Appeal for Tibet to the Indian Parliament and State Legislatures
A Brief Introductory on the History of Tibet Tibet is a principal territory situated in the middle of eastern Asia, one of the five major continents of this world. To its east is the territory of China and to its north Mongolia. To the west are the territories of Nepal, the northern part of India, and Pakistan. To its southwest are the territories of the northeastern part of India and Bhutan. And to its south are the territories of Burma and Bangladesh. And so, the territory of Tibet is ensconced in the middle of eight countries large and small. In terms of the global positioning system, it is situated between 78.24 degree East and 105.50 degree East longitudes and between 26.52 degree North and 39.20 degree North latitudes. Its territory encompasses an area of more than two and half million square kilometers. And its elevation is more than four thousand and nine hundred meters above mean sea level. It is a territory richly endowed with ranges of snow mountains, rocky mountains, and mountains of earth and boulders; as well as expanses of grasslands and forestlands; besides rivers and lakes, large and small. And it is a land which rightly deserves to be treated as a global treasure for its being like a great geographical water tower. Besides, it was solely on account of the protection afforded by the natural environment of its geographical formation and the Tibetan people’s traditional culture of maintaining an enlightened outlook that Tibet remained a unique pristine territory, like the pure land of utter bliss deserving to be fervently coveted by humanity and has rightly come to be referred to as the globe’s third pole. From the religious history of Tibet dealing with its successive generations of heavenly rulers until the time of the nation’s first King Nyatri Tsenpo and from along the course of the southward flow of the Yarlung Tsangpo river and so on and from many other parts of the Tibetan territory as well, numerous prehistoric accounts and archaeological items dating as far back as from the stone age have come to light. These discoveries reveal a historical fact that human settlements had flourished in Tibet since more than ten thousand years ago. What is universally known, however, is that from a period extending before 200 BC, a dynasty of fortythree successive kings had ruled over the entirety of a consolidated territory of Tibet which was defined by the union of its three traditional provinces. The national territory was divided in ancient times into 18 principalities. There were 61 units of army divisions with one thousand troops each. Two categories of nonmilitary subjects were further divided into attendants at the beck and call of the king and attendants of those attendants. Three divisions of warriors guarded the “teeth and mouth” of the nation’s border areas. There were 15 national laws as well as seven major codes of law and a code of 10 virtuous deeds and 16 virtuous ethical principles laid down by the king for the people to follow. “Purgyal Bhoe”, the name by
which Tibet was known in that historical period, resonated across Central Asia as a major centre of power and influence. With its own distinct territory, population, language and grammar, and so on, Tibet stood out as a self-evident nation in every sense of the term. More than that, it was among the more powerful countries in the Central Asia region. Besides, its civilization in terms of governance, economy, and culture flourished in the way the holy land of India did in its best historical times. It was in that scenario that in terms of what was the core essence of its human knowledge Tibet turned into a centre of peace fully immersed in the practice of the cultural knowledge imparted by the most learned of scholars from the ancient Indian university of Nalanda.
of what is now called the Kanlho Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (which is made up of 1 city and 9 counties) and the Palri Tibetan Autonomous County. The Yunnan Province of China was enlarged by annexing the Tibetan territory of what is now known as the Dechen Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (which is made up of three counties). Thus, the historical Tibet now stands fragmented and merged with three province of China as well as partially constituted as separate provincial areas known by the names of Tibet Autonomous Region and Qinghai Province, besides other fragmented area names. And so, the total of 155 cities and counties in these total of five autonomous region and provinces of Tibet now stands fragmented and forcibly annexed as occupied territories.
Later on, however, the kingdom of Tsenpo Dynasty of Tibet disintegrated, to be followed by internal turmoil and various other kinds of disruptive turns of events. As a result, the power and influence of the Tibetan kingdom underwent a bit of decline. However, for more than 680 years, beginning from the period of the Sakya rule through those of Phagdru, Rinpung and Tsangpa until the period of the Gaden Phodrang rulers, successive governments of Tibet have striven to protect the natural environment of the whole of the nation; preserved and promoted the intellectual heritage of the land, in its richly diverse aspects inherited since ancient times. Fully immersed in these pursuits, Tibet continued to commit itself only to peace, refusing to ally itself with or to join any side during the first and second world wars, which engulfed this world in the first half of the 20th century.
