50 years of resistance in Tibet (10th March) – China is committing cultural genocide in Tibet – Report documents destruction of the language, culture, religion and identity

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) has accused China of committing cultural genocide in Tibet. In a 30-page report on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the rising in Tibet (10th March) the human rights organisation documents the destruction of the Tibetan language, culture and identity and the effective elimination of Tibetan Buddhism. "China’s pressure to ensure assimilation in Tibet is greater now than it ever was before”, said the GfbV Asia consultant, Ulrich Delius, on Monday in Göttingen. Never before in the course of the past 20 years have so many Tibetans been held prisoner. Within only 18 months the number of political prisoners and disappeared persons has risen by more than forty-fold: from 120 to 5,700.

"If the international community does not manage to move the Chinese leaders to a credible and goal-oriented dialogue with the Dalai Lama to reach a peaceful solution to the Tibet question, then Tibet and China are in for some hard times”, said Delius. For every escalation of the Tibet conflict will result in the destabilising of China. "The international community is well advised to take a more energetic line in encouraging genuine autonomy for Tibet, a called for by the Dalai Lama, within the Chinese state frontier.”

The forcible resettling of 860,000 nomads means the end of a way of life which has lasted for thousands of years. Instead of the Tibetan language being taught – as announced many years ago – at schools and universities the local language is now being spoken only in a diminishing number of Tibetan language classes.

The Tibetans are becoming a minority in their own country. Tens of thousands of Chinese settlers have been settling along the railway line which was opened in July 2006. Tibet’s old capital of Lhasa is now firmly in Chinese hands. With the construction of six new railway lines by the year 2020 the pressure for assimilation will be even greater.

China is aiming at control and the securing of power at any price with no respect for the culture, society and religion of the Tibetans. The atheist leaders in Peking are interfering with increasing confidence in the internal affairs of Tibetan Buddhism. They are suppressing all expressions of religion and subjecting nuns and monks to brain-washing and forcing them to distance themselves in writing from their spiritual leader. Pictures and statues of the Dalai Lama are being indiscriminately destroyed and nuns and monks thrown out of the monasteries.

Devious regulations concerning religion are being implemented by China’s Communist officials to steamroll Tibetan Buddhism. The monasteries are being emptied because the adherents are being committed to long prison sentences or have had to seek refuge abroad.