Tibet Awareness

I visited the Tibet museum today and it made me much more aware of the history between Tibet and the People's Republic of China. Not a very happy story, but a story that needs to be told more. Reminds me a lot of the exhibition I saw in the museum of occupation history (I think it was called) in Riga two years ago. The Soviet methods of relocating Baltic people to deeper parts of the USSR and sending Russian people to replace them seem strikingly similar to what the Chinese have done and still are doing in Tibet. Except that to my knowledge the Baltic states were never used as atomic test range, as nuclear waste dump yard or neither were their natural resources as ruthlessly harvested, with no thought of ecological values.

It is no longer as much an ideological issue as before, but more an economical one. The natural resources, especially the minerals in Tibetan soil are of great value to China's growing economy. Still the destruction of temples and sacred scriptures continues. Tibetans are fleeing over the high mountain passes to India to avoid detection from the Chinese military. Many are frozen to death while trying, some are captured, sent back and imprisoned. The waiter in the bar I'm sitting in right now, came to India nine years ago. He managed to remain undetected and warm enough and found refuge here in McLeod Ganj. He says, he wants to go back, but that it's impossible.

The international awareness of the Tibetan situation reached it's latest peak during the Beijing Olympic games. The news about people, especially Tibetan monks, setting themselves on fire got a lot of media coverage. The situation has not changed much since. There are still people turning to the most extreme form of protest, self-immolation. According to the July edition of the Contact Magazine, a free monthly publication for Tibetan issues & community information, the toll of self immolations has now risen to 120. After the incident, the Chinese police detained more than a dozen arbitrary Tibetans and the whereabouts of six of the detained people are still unknown. At least ten Tibetans also sustained severe gunshot wounds, when the police opened fire in Tibet when people were celebrating Dalai Lama's 78th birthday on July 6th. That's not something that the international community should ignore.

A side note. I decided to wait for another day before going up the mountain. I'm hoping to find some company tonight or tomorrow morning. If no one is willing to do a four day trek with me, I'm going alone on Saturday morning. That means tomorrow's another day to relax and enjoy the sceneries here in McLeod Ganj.