Cultural-Genocide

Tibet

Tibet Censored By UNESCO And International Mother Language Day

tibettruth Leave a comment

Image:ibtimes

Would you like to know what postive action the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is taking to support and protect the Tibetan language? We would too, especially as today is International Mother Language Day, which aims to highlight the importance of peoples linguistic and cultural diversity. The threat to languages it ranks as: vulnerable, definitely endangered, severely endangered and critically endangered.

We ran an online search ‘UNESCO concerned about Tibetan language’ and could find no reference, variants were used and still no results showed. It appears the global champion of linguistic diversity doesn’t regard Tibetan as under any danger. Yet the evidence coming from occupied Tibet has documented the increasing marginalization of Tibetan, threatened by mass-colonization of Chinese speakers. While Tibetans who seek to protect their language are jailed and the informal teaching of Tibetan by monasteries was banned December 25 2018

Tashi Wangchuk a Tibetan shopkeeper aged 31, was arrested January 27, 2016, after featuring in a New York Times video On March, 2016, he was charged with “inciting separatism,” and May 22nd, sentenced to five years in prison for the charge. His appeal was denied this year.

Image: tchrd

Equally disturbing is that across Chinese run schools in occupied Tibet children are increasingly not being educated through the medium of Tibetan  but bullied into learning the language of their persecutors.

None of these facts seem to concern UNESCO or Mr Chris Mosely, editor of its report: Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger 2010 in which Tibetan does not appear as an endangered language The online interactive version of that supposedly authoratitive report is not running, and for some reason it’s been difficult to locate a downloadable PDF version.

Christopher Mosely whose editorship of the UNESCO report on endangered languages no doubt received the applause of China’s regime.

Image: namanx

We wonder also what Norway’s Ministry Of Foreign Affairs, which partnered the UNESCO report, would think about the indifference towards the considerable threats to Tibet’s language? The Norwegian capital of course proudly hosted the Dalai Lama to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in which he highlighted to Norway’s political establishment, the assault upon Tibetan culture arising from China’s occupation of Tibet.

On March 27, 2014 UNESCO named Peng Liyuan, the first lady of China, Special Envoy for the Advancement of Girls’ and Women’s Education.

Image: shu.edu

The ongoing offensive against the Tibetan language is born from a political ideology which ultimately seeks to eradicate Tibetan cultural identity. From its founding communist China embraced the Marxist theory which held ethnic culture and nationalism as a temporal anomaly which would finally be replaced by a unified proletarian culture. Within the context of its occupation of Tibet the Chinese regime applied such dogma with a particular ferocity, that process is intensifying, with the nationalistic addition of regarding China as being the center of civilization.

UNESCO has close and uncritical relations with China’s regime

Image: archivenet

To realize these ambitions China’s authorities are seeking to eradicate the Tibetan language and in so doing remove any sense of a distinct Tibetan identity. Yet UNESCO instead of raising concerns to the Chinese government lauds China’s dictator, Xi Jinping and appoints his wife as a Special Envoy. It’s been said elsewhere that such international programs can be used by states in a cynical way to further policies of cultural domination and eradication. A warning which is being wilfully ignored by Director-General, Audrey Azoulay and her colleagues! 

Tibet

Tibet’s Cultural Traditions Further Eroded By Chinese Butter Invasion

tibettruth Leave a comment
Tibet Butter
Industrialized butter manufactured in China being loaded onto trains in Shenzen, destination Lhasa.

Image:newscn

If ever further proof was needed to demonstrate that under an illegal and tyrannical Chinese occupation Tibetans have been robbed of their traditional culture and forcibly transformed into a dependent population, then evidence for that reality arrived late January at a cold and windswept platform in Lhasa’s rail station.

A refrigerated train that had made the 8 day  journey across China and into occupied Tibet delivered a huge consignment of butter, a staple ingredient in Tibetan food and drink, ahead of the Losar Festival. How does that prove the point, right? Well the vast majority of Tibetans lived as nomads and to a lesser extent farmers, throughout their long history the people of Tibet enjoyed a self-sufficient lifestyle, milk, meat, wool and other commodities were plentiful in a land which was respected and revered in a sustainable and sensitive way.

Tibet Milk
Traditional milk and dairy produce declining in Tibet

Image: archivenet

That of course has changed beyond imagination since China invaded in 1950 and in the decades of colonization and exploitation which followed. Tibetan nomads are fast becoming a minority, forced from their traditional lands into ‘socialist paradise villages’, no longer self-reliant or blessed with limitless supplies of dairy produce and meat. Instead they receive meagre rations from the Chinese regime, with the ever present threat of such supplies being withdrawn at the least sign of dissent.

Cultural Elimination In Tibet
Socialist Villages In Tibet By Order Of The Chinese Regime

Image: hrw

With the forced decline of Tibet’s nomadic culture and farmers requiring to comply with the dictate of the Chinese authorities the flow of fresh milk has been reduced, as has the production of butter and cheese. Dairy produce which was totally organic and locally produced by Tibetans has now been denuded to such a state that butter (of questionable quality and safety) is freighted in from Southe East China!

 

Demonstrations, News Item, Tibet

In Tibet Defending The Tibetan Language Is A Crime!

tibettruth Leave a comment

Tibet Activists Protest Outside China's New York Consulate

Image: studentsforfreetibet

There’s no more appropriate way to describe the assault against Tibetans in occupied Tibet as cultural genocide. It is a calculated and systematic program to assimilate Tibetans and their traditions, the objective for the Chinese regime is to eradicate any sense of Tibetan national or cultural identity.

