>>>>Avoid buying
and using any kind of goods with 'Made in China' tags. The consumer has the
right to know where your money goes. Every cheap Chinese goods you buy
contributes to rights violation of Tibetans and millions of Chinese people.
Chinese goods come cheap since human life for the Chinese authorities is
cheap.<<<<

The money is also creating the most modern and powerful military in the world with the largest standing army in the world.
The rest of the world should be concerned.

Tibet: Former Political Prisoner Addresses UN



On 14 August 2006, at the 58th Session of Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights Ms. Phuntsog Nyidron spoke about the consistent pattern of violation of human rights and fundamental freedom of the Tibetan people, and in particular, those of the Tibetan political prisoners.

Mr. Chairperson,
My name is Phuntsog Nyidron and I am making this statement on behalf of the Society for Threatened Peoples. By relating my own personal experience of 15 years in Chinese prison and Chinese officials’ torture and humiliation, I wish to inform the Sub-Commission about the consistent pattern of violation of human rights and fundamental freedom of the Tibetan people, and in particular, those of the Tibetan political prisoners.

Ladies and gentlemen,
I was 19 years old when I participated in a peaceful demonstration in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet that resulted in my imprisonment. It happened in October 1989, when Tibet, was under martial law. Together with five fellow Tibetan nuns, I went to the central Lhasa, and we shouted, ‘Long live the Dalai Lama!’ and ‘Free Tibet.’ We had been inspired by the news that His Holiness the Dalai Lama had just won the Nobel Peace Prize, and we wanted to make a statement of our continued loyalty to him.
Following my arrest I was sentenced to nine years of imprisonment denied of legal representations. In 1993, along with 13 other political prisoners (all nuns) we secretly recorded songs in the prison that were in praise of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and about the situation of the political prisoners. On account of this, my sentence was extended by eight years, making my total sentence 17 years. Through these songs, we also wanted to communicate to our families that our spirits had not been broken.

Mr. Chairperson, I did not experience freedom again until I was finally released to the United States on 15 March of this year. Since June I have come to live in Switzerland to continue the medical treatment that I received in the United States. In prison even if I had many health problems, adequate medical treatment was routinely denied to political prisoners. For instance, one of my prison mates died in 1995 when the Chinese authorities failed to provide immediate medical facilities.
Now that I live in freedom I am beginning to learn of the many rights that the Chinese authorities are said to be providing to the prisoners. I am informed that there is a Prison Law of China promulgated in 1994 that “stipulates specifically that prisoners have the right of immunity from corporal punishment and abuses, the right of appeal, the right of communication, the right of meeting visiting family members and relatives, the right to education, the right to rest, the right to receive remuneration for work, the right to labor protection and labor insurance, and the right to receive medical treatment; they enjoy equal rights with other citizens upon their release after completing their sentence term.”
I can say with confidence that the Tibetan political prisoners do not enjoy any of the above rights today. As far as enjoying equal rights after release is concerned, I was not even allowed to return to my nunnery to pursue my religious education. In fact, former political prisoners have to hide their background to seek employment or other opportunities in the society.

Whilst in prison, we underwent unimaginable torture. It was routine for prisoners to be beaten with iron bars and electric-shock prods for daring to express their views and for refusing to submit to communist political education. Sometimes we were beaten unconscious and had to be dragged back to our cells. During my initial months of detention, prison guards had my finger nails poked with the needle of the shoe-sewing machine. Five nuns died from beatings and torture following a May 1998 prison protest at Drapchi Prison. I learn that although Amnesty International has called for an official investigation, the Chinese authorities have so far failed to provide a full account on how the five nuns died.

Mr. Chairperson, it was due to the regular beatings and the fact that three of our colleagues were punished to solitary confinement, that we were convinced we would die at the hands of the security personnel and chose to stage a hunger strike to take our own lives. There was no other way through which our grievances would be heard. We knew how physically we had suffered due to the inadequate, meager and unhygienic prison food. We only stopped the strike after four and half days when we were assured that the security personnel would not be used to beat us.

My protest in 1989 was entirely peaceful, and yet I served 15 years in prison denied of all legal rights. It was routine for Communist China to treat political prisoners as the worst kind of criminals and with this policy our rights guaranteed in China’s laws were denied. For example, during the monthly family visits, general prisoners are allowed to see a total of three members of their family. However, when it came to political prisoners, only one member of our family would be allowed to visit us. Sometimes even the monthly family visit would be denied to us. Although the prison had some vocational sections, again political prisoners would never be given the opportunity to learn certain skills.

