Protests in Tibet - Firm hand reveals a hard heart

THOUGH there are less than 150 days to go before the August 8 opening of the Beijing Olympics, China has ignored the international mores that might have constrained their suppression of Tibet’s biggest anti-Chinese demonstrations in more than two decades.

Official sources admit to 10 deaths though witnesses suggest that at least 100 Tibetans were killed by the Chinese military. Sources suggest that the military have taken absolute control of Lhasa using troops and tanks to crush street protests by unarmed demonstrators.

The dark memory of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 gives rise to huge concern that equally violent measures will be taken against today’s protesters. The Tiananmen Square death toll is still hotly contested. The Chinese government says between 200 and 300 people died, Chinese student associations and the Chinese Red Cross says those figures should be multiplied by 10. Coincidentally, in Tibet this weekend, that same multiple applies to the reported and official death tolls.

That these figures are contested and that we cannot get a clear picture of what is happening today underlines the very firm grip the Chinese government maintains on information flows, its citizens and the citizens of satellite states.

Concerns about the welfare of Tibetan protesters, and those Chinese who would disagree with their government, are intensified when you hear experienced international commentators saying that by even contacting friends in China or Tibet on these issues might jeopardise their safety and liberty, such that it is.

That concern is deepened when you hear avowedly anti-Chinese politicians claim that there are up to seven million people in varying degrees of detention in that country because of their opposition to their government. But, as ever, in an information vacuum it is difficult to tell where propaganda ends and truth begins.

The Chinese government has managed to control the access its citizens have to the internet in a way that no other country might wish to or be able to sustain. We cannot even control pornography or junk mail on the internet, yet they can control the entire internet.

This was to be China’s year but already there are indications that the Olympics might throw light on just a bit more of China than the authorities might have wished.

There are already mutterings that the Tibetan protests were put out with such violence to act as an example to others considering availing of the attention the Olympics might bring to launch protests against their government.

Let us hope that this is not so and that China’s millions will soon live in a country confident enough to consider democracy and recognise that human rights enhance society rather than threaten it.

And what’s the lesson for us? Just a reminder, as if it was needed, that at least two of the world’s superpowers are prepared to crush their opponents no matter what the rest of the world thinks.

For a small country with little or no influence in these matters; for a small country at the end of the international food chain two responses are appropriate: the establishment of energy and food independence.