Development aid for China must be separated from economic interests

The visit of the Dalai Lama to Germany caused the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) on Sunday to call for a "clear separation” of development aid from economic interests. "As long as Peking disregards human rights and tries to prevent Bundeskanzler Angela Merkel from receiving the spiritual and temporal head of the Tibetans aid for China must be stopped”, said the General Secretary, Tilman Zülch, at the Annual General Meeting of the human rights organisation in Göttingen. Some 250 delegates passed a resolution calling on the German government to take more energetic measures to save the traditional culture and society of the Tibetans and Uigurs, which are being systematically destroyed by the Chinese government.

In view of the discussions on the earliest possible withdrawal of the US troops from Iraq the GfbV called for the EU states to place the autonomous Iraqi federal state of Kurdistan and the neighbouring minority areas under their protection. The international Islamist terror and the neighbouring countries of Turkey , Iran and Syria will have no truck with the existence of this autonomous region and have threatened with invasion. The Nato partner Turkey is particularly dangerous because it constantly violates the borders to North Iraq with military action. In the region which is inhabited mainly by Kurds there live also or have sought refuge from the terror in South and Central Iraq various small tribes and religious minorities like the Assyro-Chaldaic-Aramaic Christians, Yezidi, Turkmens, Mandaeans or Shabak. The Minister of Tourism from Iraqi Kurdistan, the Christian Nimrud Youkhana, emphasised on Saturday that his regional government guarantees elementary rights to all ethnic, religious and cultural groups.

The Bolivian ambassador, the Indian Prudencio Magne Veliz, emphasised the importance of the work of the GfbV for the approximately 370 million native people in the world: "We must no longer be patronised, but must at last be recognised as equal partners.”

The delegates of the GfbV from Germany and its foreign sections as well as representatives of ethnic and religious minorities from several continents discussed at the weekend strategies against genocide in Darfur in the south-west of Sudan, for the support of the peace process in South Sudan, for the admission of Bosnia-Herzegovina to the EU and for the protection of the minorities of the Roma and Ashkali in Kosovo, as well as against the discrimination of people of German origin from the former states of the Russian Federation and the cutting of federal funds for the Sorbs. For the reindeer herds of the Swedish Sami, the only indigenous group on European soil, the GfbV called for access free of control to their traditional pastures in Norway .

The GfbV celebrated the move into its new premises, a building formerly belonging to the University, with a grand party. The building has been given the name "Victor Gollancz House” after the British-Jewish humanist, publisher and writer, to celebrate his exemplary work for the victims of arbitrariness and violence. Gollancz spent a great deal of his life drawing attention to crimes against humanity and mobilising aid for the survivors. In 1933 already he documented in detail the crimes of Hitler and worked for the recognition and acceptance of Jewish refugees by the British government. Later, on the collapse of the Third Reich, he rejected the collective guilt of the Germans, conducted campaigns against hunger and condemned the mass expulsions. Victor Gollancz was with Bertrand Russell and Robert Jungk one of the initiators of the movement against atomic weapons and played for many years a central part in the work of reconciliation between Germany and Britain .