Tibet, the yellow-man's burden: Laura Kelly

Tibet-- the Yellow Man's Burden (April 2008)

Editor in Chief
The Hindu
Anna Saalai
Chennai-600002
India

To:

Dear Mr. Ram

It is heartening to read the 'Rather Bold' mails on the Tibet issue. But it is too little and too late is the bitter truth. As the figures supplied by Sonia Jabbar, Ramachandra Guha, Mukul Kesavan, Madhu Sarin, Jyotirmaya Sharma, Dilip Simeon, Tenzin Sonam, & Shashi Tharoor show that the Han population has become dominant over Tibetans. What is despicable, which I WITNESSESD OVER MANY VISITS TO MT KAILASH, over eleven years is this:

1. Tibetans who could be seen moving around in plenty in villages en route, have become extremely rare. Their settlements have disappeared!

2) Tibetans were brought in Military Transport, to work for twelve hour shifts in extreme weather conditions; having been forced into silence, not a word exchanged between them or with others, and bundled back into the backs of military trucks at the end of the day made to stand on long and arduous journeys winding through treacherous roads and to transported back the next day morning. For every truck load of Tibetans (about thirty men and women) there were three heavily armed soldiers with assault rifles and carbines.

3) It Sounds every bit Nazi camps:Dachau-Auschwitz-Birkenau-Sobibor-Trebinka-Betzee-Bergen-Belzen where the largest number of European Jews were put to death by gassing and other methods. Here instead of SS men replace with the Red army brigades.

4) Lot of construction is happening for the better and modern conveniences in villages depleted of Tibetans obviously to house the Hans and the military administrators. My first visit was in 1992 and the last in 2004.

5) With the passing of communism into history as an ideological alternative to democracy it is time to do some accounting of its human costs. Few would deny any longer that Communism--Marxism-Leninism and its variants--meant in practice bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal gulags and forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extra-judicial executions and show trials, gulags and genocide. It is also widely known that as a result millions of innocent people have been murdered in cold blood. Yet there has been virtually no concentrated statistical work on what this total might be.

6) Let us examine the figures available on murder by communists: “the Soviet Union appears the greatest mega murderer of all, apparently killing near 61,000,000 people. Stalin himself is responsible for almost 43,000,000 of these. Most of the deaths, perhaps around 39,000,000 are due to lethal forced labor in gulag and transit thereto. Communist China up to 1987, but mainly from 1949 through the Cultural Revolution, which alone may have seen over 1,000,000 murdered, is the second worst mega murderer. Then there are the lesser mega murderers, such as North Korea and Tito's Yugoslavia".

7) Even if Dalai Lama makes a deal, an autonomous Tibet under Chinese Central Govt how can he stop the Han sweep and the cultural genocide that has taken place over the last fifty years?

8) How can we moronically support ideologies, that after devouring its own civilization and has devoured the neighbour for the next meal? Power kills. Absolute power kills absolutely -- whether it was Hitler in the past or Maoist China in 2008! How can we forget/forgive mass murderers of red China?


Sincerely,

Laura kelly


Please read on.....



9)”In sum the communist probably have murdered something like 110,000,000, or near two-thirds of all those killed by all governments, quasi-governments, and guerrillas from 1900 to 1987. Of course, the world totals itself is shocking. It is several times the 38,000,000 battle-dead that have been killed in all this century's international and domestic wars. Yet the probable number of murders by the Soviet Union alone--one communist country-- well surpasses this cost of war. And those murders of communist China almost equal it. “
11) As part of Party persecution of the Falun Gong sect (to members, it is not a religion), police are likely to arrest any Chinese who practice its combination of Taoism and Buddhism, and the meditation and martial arts techniques that lead members to a spiritual melding of mind, spirit,and body. (akin to yoga)

12) There are as many as 100 million adherents in China, though the Party claims that no more than 2.1 million belong. Clearly, however, sect leaders can bring together many members quickly. On April 25, 1999, for example, a mass of 10,000 followers stood quietly in front of the compound housing the top Party leaders in Beijing.

