-sales and occassional protests outside Chinese embassies.

Pelosi also commented on Chinese allegations that the Dalai Lama had instigated the violence in Tibet, Pelosi said "We go with an added mission to call upon the international community to have an independent, outside investigation of the accusations made by the Chinese government that His Holiness is the instigator of violence in Tibet.

"This investigation is to make sure there is no association between His Holiness and violence in Tibet," she said after a working lunch hosted by the Tibetan spiritual leader.

Chinese reaction to her comments was swift and predictable, an attack coming straight from the government-controlled press agency: "Apathetic to those innocent victims in the recent Lhasa riot, Pelosi lost her own 'moral authority to speak about human rights' when she acted as a defender of arsonists, looters and killers," Xinhua said on Sunday.

"Finding a leverage to tarnish China, 'human rights police' like Pelosi are habitually bad tempered and ungenerous when it comes to China, refusing to check their facts and find out the truth of the case," it said.

The truth of the case is that the Chinese government cares little for its people and less for the people of Tibet if they do not simply roll over and accept the occupation.

It is a shame that the U.S. government feels it is more important to salve the feelings of the Red Chinese than enforce the "Bush Doctrine' in the Far East.

Instead of issuing similar statements to Speaker Pelosi, the Administration says that they are working the diplomatic back channels to achieve their aims.

We hope that this is true but believe that little will change unless the Chinese are shamed into action - if that is even possible with a government whose recent ancestors were willing to inflict the Cultural Revolution and tens of millions of dead on their own people.

Our leaders should call for a voluntary boycott of the Beijing Olympics now, and we should end most-favored nation status for the Chinese. Do they have the nerve to do so with the Chinese holding millions of U.S. Treasuries... we will have to wait and see, while the Tibetans are forcibly migrated or killed. Like Darfur, Tibet is another region where millions die while politicians fiddle.