On behalf of all the members of the Tibet Support Group - Ireland, I thank the Chairman and members of the committee for giving us the opportunity to brief them on the situation that prevails throughout Tibet, particularly in the past four weeks.
Our written submission comprises ten documents. The first is a briefing document on the current situation in Tibet, prepared by Tibet Support Group - lreland, the main points of which will be included in my verbal presentation. Also included is the report of the International Campaign for Tibet of 3 April which provides more details about specific demonstrations up to that date. Other documents include: the resolution from Ms Nancy Pelosi in the House of Representatives; a statement issued by the Dalai Lama to all Tibetans on 6 April; an appeal from the Dalai Lama to all Chinese people worldwide, issued on 28 March; and a document entitled, Turning Point for Tibet, by Lodi Gyaltsen Gyari, published on 3 April. Lodi Gyari is the Dalai Lama's special envoy and leads the dialogue between the Tibetan Government in exile and the Chinese Government.
The written submission also includes an excellent article entitled, The Dalai Lama's Plot to Split and Humiliate China, by Gabriel Lafitte. As members may gather, the title is very much tongue in cheek. The article outlines what is happening and what is likely to happen in terms of the imprisonment, torture and extraction of so-called confessions by Tibetans. We have also included an interesting article entitled, A Chinese View from Taiwan, by Ruan Ming who was a member of the Chinese Communist Party and an adviser to Hu Yaobang. He is now living in Taiwan where he is an adviser to the President. He puts forward his own views as to what has instigated the current difficulties in Tibet.
We have also supplied members with a press release issued by the International Commission of Jurists on 18 March which called for an international investigation. The final document is entitled, Tracking the Steel Dragon: How China's Economic Policies and the Railway are Transforming Tibet, a major report recently published by the International Campaign for Tibet. As it is 260 pages long, I doubt if members have had a chance to read it in full. However, if they find time between now and the next break, I urge them to do so. It provides an in-depth and clear analysis of the situation in Tibet. For now, if they could read the four-page executive summary and the seven pages of recommendations, that would be fine.
After my verbal presentation, any questions that members may have can, I hope, be answered by one of us. I will answer political questions; economic and environmental questions will be answered by my colleague, Mr. Anthony O'Brien, while questions about the current realities of life in Tibet will be answered by committee member Tsering Lhamo Gawathsang who was born in Tibet and escaped over the Himalayas at the age of 17 years, as approximately 2,000 Tibetans do annually, a journey which takes about one month. In her group 30 left Lhasa but only eight survived to reach Nepal.
First, given his announcement last Wednesday, we take the opportunity to again express publicly our appreciation of the Taoiseach's support, not only for his decision to meet the Dalai Lama when he last visited Dublin but also for his support of the Tibetan people's right to self-determination which he publicly expressed while in opposition and also, to our pleasant surprise, as Taoiseach on a visit to Beijing. We wish the incoming Taoiseach, Deputy Brian Cowen, well and hope he will maintain Ireland's support for the Tibetan people's right to self-determination that Frank Aiken so strongly voiced at the United Nations from 1959 to 1965 and that the Taoiseach has reiterated in recent years.
The events in Tibet in the past four weeks have not come out of the blue, but are the result of nearly 60 years of occupation, economic marginalisation, human rights abuses and oppression of the culture, language and religion of the Tibetan people by China. This merciless repression, the term used by the Chinese, has been intensified in the past two to three years by an even more hardline policy imposed by Politburo member, Wang Lequan; Li Dezhu, head of the ethnic affairs commission, and Zhang Qingli, the current party secretary of what the Chinese call the Tibet Autonomous Region, TAR. The opening of the Golmud to Lhasa railway in July 2006 also intensified the plantation of Chinese settlers and the economic marginalisation of Tibetans.
The main causes of recent events are the 60 years of repression, hard-line policies and the railway, not the forthcoming Olympic Games in Beijing. The latter is, however, an influencing factor, not only for Tibetans who obviously know that the eyes of the world will be focused on China's response to any demonstrations in Tibet against Chinese misrule but also for the Chinese Government, for which the Olympic Games may provide convenient cover for a policy of provoking such a situation in a bid to solve the Tibetan problem. The document, A Chinese View from Taiwan, to which I referred, is by a former CCP official, Ruan Ming, who claims that the CCP has carefully staged the incidents in Tibet in order to force the Dalai Lama to resign and to justify future repression of the Tibetans.
