China's Final Solution

The scene was shocking in its brutality. Peaceful demonstrators had gathered in the capital square to call for democratic reforms. The Chinese government responded with a show of force: Thousands of combat-equipped army units from around the country surrounded the protesters with tanks and armored personnel carriers. The troops moved in, firing indiscriminately into crowds of unarmed people. Hundreds were killed.

In the aftermath of the massacre, foreigners--especially Western journalists--were expelled. Government forces swept through the city, arresting demonstra-tors and publicly executing the leaders.

These events took place last spring in Lhasa, Tibet, prefiguring by months the carnage in Tiananmen Square that so shocked the world. And while outrage over the Tiananmen Square bloodbath continues to reverberate in U.S. and international politics, scarcely a whisper has been raised on behalf of the Tibetans.

Both ends of the political spectrum have rightly condemned the Bush administration, in the context of the continuing repression of the democracy movement in China, for kow--towing to the Chinese dictators by sending high-level emissaries to toast U.S.--China friendship, chipping away at sanctions against selling high-tech materials, vetoing legislation to protect Chinese students in the United States, and opening the door for new World Bank loans to China.

But the largely untold story of Tibet is, in some ways, a more horrible example of China's moral turpitude than the crackdown on the student freedom movement in that country. Tibet has one of the world's oldest civilizations, with a recorded history dating back to 127 B.C.E. Perched on a plateau in the world's tallest mountains, the Himalayas of central Asia, Tibet has for centuries been a bone of contention for its massive neighbors, China and India.

The demonstrations in Tibet's capital that led to last year's massacre were part of a resistance movement that has opposed Chinese occupation for 40 years. Soon after their revolutionary victory, the Mao-led Communists invaded Tibet in 1950 and forced Tibet's leader, the then-16-year-old Dalai Lama, to sign an agreement acknowledging Chinese control over defense and foreign affairs but supposedly allowing Tibetan autonomy in internal matters.

Over the next decade, Chinese attempts to consolidate control fed a growing rebellion, aided by the CIA, that culminated in a massive uprising in March 1959 which the Chinese ruthlessly crushed. An estimated 87,000 Tibetans were killed, and the Dalai Lama was forced into exile in India.

LIKE THE PEOPLE OF THE Baltic states forcibly annexed by the Soviet Union, Tibetans have never recognized the legitimacy of their conqueror's rule. Forty years of Chinese occupation has resulted in the deaths of more than 1.2 million Tibetans--one sixth of the population--and the destruction of more than 6,000 monasteries, the seat of Tibet's culture.

While martial law has been ostensibly lifted in Bering (or at least the soldiers have put on police uniforms), in Tibet's capital of Lhasa martial law remains. Currently, more than a quarter million Chinese occupation troops are stationed on the Tibetan plateau, as well as one quarter of China's nuclear arsenal, and the area has become China's chief dumping ground for toxic and nuclear wastes. Despite this horrible oppression, the sovereignty movement in Tibet has remained largely nonviolent--primarily because it is rooted in Buddhism, with its strong emphasis on nonviolence, and has been led largely by Buddhist monks and nuns.

China's leadership sought negotiation during the early 1980s with the exiled Dalai Lama--who is both political and religious leader of the Tibetans--hoping to stabilize the region with his cooperation. In 1983, the Chinese abandoned that policy and began to implement a "final solution" to its Tibet problem: the destruction of the Tibetan race and culture.

To do so, Beijing encouraged mass migration of Chinese citizens to Tibet--riot unlike Israel's settlement policy in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and the Golan Heights--and has been accused of practicing forced abortions and forced sterilization on Tibetan women. Today there are 7.5 million Chinese to six million Tibetans in Tibet, a demographic reality that not only promises to negate the cause of Tibetan self-determination, but threatens also to end Tibet's long tenure as a distinct people.

The world's outrage at the slaughter in Tiananmen Square and China's subsequent repression of the democracy movement there demonstrated humanity's compassion for the victims of unjust repression. In this country, despite the Bush administration's refusal to stand up to Communist China, people are not likely to soon forget or forgive the savage crushing of the Chinese freedom movement--especially in this time when the bells of freedom are ringing across the globe.

The people aspiring to freedom for Tibet are not known to the world. The massacre in Lhasa's square, unlike that in Beijing's, was not televised. Even last year's awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Tibet's leader-in-exile, the Dalai Lama, did little to alert humanity to the repression and suffering of his people.

If this decade is to be remembered as the era of freedom and human rights, with the walls of subjugation tumbling down for cit-zens of the Soviet Union and Namibia and Eastern Europe and elsewhere, the people of Tibet cannot be forgotten by the rest of the world.

Jim Rice is editor of Sojourners magazine.