13) Police have already arrested over a hundred sect leaders and thousands of its adherents for what, until recently, the Party labeled a “counterrevolutionary crime,” and has renamed in less political terms a “crime disturbing social order.” The Party recently held over 35,000 Falun Gong members in detention or in prison, and has tortured many. It has sent some 5,000 additional members to labor camps without trial.

14) At least eighty-nine Falun Gong have died due to Party mistreatment. Though this number is small and seems irrelevant in such a huge country, for each of the eighty-nine and those who loved them, it was terribly real. Sixty-year-old Chen Zixiu is a case in point. She traveled to Beijing to request that the Party lift its restrictions on the Falun Gong. The police arrested her, then beat and tortured her. Her aging body could not take it, and she was dead in four days. When her family collected her corpse, they found bruises all over her body, broken teeth, and dried blood in her ears.

15) Another woman, Zhao Xin, a professor at Beijing’s Industry and Commerce University, died from a beating she received after her arrest for practicing Falun Gong breathing exercises in a Beijing park. The Party cannot leave alone even that which most people regard as superstitions or simply good health exercises. In a crackdown on a group of Qi Gong practitioners, for example, have says R. J. Rummel “over 21,000 been arrested for nothing more than fostering breathing and meditation exercises.”

16) Action against unapproved sects or religious groups is simply an example of the Party’s continuous campaign to suppress anything of which it does not approve—be it association, speech, unions, or movements. In China, there can be no association without Party permission, no nonprofit organization without registration. The Party must license all newspapers, magazines, and other publications, and no book can be published without Party approval. Censorship is common.

17)There are even Party guidelines for publications, such as requiring that newspaperStories be 80 percent positive, 20 percent negative. Disseminating or selling unapproved literature can lead to a long prison sentence.

18) For example, police arrested two Beijing bookstore owners, sisters Li Xiaobing and Li Xiaomei, for selling Falun Gong publications, and a court sentenced them to six or seven years. The police even arrested the environmental journalist Dai Qing, who justifiably criticized a mammoth dam-building project on the Yangtze River, which will create the world’s largest hydroelectric dam and displace one to two million people. A court sentenced him to ten months in prison and forbade him to publish in the future. Even for simply making a list of those convicted of protest-connected offenses—just a list—a court sentenced one fellow, Li Hai, to nine months in prison.

19) After all, convictions are a “high-level state secret.” Arrest and incarceration in prison, a labor camp, or a psychiatric hospital, forced drugging, brainwashing, psychological torture, physical
>torment, execution, a simple beating—all are Party tools. Their purpose is to control the Chinese population, advance Party policies, and maintain Party power through fear. There is no humanity in any of this. Note how the prison authorities treated the forty-two-year-old woman Cheng Fengrong. They handcuffed her to a tree and beat her, made her stand in the snow barefoot while they kicked her, and finally poured cold water over her head, which ran down her body and turned to ice at her feet.

20) Aside from the Party’s great concern over what Chinese say and whom they associate with, there is still more reason why one would not want to be born in China. The Party also deems restricting population growth to be vital. It therefore forcibly intrudes into the core of a family’s soul desire to have children.

21) Since 1979, the Party has dictated who will have no more than one child, a policy largely applied to Han Chinese (comprising 92 percent of the population) living in urban areas.

22)To prevent women from having a second child, the Party might sterilize them or, if they’re pregnant, force them to undergo an abortion. If there are many pregnant women in an area, or just to ensure that there are no Never Again Supplement 23 second children, Party officials might enforce a local “Clean Out the Stomach Campaign” involving house-to-house examinations and forced abortions. If a woman still somehow manages to have a second child, the couple would likely be fined, and the child would be discriminated against and not allowed to attend the better schools.