The government of China continues to be unrelenting in carrying out the destruction of the natural environment of Tibet without any sense of concern whatsoever about limits. That this has unimaginably serious implications not just for Tibet but also for the development and well-being of many countries in south and middle of southeast Asia is, stark and all too self-evident. It bears no mentioning that the four major river systems flowing out of Tibet’s Mount Kailash area and the trio of the Machu (Yellow), Drichu (Yangtze), and Zachu (Mekong) river systems, as well as others are the principal sources of livelihood for around fortysix per cent of the world’s population from people living in their downstream countries. The Chinese government’s ongoing projects in Tibet of all kinds, meant to dam those river systems, to divert their flows to build hydropower generation projects and so on, have highly degenerative and destructive effects on the areas’ natural ecology and geology. Including the occurrences of earthquakes of different magnitudes, they have led to various types of disturbances in the elements of nature, whose destructive effects have been seen to keep increasing year after year. Besides, China has carried out in Tibet massive and expanded scales of deforestation and mineral ore extraction works; the establishment of new towns and cities; the building of railway tracks, highways, airports, and secret military installations, and so on. Various types of Chinese government businesses are being set up. There is massive influx in Tibet of immigrants from China year after year. Throughout Tibet’s history under its current political dispensation have these projects and actions carried out or facilitated by the government of China – which have seriously affected the land, its historical inhabitants and natural environment – and has never known to have been ceased. For example, massive deforestation works have been carried out in places such as Kongpo, Thewo Rong, Gyalmo Rong and so on. Industrial complexes to produce atomic and nuclear weapons were set up in Themchen (Chinese: Tianjun) County of Tsonub Prefecture in Qinghai Province in 1958. In 1964, it was widely announced and boasted by China that it had not only carried out atomic weapon tests but also achieved the capability to split the globe in half. In 1987, China stopped working at this complex and in 1995 withdrew all the military supervision of the site and gave the place a new name: Nubtso Town. In Themchen, China determined that its Miru Coal Mine had reserves totaling three and a half billion tonnes of coal with the extraction of coal from this mine never stopping even to this day. The salt lake area of the Tsaidam Basin in Qinghai Province covers an area totaling approximately 120,000 km2. Its salt reserves total more than four trillion tonnes. The work of
Continued exercise of Chinese subjugation and polices in Tibet In the 50th year of the 20th century, China, wedded to its communist ideology, cast its colonial sight on its neighbor Tibet, inspired by greed and motivated to carry it out with a method of armed invasion. Tibet, with its puny national army, was quickly overrun and fully occupied by it in a naked armed aggression. And it is a matter common knowledge that following it, China killed or caused the untimely death of more than 1.2 million people out of the six million people of Tibet. Likewise, it destroyed more than six thousand religious centres, which were the repositories of Tibet’s rich religious and cultural heritage, as well as the sacred and highly precious body, speech and mind representations of the teachings of the Buddha which made up their contents and adornments. Such and other destructions carried out by China have been too horrendous to make for easy recalling. The independent united nation of Tibet was split into different fragments and annexed to the neighbouring provinces of China. As a result, the nation of Tibet now stands divided, with one part being named as the Tibet Autonomous Region (made up of 73 cities and counties) and another part being named as Qinghai Province (made up of six Tibetan autonomous prefectures, as well as eight counties and three cities in the east, making for a total of 36 counties). Likewise, annexed into the Chinese Province of Sichuan is the Tibetan territory of what is now known as the Karze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (which is made up of 18 counties), the Ngaba Qiang and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (which is made up of 13 counties), and the Muli Tibetan Autonomous County. The Gansu Province of China was enlarged with the annexed to it the Tibetan territory
extracting and transporting salt from this area has never stopped over the last more than 50 years. In more recent times too, some 16 major types of minerals, including copper, lead, tin, and iron, have been transported to China and this still continues. It has been estimated that the total yields will be at least 16 tonnes of copper and about 10 million tonnes of lead and tin. Not only are there countless number of miners in every part of Tibet such as, Mines at Dola Ringmo for different precious minerals; Marble mining site at Serchen county in Qinghai Province; mines in Minyak Township of Dartsedo Prefecture; White diamond mines in Dzatoe area of Ga Kyegu county; Gold mines in the area between Chukhoel and Bumnag Townships in Lithang; Mines at Markham Shamshul Tagra in Chamdo Prefecture; Copper mines in Lhathog area of Yulung in Chamdo Prefecture; Mines at Yama Yultso area in Achog and Dechen Counties of Yunnan Province; Mines at Tsawa Zogang area of Chamdo Prefecture; Mines at Gyama Township of Maldro Gungkar County near Lhasa as well as in the Zhethongmon and Dingri Counties of Shigatse Prefecture: but even the grassed earth as well as the black beach soil from the grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau are being transported to China for the purpose of carrying out beautification of sites in different parts of China, with the