This is implemented through mass colonization of Han Chinese into Tibet, forcing Tibetans nomads into concentration settlements, where they become utterly dependent upon the meagre handouts of the Chinese authorities. The urban landscape has also been Sinocized with towns across Tibet virtually indistinguishable from those in China. While in Tibetan homes families are fed a 24/7 stream of Chinese language TV.

For China’s tyrannical authorities such measures are not enough, in addition they target Tibetan children and have been replacing the teaching of Tibet’s language with Mandarin. In truth there are no schools in Tibet, in their place are indoctrination centers, designed to program students to identify as Chinese.

Tibetan dissident Mr Tashi Wangchuk witnessed this cancerous erosion and three years ago decided to take action in support of the Tibetan language. Having traveled to Beijing in order to formally lodge his concerns he was arrested and disappeared into a Chinese prison. Being a Tibetan, defending Tibet’s culture and spoken-tongue is now a crime!

News Item, Tibet

China Threatening Tibetans With Starvation And Homelessness If They Fail To Denounce Buddhism

tibettruth Leave a comment

Image: courtesy of @tibettruth

First they invade your country, then place an army of occupation to suppress your resistance. Next they encourage and facilitate mass-colonization so that increasingly your land becomes dominated by foreign occupiers. Under the disguise of development the language of your oppressor is forced upon your children at school, internet television and radio broadcast in a foreign tongue. Without that language you are deprived and marginalized. Your traditions and culture is increasingly targeted as being in need of reform and modernization.

As part of such a process you and your family, along with countless others are rounded up and forced to live in concentration settlements, you are given basic handouts of fuel and food. No longer are you free living under the stars in harmony with the land and animals that you kept, you are now dependent on the crumbs offered by your tyrant. Having endured the misery of such an existence you are then ordered to renounce the traditions and religion which define your cultural and national identity. If you fail to comply the meager handouts you now are completely reliant upon are withdrawn, hunger and cold ensure obedience. This is occupied Tibet, this the calculated terrorism waged by the Chinese regime!

January 21 2019 report here: http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=41106&t=1

Appeasing China, News Item, Tibet

Turkish Reporter Serves His Government By Denying China’s Cultural Genocide Against Uyghurs

tibettruth Leave a comment

Image: Courtesy of @tibettruth

After the Chinese regime recently allowed in a select group of media to visit East Turkistan (so-called Xinjiang) the chosen reporters issued a glowing account of how wonderful the treatment of the Uyghur people was by China’s authorities.

The laughingly named ‘Silk Road Celebrity China Tour’ took place from January 9 to 16 and the compliant ‘journalists’ dutifuly regurgitated the propaganda narrative after being escorted around a number of locations.

One among that party surely merits this year’s award for nausea. Erdal Kurucay, a presenter from Turkey’s ATV station,who a number of Chinese media mouthpieces claimed rejected international concerns on the violent oppression of Uyghurs and their culture as little more than “terrorist propaganda” and “misinformation” propagated by “global capitalist and imperialist forces.”. A script drafted and approved in Beijing’s Department of Disinformation!

We’ve a feeling that this pro-Turkish government reporter was fulfilling a foreign policy agenda of his beloved authorities, which has been issuing a number of appeasing statements on China, in the hope of securing trade deals.

“When we went (our) prejudices were shattered. Because we read the Western media, and we act and take a stance according to the Western media, but we saw what a mistake we were making..” Source: https://ahvalnewstr.com/uighurs/turkish-pro-govt-reporter-denies-chinese-persecution-uighurs

He concluded by claiming that he had visited a ‘reducation center during the trip and insisted it been a “therapy centre” for criminals! Source: Ibid

Now there’s nothing new here, mainstream media and governments around the planet have been sucking up to the Chinese government, but to see Turkey effectively endorse the violent suppression of its Turkic brothers and sisters is particularly distasteful.

As to journalists and media outlets who serve as a conduit for the propaganda of China’s regime they are justly condemned as facilitating, through their active collaboration, the terrorism waged against those suffering under the tyranny of China’s dictatorship.

Miscellaneous, News Item, Tibet

China’s Destruction Of Uyghur Culture A Crime Against Humanity!

tibettruth 1 Comment

Image:HRW

Looking at this image of Uyghurs imprisoned in a Chinese run concentration camp, one of our colleagues remarked, ‘The only thing missing is a yellow star stitched onto the uniform’. A reference to the emblem forced upon Jewish prisoners by the Nationalist Socialist Party. A controversial analogy for some, yet there’s no denying that the Muslim culture of occupied East Turkistan (so-called Xinjiang Region) is being systematically and violently dismantled. Mosques obliterated, Islamic traditions banned, Uyghur women forced into marriages with Han Chinese colonists. The Uyghur language marginalized as Chinese is forced upon school children.

Meanwhile human rights organizations and the United Nations have received  accounts that Uyghurs have been rounded up and forced into what are effectively concentration camps. There they suffer a harsh regime of indoctrination and abuse that has the objective of generating obedience to the ideology of China’s communist party. A people are being violently denied their culture, which has been criminalized, racism and apartheid are driving forces in such tyranny. As they were of course for Nazi-Germany. Uyghur culture is now portrayed as the great enemy of ‘social stability’, regarded too as ‘less than’, dark resonances indeed from recent history.

China denied such camps existed, but only this week information came out  acknowledging their existence, SOURCE while insisting it was all very legal!

Some insist such reports are fabricated, the product of US inspired propaganda, others defend the Chinese regime, while the haunted expressions stare out from behind the barbed wire! We’ve been here before!