Saturday, March 15, 2008
Tibet, Kosovo, and the Olympics - Living up to Our Values
Lost in the news of election coverage, Spitzergate, and Barak’s pastoral issues there has been a major protest in Tibet, led again apparently by some very brave Buddhist monks. Of course, it will be crushed or short-circuted. Chinese Communist rulers have not survived all these years, including the days after Tinemman Square in 1989 (one of the saddest of my life - as a college student watching coverage, hoping that the people of China would be free, only to see those young people - my age - trounced by tanks and the army).
So what are we to do, those who say we value human rights?
This is particularly bad timing because of two recent other issues. Kosovo has just declared its independence from Serbia. You will of course remember the war in Kosovo back in 1998, and our military’s campaign to end genocide. Of course later we found out that a) there was no genocide b) the ethnic cleansing that was going on was in part spurred by actions of the Marxist Islamic group, the KLA and 3) that the whole plan was well orchestrated to get a free Kosovo.
The problem with Kosovo is that the land has no history as a separate nation, it has been taken from Serbia without their Serbia’s approval, and now a new precedent has been set. Literally dozens of countries have large ethnic minorities living in geographically cloistered areas, and now we must ask - why should not all of these “nations” be allowed to declare independence?
Tibet would be case #1. It has a very distinct culture (or did until 50 years of the Chinese practice of destroying cultures and making everyone Chinese), a separate religious identity, and a deep desire for independence. So I would assume that the EU is ready to step forward and declare Tibet free today. Right?
Meanwhile we are just months away from the farce that will be the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. The idea of course of the games was originally to promote peace among nations, human rights, yada yada. Granting the Olympics to China in 2001, which was highly controversial at the time.
To his great credit, late Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos was one of the few “human rights activists” who was consistent across the board. Lantos, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust (the only one who ever served in our Congress), had challenged the Chinese policies at every turn - on Tibet, on Darfur (China is a leading trading partner and seller of weapons to Sudan), the suppression of Christians and Fulan Gong practioners.
Now we have Tibet protest. Read article here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/15/wtibet615.xml
So, while we have some urging Olympic protests over Sudan/Darfur - the internal issues of China - Tibet, religious repression, forced labour camps - are ignored (I will give credit here to Richard Gere who has been on the Tibet bandwagon for year).
So, now it up to the International Community to step forward. If Kosovo has the right to be independent, should not Tibet? Given Tibet’s former independence, its 50 years of fighting against Chinese rule, its separate religion (one of the keys behind Kosovo), should not Tibet be declared independent today by the EU as well?
Let us be honest, there is one reason for this- money, dinero, Claude. China is the third largest economy today, the source of manufacturing for many of the world’s leading companies, and is not someone to be trifled with no matter what. So, let me ask you, what are the chances if there is indeed blood running down the streets of Lhasa, do you think that the nations of the world will boycott the Games?
Should they? We have heard for years about the importance of engagement with the Chinese, to bring them into the world of liberal democracies. So how is that working out?
Our words, especially the United Nation’s Declaration on Human Rights, mean nothing if we are not willing to pay the price to see them upheld. I know many Chinese democracy activists are arguing against a boycott, thinking it will make things worse for them, but this is actually even bigger than China. An international community without integrity makes the whole “human rights” thing a farce.
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