In February 2004, I was suddenly released from prison but nevertheless continued to undergo difficulties. I was under constant surveillance with two policemen posted at our home. It was during this time that the Chinese authorities took me to meet foreign delegations, including the Chairperson of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. However, at the time of these meetings, I had no clear knowledge of who these people were or about their work. I only understood the significance of these visits to me only after coming to the United States.

I am an ordinary Tibetan from a peasant family and like the other political prisoners in the Chinese prisons in Tibet I have undergone immense hardship. After all these years in prison, I owe my freedom firstly to the grace of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and also to those Governments, Parliaments, NGOs and UN human rights bodies that have shown their concern for the Tibetan political prisoners by putting pressure on the Chinese Government.

Mr. Chairperson, Ladies and Gentlemen, it was when I was in prison that this Sub-Commission adopted a historic resolution on Tibet on 23 August 1991. Although we could not openly express our joys or directly convey our gratitude to the Sub-Commission at that time, I wish to, today, on behalf of the Tibetan people, especially the political prisoners of Tibet, say a very big thank you for your expression of concern. It meant a lot for us when we were languishing in the dark, cold and squalid prison cells!

In conclusion, despite China’s claim of the situation being better, I can say that even today Tibetans in Tibet do not enjoy those rights that are even guaranteed by the Chinese Constitution. I stand before you today as a testimony to the fact that international concern and intervention on the deplorable human rights situation in Tibet does have an effect. While I rejoice in my freedom I urge the United Nations human rights bodies not to forget the very many Tibetans who have been imprisoned solely for voicing their strong feelings towards their religious, national and cultural identity and for peaceful expression of their belief in the non-violent freedom struggle of Tibet.

I thank you, Mr. Chairperson.
Ms. Phuntsog Nyidron

– from The Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO)


The True Face of Red China

By. Yeshe Choesang, Sub-editor of The Tibet Express.

Dharamsala. 14,12,206. Tibet sinks further into suffering chaos, with Chinese military incursions increasing and nothing being done by the United Nation, United States or European Union. Chinese have killed 1,300 Tibetans over the past 47 years, including 7 refugees in the four weeks since Tibet Nepal cross-border escaped by Tibetans fighters on August 19. The wounded can be counted in the tens of thousands. All of the casualties are civilians, most of them children.

The killing continues on a daily basis - by machine guns and sniper fire, by air and mountain bombardment, and by Chinese undercover teams in civilian clothes sent into Nepal territory to ambush and murder.

How long will the ‘international community’ allow the slaughter to continue? The cruel repression of the occupied territories and of Tibet and western Tibet in particular, is one of the most scandalous in the world today. It is the blackest stain on China’s patchy record as a would-be red state.

The situation is all the more urgent, because according to reports from China, something bigger and still more lethal is in prospect. Fresh from the indiscriminate slaughter they unleashed on Tibetans on 19th October this year - and no doubt eager to efface the memory of that fiasco - Chinese President Hu Jintao, some Ministers, and the chief of military staff, are said to be about to launch a military offensive against mountain barbarians (Tibetan monks and nuns), on a far larger scale than the bombardments and armored incursions of recent weeks and months and 47 years ago. They could not hide the crime of murder this time, because of the western iron eye.

Some form of intervention is urgently required, perhaps in the form of an international force on the border between Tibet and China, to protect each side from the other, to allow some air into the Tibet economy, and to bring relief to a humanitarian catastrophe. But how it can happen? Can UN, EU and United States on whom Tibetans have laid so much faith, not help Tibetans have basic human rights?

European Union, UN and United States - verbally, at least, staunch supporters of a two-state solution - must feel a certain sense of guilt at having failed to persuade President Hu Jintao to advance the cause of Tibetan self-determination. By joining Chairman Mao in the invasion or occupation of Tibet, he may have imagined he could persuade the red chairman to advance the Tibetan-Chinese peace process. He may have thought he had some sort of a deal. He was mistaken. He had counted without Soviet Union’s pro-Russian neo-cons, and their influence on Chairman Dang’s Tibet China policy.

Far from reining in the China hawks, messianic settlers, Han-killers and expansionists, Hu Jintao gave them a completely free hand - and continues to do so.

