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“TIBETAN UPRISING DAY” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the Extensions of Remarks section on pages E579 on March 10, 1995.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
TIBETAN UPRISING DAY
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HON. JOHN EDWARD PORTER
of illinois
in the house of representatives
Friday, March 10, 1995
Mr. PORTER. Mr. Speaker, as co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, I have long followed the plight of the Tibetan people and the peaceful activities of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. Forty six years ago in 1949, Communist China invaded Tibet. By 1959, the Chinese Army had a strong military presence in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, and it was rumored that the Chinese had a plan to take the Dalai Lama to Beijing to act as a Chinese puppet. On March 10, 1959, in response to indications by the Chinese garrison in Lhasa, Tibetans staged massive demonstrations. Thousands of Tibetans surrounded the Dalai Lama's Palace to prevent him from being taken by the Chinese or voluntarily surrendering to avoid conflict and protect the Tibetan people. The Chinese made their intentions clear and began shelling the palace, causing further Tibetan demonstrations that ultimately resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Tibetans, many of them monks and nuns. The Dalai Lama narrowly escaped the slaughter by disguising himself and fleeing over the Himalayas to India. In the past 40 years, His Holiness has worked tirelessly to appeal for international help to save his people.
Congress officially recognizes that Tibet is an illegally occupied country whose true representatives are the Tibetan government in exile and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Currently, the most critical issue for the Tibetan people is the transfer of Chinese population into Tibet, which is reducing the Tibetans to a minority in their own country and undermining the Tibetan culture. We cannot ignore the plight of the Tibetans and their ongoing loss of community and identity. Because today, March 10, marks an important day for Tibetans, I ask my colleagues to join me in remembering and paying tribute to the 1.2 million Tibetans who have died under Chinese rule since 1949 and to work with me through the Congressional Human Rights Caucus to continue to focus congressional attention on this issue. I also commend to my colleagues the following A.M. Rosenthal editorial ``Criminals for Freedom'' regarding this deplorable situation.
[From the New York Times, Dec. 27, 1994]
Criminals for Freedom
(By A.M. Rosenthal)
From concentration camps come few dispatches, not even when a whole nation is imprisoned. Silence is as real as barbed wire. For the captors, it is at least as effective.
So, when occasionally I write about the captivity of Tibet, readers sometimes ask why I care so much.
They ask why they should involve themselves. Isn't so much else more important to American interest?
And since the invasion and occupation by the Chinese Communists have gone on so long, almost a half century now, with Beijing's grip growing ever tighter, forcing more and more Tibetans out of the country, and the world not even taking note, are not Tibetans and foreigners perpetuating an impossible dream when they insist that Tibet lives?
As the years pass, the questions become ever more important to answer--else the silence will become eternal, and the concentration camp one more national grave.
But before they can be answered, another question must be put: Why is it that Tibet, a nation with a history almost as old as man's memory, a nation with a culture unique in the world, with a religion that not only binds together its own people but embraces men and women all over the world, why is this nation, almost alone among nations, denied the most elemental rights of nationhood and personal freedom?
When I was a young reporter, The Times assigned me to the bureau it had just set up at the brand new United Nations. The total membership then was 56 and new countries were asking to be admitted. One day a British delegate warned that if the U.N. kept growing, the membership would be as high as 70, maybe 80.
Today the membership stands at 184. Among them are countries that are minute in population and size. Their most important industry is the bureaucracy created to run them.
And there are other members whose boundaries and identities were craved out of the map by the colonial powers of Europe for their own administrative and imperial conveniences.
And yet there they all are, flags waving on First Avenue, their ambassadors treated as they should be, with dignity and attention.
But Tibet--Tibet is not only barred from U.N. membership but its representatives are usually not even allowed in its halls and meeting rooms or in the state departments of the world.
Why? The nations know what has been happening--the massacres, tortures, pillage, the deportation of millions of Tibetans and their replacement by Chinese, the stone-by-stone, temple-by-temple destruction of a great culture.
The truth is that almost all the nations of the world made a deliberate decision to abandon Tibet to its captors. Among these nations were many U.N. members ruled by dictators. At least they had some rationale--the brotherhood of tyranny.
But for the others, including the United States and Europe, the reason was money. Beijing constantly warns that trade with China will be cut off for any nation daring to do all that the Tibetans really ask--speak up for their elemental human and political rights.
Once President Clinton did that. But that was long ago--a year or so. Now Washington talks about sending his wife or the Vice President to visit Beijing, the heart and head office of the Chinese and Tibetan concentration camps.
So, after all, what do we have in common with Tibetans? I can think of only this: shared criminality.
The same political crimes that bound us to the victims in the Nazi camps, to the dissidents in the Soviet Gulag, to the people in the Khmer Rouge death pits and in the torture chambers of the Middle East bind us to the Tibetans.
Every day we commit the crimes for which Tibetans have been made captive, tortured and murdered and for which their nation has been sundered and occupied. We talk, we write, we act, we think, we pray.
Tibet has no ethnic or national constituency in the U.S. But in America, as around the world, are thousands of people who do what they can for Tibet--write, talk, act, pray, help the International Campaign for Tibet (202) 785-1515. Among them are intellectuals, business people, members of Congress, working people, Democrats and Republicans.
This constituency is staunch and slowly growing. That is the best reason I can give for hoping for the future of the imprisoned nation in the Himalayas--the international conspiracy of the criminals for freedom.
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