Film on the Mongolian nomads in China wins the Berlinale

The winner of the Berlin Film Festival recalls with "Tuya’s Marriage” the downfall of the nomad life in Inner Mongolia in China, for which the Chinese government is basically responsible, said the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) on Sunday. "Official China will not be pleased with the granting of the prize to the Chinese regisseur Wang Quan’an for his film recounting the hard life of the nomads in Inner Mongolia”, said the GfbV Asia correspondent Ulrich Delius. "For China’s government has since the year 2001 systematically settled 650,000 Mongolian nomads in towns and thus given the nomad culture, which is thousands of years old, a death-blow. This film will contribute to making known the destruction of the Mongol culture.”

In 1949 only 200,000 Han Chinese lived in Inner Mongolia, but now the proportion has reversed completely. Today in the Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia, which is three times the size of Germany, 5 million Mongols face 12 million Han Chinese, who have immigrated. The Mongols suffer from the same problems as the Tibetans, but the destruction of their traditional society is further advanced as the result of industrialisation and minerals and in the world outside almost nothing is known of it.

It is not only the nomads who are responsible for the increasing desertification, as the Chinese maintain, but above all the influx of Han Chinese, who are ruining the already poor soil with their intensive agriculture. In the year 2001 the authorities decided to settle 650,000 nomads in towns and villages in the coming five years in order to stop the ecological destruction of the region. Many nomads, who refused to be settled, were arrested and their herds confiscated. The Mongols see in the settlement policies a massive violation of their human rights.

Up until now the government in Peking has prevented with censure the public discussion of these controversial policies. For this reason the authorities closed two Mongol websites because they had reported too critically on the destruction of the Mongol culture. In the spring of 2003 the authorities closed in a campaign against the Mongol human rights movement 500 internet cafes in Inner Mongolia. In November 2006 the police in the provincial capital of Hohhot carried out a raid on Mongol book and music shops. More than a dozen Mongol human rights workers are in custody because they criticised the Chinese repression. The book-shop owner Hada was in 1996 sentenced to 15 years imprisonment for "separatism”.