This may explain why, addressing their last stand at a Conference 48 years ago, they resolved to make the Tibetan-Chinese conflict the priority of their remaining time in office. It is 47 years ago, but no action has followed these brave words.

Four and a half million Tibetans, 98 percents of them under the poverty line, suffering 84 per cent unemployment, packed into a narrow strip of a few square kilometers, are being besieged, starved, cut off from the world and bombed on a daily monasteries basis, and EU, UN, and World Bank talk about building Tibetan institutions, as a peace zone! How about stopping the killing first? Do UN and others’ words count for nothing?

I have scoured Chinese government websites and have found stirring speeches and statements by the Chinese leaders and other officials about Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Eastern Turkistan, climate change and so forth, but not a word about the ongoing criminal subjugation of Tibet. It has been left just the same as 1959, the UN still describe Tibet as a “Long term Peace Zone”.

China has already partially reoccupied the so-called China Tibet, corridor on the Tibet-India border and with Nepal in an attempt to put an end to cross-border tunneling and smuggling.

In the occupied eastern Tibet, the situation is less violent but it is growing and in its own way, is just as desperate. According to UN human rights officials on the spot in western Tibet, the territory has been fragmented by no fewer than thousands of Chinese military checkpoints, imprisonments a double percent rise, and severe restriction of Tibetan freedom of movement. Not only has the whole Tibet territory been chopped up into many regions - TAR, Sichuan, Gangsu, Yunnan province, and so on - but even within these zones Tibetan communities are isolated from each other, making it very difficult for people to reach their land or gain access to basic services such as health and education. As the economy stagnates and the population suffers, China’s mind separation wall continues to gobble up Tibetan land, while hundreds of illegal Chinese settlements enjoy a building boom.

Even more disturbing than the silence from the world at these developments, and the collusion of UNO, is the entry into the Chinese government of Hu Jintao and ministers. With the rise of Hu Jintao in the Chinese government, the future of Tibet looks even grimmer.

Born in China, Hu Jintao, and a burly around 46-year old in 1990s came to Tibet with red-eyed and focussed hunter. He was so called the leader of the TAR province far-right Mr. Dang, the Chinese little bomb (”Tibet our home”) a party composed mainly of Soviet Union immigrants.

Best known for having recommended flooding crackdown peaceful demonstrations by killing hundreds of Tibetans 1987, he is an ardent champion of the settlers and opposes any reality construction from west in Tibetan territory. His solution is the “transfer” of millions of Chinese into Tibet so as to create an ethnically pure country. He has advocated death for any Buddhist scholars, teachers and Tibetan leaders of the freedom fighters who dare to meet members of UN or EU. In any truly democratic country he would be denounced and shunned as a dangerous fascist.

Instead, the new leader of TAR is to be given the job of formulating Chinese policy regarding the “strategic threat” facing the country - a code word for terrorist’s activities. As Beijing news-paper, the left-of-centre Chinese daily commented: “The choice of the most unrestrained and irresponsible man around for this job constitutes a strategic threat in its own people’s rights.” In name of veto power, in the name of red nation, they or he will separate atomics secrets everywhere, as they or he did in North Korea.

The fact that Hu Jintao will have access to China’s atomic secrets - and will serve in fact as a sort of super-defense in Asia - must be a source of considerable anxiety. With Hu’s entry into the government, the Tibet-China confrontation, one of the most dangerous in a volatile region, will be ratcheted up a notch or two.

Many Chinese people - already a huge disappointment to the Left for Hu’s bellicose policies in China and Tibet - seems quite happy to sit at the same cabinet table with a notorious racist and mountain rats-hater.

With the unfolding murder of Tibetan nuns and children in Himalayan Mountains, in the name of on the resurgence and China barking about the Tibetan terrorists in exile, the whole world should be laughing. The Tibetan exile community is a very little group, which does not have a single arm to hurt others. The world should be thinking about how to moderate Tibet, there are huge problems for which no credible solutions have yet been proposed - the Tibetans continue to bleed, starve and suffer unimaginable humiliations and hardships under China’s pitiless rule.

Yeshe Choesang is a leading Tibetan writer on the policy of Tibet and China, and the author of The Crying Voices of A Snowland “Tibet”; A Struggle for Tibet; Freedom of Tibet: The Struggle with Peace Weapons; Aduk Gonpo Tashi: A National Hero; Trulku Tenzin Deleks; I Believe in Your Broken Wing.

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