works in connection with it going on relentlessly, day and night. Such an enormously mindless exploitations on such scales of Tibet’s mineral and natural resources not only damage or destroy the natural environment of Tibet but also seriously affects and influences the environment globally as well. Over the last more than 60 years since its armed invasion and occupation rule over Tibet, China has pursued courses of policies designed to wipe out the Tibetan language and literature, religion and culture, and traditions and customs which are the defining core essence underlying the survival of the Tibetan people’s identity. These included, to begin with, subjecting the Tibetan people to the oppressive regimen of its so-called democratic reform whose framework is defined by the communist party totalitarian dictatorship. It also included a decade of calamity in Tibet carried out under what was called great the Cultural Revolution in a relentless continuation of that policy. As stated by the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in its latest annual report, from the year 1991 until the 15th of September 2017, a total of 5,065 Tibetans had been arrested and jailed by the government of China for alleged criminal offences based on various political reasons. Of them, 1,652 Tibetans were put on trial and sentenced under criminal allegations based on political reasons. Besides the centre notes in its report that there were a total of 2,057 Tibetans about whom no information exists on whether they had been tried and sentenced after their arrest or detention. Throughout Tibet, the government of China still continues to carry out such gravely mistaken policies. Likewise, the government of China has continued, to this day, to carry out all sorts of political campaigns in Tibet. These have included the campaign to oppose local nationalism, the campaign to strike at the “Dalai separatist clique”, the campaign of patriotic re-education, the campaign to protect the stability of the nation and opposing separatism, and so on. To state it all briefly, through the imposition, in reality, of military imperialism, cultural imperialism, and colonialism, the government of China has treated the Tibetan people with a succession of polices of ethnic contempt, disrespect, debasement,
and discrimination and this continues to be the situation even today. As a result of such kinds of policies of brutal repression carried out in a relentless continuum by the government of China, the Tibetan people in Tibet have been driven to express their anguish with an endless series of peaceful protests. Particularly in 2008, people across the three traditional provinces of Tibet rose together in large-scale peaceful protests. Following it, the government of China reenacted on the Tibetan Plateau, the theatre of violence and killings which was the underlying history of the occupied territory over the past 50 years by use of its armed forces. Numerous modern military stations were established in every part of Tibet and various types of weapons employing latest technologies were tested in routine warlike military exercises. And they targeted the unarmed Tibetan people, who doesn’t even have a needle as weapon upon them with armaments such as machine guns, artillery, bombs, poisonous gas, armoured tanks, attack helicopters and so on in acts of intimidating and bringing them to their knees. Not only that, in many places Tibetan people were massacred while many were subjected to severe repression with beatings, arrests, imprisonments and so on and this situation continues even today. It bears pointing out, however, that the government of China has failed to restrict or diminish the sense of bravery and firm determination among the Tibetan people in the face its policy of brutality and violence. It was, thus, that despite threats of punishments, the Tibetan people have, speaking of recent developments, refused to obey orders to take part in Chinese government’s celebrations of festivals, including its National Day, with requirements on them to give joyous performances. In this milieu, they have also refused to plough their fields and refused to celebrate Losar, the Tibetan New Year. Besides, they have held peaceful protests, demanding respect for their right to learn and use the Tibetan language. Numerous types of peaceful protests such as these have been held by the Tibetan people without any let up. The government of China has responded to each of them with continued and ever more brutal repressions. Besides, they have further punished the Tibetan people by confiscating their homesteads which they had inherited through countless generations, seizing from them of their year-long hard earned incomes, and increasing the contradictions between the Tibetan and Chinese people by imposing on the Tibetan people the requirement of showing patriotism based on Han-chauvinism oriented great Chinese nation ideology. Even for travelling from one place to another within Tibet, the Tibetan people are still required to apply for all sorts of permits from different Chinese authorities. When travelling to any town or city in China, Tibetan people are subjected to all sorts of discriminatory treatment and harassment in hotels, restaurants, and hospitals. All these and other developments have obviously been too much for the Tibetan people to be able to live with. The unbearable feeling of anguish and sense of torture resulting from these multitude types of ill-treatments have driven the Tibetan people to take recourse to peaceful protests of utter desperation by means of self-immolation. Staring from the year 2009, when Tabey, a monk from Kirti monastery, Ngaba first carried out this form of protest, until 7 March, 2018, when Tsekho, also from Ngaba, a total of 152 Tibetans in Tibet have been verified to have immolated themselves in protest
against the government of Chinese policies. Among them, 130 are reported to have succumbed to their injuries while it continues to remain most difficult to find out about the fate of the other 22.
