Taiwanese should take the capture of Tibet by China to heart and support the Tibetan people’s pursuit of freedom, Tibetan rights activists said yesterday.
“Buddhists in Taiwan in particular should understand that people of the same faith in Tibet are suffering brutal oppression when they’re currently engaged in so-called religious exchanges with China,” Taiwan Friends of Tibet (TFT) chairperson Chou Mei-li (周美里) said at a symposium.
Participants at the symposium, organized by the TFT and Taiwan Association of University Professors (TAUP), yesterday in Taipei said that Tibetans striving for democracy under Chinese domination are being forced into extreme acts such as self-immolation.
Since 2009, 56 Tibetans, mostly monks, including 53 in China and three overseas, have committed suicide by setting themselves ablaze to call for Tibetan independence and religious freedom.
The reasons Tibetans killed themselves by burning themselves alive was similar to Deng Nan-jung (鄭南榕) who also set himself on fire, Chou said, “because it was their last resort — under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regimes respectively — to speak out to the world about what they believed in.”
What happened in Tibet after it signed the 1951 17-point Sino-Tibet Treaty would be a good example for Taiwanese to reflect when thinking about cross-strait relations, especially at a time when President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) appeared to be interested in signing a peace accord with Beijing, she said.
Sadly, Tibet was a reclusive country with a limited military presence and international engagement at the time, she said, “most of all, the Tibetan people were not vigilant and falsely believed that China would keep its promise of maintaining religious freedoms and social systems.”
“The peace treaty turned out as the prelude to a Chinese invasion and takeover,” Chou said.
The former director of Taiwan’s Regional Tibetan Youth Congress Tashi Tsering, who was born and raised in India and who has lived in Taiwan for 14 years, said self-immolation was the only way Tibetans are able to make the world take notice of their hardship following more than half century of Chinese oppression.
“While the People’s Liberation Army is armed with guns, Tibetans only have stones in their hands. Despite their protests against Beijing, Tibetans never killed Han people and would never resort to terrorism,” Tashi Tsering said.
Khedroop Thondop, a nephew of the Dalai Lama, explained to the audience that the negotiation process between Tibet and China since 1959 had been unfair and concluded that Beijing could never be trusted and the regime was not interested in understanding or respecting Tibetan culture and religion, which is why he supports Tibetan independence.
The self-immolations were actually sacrifices made to appeal their loss of freedom and beliefs, the vice president of Amnesty International, Taiwan Lin Shu-ya (林淑雅) said.
Beijing’s accusations that the dead monks had “violated the spirit of Buddhism by committing suicide,” is a distortion of the true spirit of Buddhism and is ironic given the atheist nature of the Chinese regime, she said.
Another irony was that most of the people who died after self-immolation were young people who grew up under Chinese influence and education, she said.
“That fact tells you something,” Lin said. “They could not know much about history and yet those young men would still be willing to sacrifice their lives because they longed for respect and dignity as human beings.”
Taiwan yesterday condemned the recent increase in Chinese coast guard-escorted fishing vessels operating illegally in waters around the Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島) in the South China Sea. Unusually large groupings of Chinese fishing vessels began to appear around the islands on Feb. 15, when at least six motherships and 29 smaller boats were sighted, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said in a news release. While CGA vessels were dispatched to expel the Chinese boats, Chinese coast guard ships trespassed into Taiwan’s restricted waters and unsuccessfully attempted to interfere, the CGA said. Due to the provocation, the CGA initiated an operation to increase
A crowd of over 200 people gathered outside the Taipei District Court as two sisters indicted for abusing a 1-year-old boy to death attended a preliminary hearing in the case yesterday afternoon. The crowd held up signs and chanted slogans calling for aggravated penalties in child abuse cases and asking for no bail and “capital punishment.” They also held white flowers in memory of the boy, nicknamed Kai Kai (剴剴), who was allegedly tortured to death by the sisters in December 2023. The boy died four months after being placed in full-time foster care with the
The Shanlan Express (山嵐號), or “Mountain Mist Express,” is scheduled to launch on April 19 as part of the centennial celebration of the inauguration of the Taitung Line. The tourism express train was renovated from the Taiwan Railway Corp’s EMU500 commuter trains. It has four carriages and a seating capacity of 60 passengers. Lion Travel is arranging railway tours for the express service. Several news outlets were invited to experience the pilot tour on the new express train service, which is to operate between Hualien Railway Station and Chihshang (池上) Railway Station in Taitung County. It would also be the first tourism service
‘MALIGN PURPOSE’: Governments around the world conduct espionage operations, but China’s is different, as its ultimate goal is annexation, a think tank head said Taiwan is facing a growing existential threat from its own people spying for China, experts said, as the government seeks to toughen measures to stop Beijing’s infiltration efforts and deter Taiwanese turncoats. While Beijing and Taipei have been spying on each other for years, experts said that espionage posed a bigger threat to Taiwan due to the risk of a Chinese attack. Taiwan’s intelligence agency said China used “diverse channels and tactics” to infiltrate the nation’s military, government agencies and pro-China organizations. The main targets were retired and active members of the military, persuaded by money, blackmail or pro-China ideology to steal
RSS