"War is Peace"

Leave it to the Chinese government to restrict protests, then twist events, and intensify martial law, while simultaneously denying their crimes. This time, the Chinese government has turned a week of the most intense protesting seen in Tibet and the rest of the world in decades into yet another myth. As Jim Yardley of The New York Times reports,

BEIJING — Thousands of Buddhist monks and other Tibetans clashed with the riot police in a second Chinese city on Saturday, while the authorities said they had regained control of the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, a day after a rampaging mob ransacked shops and set fire to cars and storefronts in a deadly riot.

Residents in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, walked through Barkhor, an ancient part of the city where protesters had set fire to a shop and several vehicles on Friday. Conflicting reports emerged about the violence in Lhasa on Friday. The Chinese authorities denied that they had fired on protesters there, but Tibetan leaders in India told news agencies on Saturday that they had confirmed that 30 Tibetans had died and that they had unconfirmed reports that put the number at more than 100.
Chinese authorities defended their response to the violence in Lhasa. “We fired no gunshots,” said Qiangba Puncog, chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Regional Government, according to state media.

But Tibetan advocacy groups and witnesses in Lhasa offered contradictory accounts. The Tibetan government in exile said at least 30 Tibetans died in the protests, according to Agence France-Presse. Witnesses told Radio Free Asia, the nonprofit news agency financed by the United States government, that numerous Tibetans were dead. A 13-year-old Tibetan boy, reached by telephone, said he watched the violence from his apartment and saw four or five Tibetans fall to the ground after military police officers fired upon them.

The protests also disprove yet another lie propagated by Chinese authorities.

The tumult also undercuts a theme regularly promoted by China’s propaganda officials — that Tibetans are a happy minority group, smoothly integrated into the country’s broader ethnic fabric.

It is sad that such a peaceful people simply desiring freedom and democracy are only noticed as endangered by a repressive government when they are provoked to lashing out in violence against an oppressor infinitely larger than themselves. As Wolf Blitzer reports,


Clearly, people across the world are calling for action to prevent the genocide China has engaged in since 1949 that has been largely ignored by the international community. The plight of the Tibetan people is one that is rooted in the minds of all people, regardless of their origin. As a promoter of democracy and a nation vowed to uphold the Geneva Conventions, the United States is in a key position of influence to encourage and persuade the Chinese government to stop its murderous campaigns and allow Tibet to uphold its culture and the democracy they desire through meaningful autonomy.

Or, better yet, independence.

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