Historical relationship between Tibet and India Tibet and India have a millennia-old history of friendly coexistence and cultural exchanges. They have been neigbouring countries with rich ancient as well as contemporary civilizational ties. Not only that, the feeling the Tibetan people have from the very depth of their hearts about the nation of India is one that is charming like the heavenly realm and we consider the Indian people nothing less than familial and fraternal members with ourselves, deserving of nothing but exaltation and glorious honour. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said on repeated occasions that the relationship between Tibet and India is a unique one in being similar to a bond of teacher and disciple. Also, the late Prime Minister Morarji Desai of India has said that Tibet and India were like different branches from a single bodhi tree. It has been nearly 60 years since the Tibetan people have been forced into exile. During that period, the residence of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the centre of the Central Tibetan Administration came to be established in the north Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. Likewise, many places in various states of India have become centres of Tibetan settlements, schools, monastic institutions, hospitals of Tibetan medicine as well as of allopathic medicine, and so on. For the revival, preservation, and promotion, as the case may be, of their nation’s unique religious and cultural traditions in such a critical period in their history as today, the Tibetan people are unequivocal in acknowledging their immense debts of gratitude owed to the central and state governments, as well as the people of India. Nevertheless, even now, many millions of Tibetan people, with unwavering sense of fortitude and genuinely selfless concern for the greater good of the greater cause, continue to oppose the expansionist and violently rapacious attacks of the communist Chinese government with their very lives and blood. There has never ever been, in past history, any sort of territorial boundary between India and China. However, such a boundary has now come into being and that boundary continues to remain a subject of dispute. And this dispute is but the negative fallout from the distortion of Tibet’s history and the destruction of its culture by the communist Chinese government. Including India, many governments, parliaments, and peoples who covet freedom and democracy have held discussions and expressed support for the just cause of the people of Tibet. In particular, resolutions continue to be passed in support of the Tibet issues in many parliaments. With a view to still appeal for even greater amount of efforts to lend support to the Tibet issue in the different states of India, we have launched this current campaign.
Our Appeal 1) Whenever meetings are held between the governments of India and China, the issue of Tibet should be included in the discussions. Ways should be explored to lend support for reviving talks between envoys of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the government of China for our efforts to resolve the critical situation in Tibet on the basis of the mutually beneficial Middle Way Approach. 2) Since the natural environment of Tibet is directly concerned with the life of many billions of people in neighbouring countries, including India, attention should be paid and discussions held on that issue in an effort to protect it by means of persuading thereby the government of China. 3) Because of the brutality of the policies followed by the government of China on successive occasions in Tibet, a total of 152 Tibetans have carried out protests with self-immolations there, starting with the monk Tapey who torched himself on 7 February 2009, until 7 March 2018 when Tsekho did likewise. The wishes and demands expressed by these Tibetans were that “His Holiness the Dalai Lama should be invited to Tibet; that freedom should prevail in Tibet” and we accordingly request that the government of China be prevailed upon to respect these sentiments of the Tibetan people and take them up for proper consideration. 4) The government of China is exercising tight control on religion in Tibet; destroying the Tibetan people’s linguistic heritage and culture; persecuting and torturing the Tibetan people held for political reasons; encouraging a massive influx of Chinese immigration into Tibet, and has carried out largescale deployment of armed forces in Tibet’s border areas. We, therefore, urge that these issues be taken up with the government of China with a view to hold serious discussions on them and to convince Beijing to put an end to these abusive practices.
Appeal for Tibet to the Indian Parliament and State Legislatures
5) We request the Indian Parliament, state legislatures and likewise, the different political parties to strive to adopt resolutions on the issue of Tibet in their respective meetings and sessions, and also initiate and take part in campaign actions related to Tibet. Tibetan Parliament in Exile ............................................. .................. Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile Central Tibetan Administration Gangchen Kyishong Dharamsala – 176215 Distt. Kangra (H.P) INDIA Phone.no : 01892-222481 Email : tibetanparliament@tibet.net Website : www.tibetnparlaiment.org www.chithu.org
བོད་མི་མང་སྤྱི་འཐུས་ལྷན་ཚོགས། Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile 2018