Compared with the situation prior to the 1988 protests, conditions in Tibet are now even worse. Then the demonstrations were mainly confined to the Lhasa region but today demonstrations are taking place throughout all three provinces of Tibet, as well as in the Chinese provincial capitals of Chengdu and Lanzhou and even Beijing. Then the demonstrations were mainly confined to the Lhasa region but today they take place throughout all three provinces of Tibet - U-Tsang, Kham and Amdo - as well as in Chinese provincial capitals Chengdu and Lanzhou, and even one in Beijing. The Tibetan government-in-exile's current figure for confirmed dead is 140, while the Tibetan community in exile estimate, from telephone calls from all over Tibet, that it is at least 300 to 400. Some estimates rise towards the thousands. It is difficult to determine. The Chinese continue to make house-to-house searches and thousands of Tibetans have been arrested and imprisoned. China has moved tens of thousands of additional troops to lock down all Tibetan areas, all journalists and tourists have been expelled, many places have had their water and food supplies cut off and people are being shot if they leave the house.
Despite all this, protests are continuing throughout Tibet. Last Thursday, for example, at least eight Tibetans were killed in Tongkor near Kardze in Kham, which is now part of western Sichuan. Armed police fired on a crowd of several hundred monks and lay people after an incident in which monks were detained when they objected to an intensified "patriotic re-education" programme, including photographs of the Dalai Lama being thrown to the ground and the monks being ordered to denounce the Dalai Lama, which is a typical Chinese action.
More recently, just two days ago, in Tawu, in Kardze, Sichuan province, due to the protest by the nuns from Ratroe Nunnery on 2 April, armed forces continued to impose tight restrictions at the nunnery and, in addition, also announced that patriotic re-education classes would be started soon.
I have a message from Tibet that came out today and if Mr. O'Brien can find it, I will add it in later.
What can and should the Irish Government and this committee do in response? Silences of complicity, half-hearted declarations and other capitulations to commercial, diplomatic or sporting interests, at the expense of fundamental principles of human rights, including the Tibetan people's right to self-determination, would be grossly inadequate and bring a loss of democratic credibility to Ireland.
The Irish Government and its EU partners should recognise that the EU/China dialogue has failed miserably. I draw the committee's attention to one comment from the statement by Lodi Gyari, the Dalai Lama's chief representative in talks with Beijing. In this case, he is speaking of the talks between the Tibetans and the Chinese:
It is imperative that those governments advising both sides to continue with the dialogue process ask the Chinese leadership to provide assurance of real and concrete progress in the dialogue process.
The same should apply to the EU's dialogue process with China. Real, tangible targets should be set and China should be held accountable if they are not met. This EU/China dialogue has been going on since 1997 and the situation now is far worse than it was then.
This committee should take the US Speaker of the House of Representatives, Ms Nancy Pelosi's, proposed House Resolution 1077 as a model and immediately bring similar motions to the Dáil and Seanad. I was not aware that Senator Norris has already tabled a motion and I know nothing about it, but I welcome his move. In particular, as Ms Nancy Pelosi's resolution does, this committee and the Irish Government should call on the EU to seek to establish an office in Lhasa to monitor political, economic and cultural developments in Tibet and to provide consular protection and citizen services in emergencies, and not to permit China to open any further diplomatic missions within the EU unless such an office is established in Lhasa. I realise it will be much more difficult to get 27 countries to agree to that than one country in the case of the US, but difficulty should not dampen the efforts to try to achieve it.
The Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, whoever he or she may be in four weeks' time, should announce that he or she will not attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games in August next. A representative of the Irish Government, or Member of Dáil Éireann or Seanad Éireann, should not attend the opening ceremony. Might I point out here that we, the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan community are not asking for a boycott of the Olympic Games. What we are asking for is a boycott of the political propaganda event that the Chinese are making of the opening ceremony. The committee may have questions about that later.
All Members of the Dáil and Seanad should urge members of the Olympic Council of Ireland and of the Irish Olympic team - the individual athletes - not to participate in the opening ceremony. By all means, let them go and have their games, let them take part, let them win medals and stand up on the podium if they win, but they should not take part in such a propaganda exercise.
In Ireland, Government funding is withdrawn from any golf club that chooses not to accept women as full members. At the very minimum, Government funding should be withdrawn from the Olympic Council of Ireland if it chooses to take part in such a propaganda exercise that the Chinese have made it. I have seen several people on the television stating sport and politics should not mix. It is the Chinese who are making this Olympic Games into a political event for very deliberate reasons.
The Irish Government should consider how it can help Tibetan people directly - those within Tibet, those living as refugees in India and Nepal, or those living in Ireland. There is now a community of approximately 25 Tibetans living in Ireland.
We thank the committee again for its invitation to make this submission and now invite members questions, which, I hope, one or other of us can answer.