23) What happened to the owner of a small clothing store is an example of the trouble a second pregnancy might cause. I will name her Woman X, since she is now a refugee and fears harm if the Party knows her name. After she had her first child, officials ordered her to use an intrauterine device to prevent another pregnancy. She did so for a while, but because of connected health problems, secretly removed it—and got pregnant. When they found out about this, Party officials fined her and forced her to undergo an abortion. The fine was too much for her meager resources to cover, and she could not pay it. Officials then seized her store. Penniless and distraught, she borrowed what money she could from relatives and fled alone, deserting her husband, child,and mother.

24) The result of the Party’s one-child policy was predictable in an Asian, male-oriented society. If a Chinese woman believed her first fetus to be female, she might well abort it. The second try might yield a male. If a female were born, the mother or her husband might murder or abandon it. Infanticide was naturally prevalent, and sometimes even encouraged by Party authorities. The result was that there were about 119 males born for every 100 females.

25)It has led to playgrounds filled with masses of boys, few girls, and no siblings. For traditional Chinese families, the end result is even worse. Who will take care of the aged parents? This has led to a Party reconsideration of the policy. One resulting reform is to permit families to have two children, if both parents are from single-child families.

26) With the liberalization of some controls, a much freer market, and less emphasis on remaking the society and culture, the Party now executes far fewer people than it did decades ago. Still, the numbers are very high by international standards. As expected, how many people the Party executes or otherwise kills without a fair trial and for political or religious “crimes” is unknown and difficult to estimate.

27)Going by what the outside world knows, however, in just the one year of 1996 the Party executed at least 4,367 people. With a little more than 20 percent of the world’s population, and going only by documented executions, the Party performs about 75 to 80 percent of all known judicial executions in the world.

28) Nor can Chinese expect a decent burial if executed. As the still warm body lies on the ground after being shot in the back of the head, doctors brought for this purpose will likely cut out the organs and rush these to a hospital, without the prior consent of the executed or the family. RJ Rummel. At the hospital, doctors will transplant the organs into well-paying foreigners or the elite, or prepare the organs for shipment, so the Party can sell them in the international transplant market for much-needed hard currency. An American Chinese-language newspaper even advertised such organs for sale—one negotiated price was $30,000.00

29) Executions are the result of official court sentences, but Chinese also die “off the record” from beatings, torture, or other mistreatment by authorities in prisons or labor camps. Even the Chinese press sometimes reports these deaths, as it did of a worker who, suspected of embezzlement, died after being beaten and tortured for twenty-nine hours. Chinese who simply demonstrate for democracy can be killed.

30) During the nonviolent, pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, soldiers, armored vehicles, and tanks slaughtered 2,000 to 10,000 demonstrators. Those who escape execution or prison might still be sentenced to a forced labor or re-education camp. Life in either case can be worse than that in prison, however, and even death might seem preferable. It did for human rights leader Chen Longde. Beaten by guards with clubs and electric batons, tortured by other inmates who were promised reduced sentences if they got him to confess, and suffering from associated kidney damage, he finally jumped from a window.(The Laogai Research Foundation at: www.laogai.org/reports/profit.htm and quoted by RJ Rummel)


31) He survived, perhaps unfortunately, with two hips and a leg broken. The Party forces inmates to fulfill a work quota or meet certain “reform” standards. Failure to meet a quota or spout communist dogma can be lethal. Camp officials may simply deny them benefits, or they may impose a more deadly punishment—they may beat them, starve them, or put them in painfully tightened leg irons or handcuffs for long periods. The quotas are not easy for inmates to fill, and could require them to work overtime with little sleep—sometimes no more than three or four hours.

32) Moreover, camp authorities might combine work with required communist study, making it even harder to meet quotas. In some camps, guards routinely beat and harass inmates to force them to do more work. Of course, guards beat prisoners in other countries as
Well. But in China these beatings are not the idiosyncratic behavior of sadistic camp guards. They are the Party’s method to ensure work output and proper brainwashing. Overall, the Party admits to keeping 1.2 million prisoners, including detainees. This total is probably far under the actual number.