Tibetans Make Ultimate Sacrifice & Under Islamic Law, Rape Victims Jailed
The Polemicist
by Michael House
KING’S SUTTON England—(Weekly Hubris)—11/21/11—The Dalai Lama has long ruled out armed struggle. So Tibetans under the jackboot of the Chinese army of occupation have few ways of resisting the invaders. An occasional monk shouts “Free Tibet,” and disappears into the gulag’s prison system for many years or forever. Very rarely, the gentle Tibetans are pushed too far and riot. But resistance is sporadic and uneffectual.
Recently, a handful of brave monks and nuns have found a new way of bringing their message to the world. The Tibetan community in exile calls them “the burning martyrs.”
In the last month, seven have set fire to themselves.There have been eleven in all. Most have died. The center of the protest is Sichuan, part of Greater Tibet, although not part of what is laughingly called the “Tibet Autonomous Region.” The map of Tibet was redrawn by the Chinese to exclude vast swathes of eastern and southeastern Tibet.
It is said that lists are circulating in Tibetan monasteries in China of dozens of young people prepared publicly to burn themselves in protest at Chinese rule. The center of the protest is the Kirti monastery in Aba county, Sichuan. A monk from the monastery said “the situation is suffocating and there is no other way to demonstate anger.”
Reactions are mixed among Tibetans in exile. The Karmapa, third in the hierarchy of Tibetan Buddhism after the Dalai and Panchen lamas (the latter kidnapped by the Chinese as a child and, if still alive, imprisoned somewhere in China), has expressed strong disapproval of the self-immolations: “These desperate acts . . . are a cry against the injustice and repression under which they live. But I request the people of Tibet to preserve their lives and find other, constructive ways to work for the cause of Tibet.”
He is right. Every Tibetan life is precious. Tibetans are few in number compared to their oppressors.
The Dalai Lama has expressed deep sorrow at the deaths, but has not appealed for them to stop. He has led prayers for those whohave set fire to themselves. The Chinese lie machine has interpreted this as “terrorism in disguise.”
The officially-declared policy of the Chinese government is to allow freedom of worship, including for Tibetan Buddhists. The reality is utterly different. Repression of monasteries has steadily been ratcheted up, year by year. How desperate do you have to be to kill yourself by this dreadful method?
The world, conscious of China’s power and wealth, looks the other way.
How should rape victims be treated? Looked after, counseled, helped to put the awful trauma behind them? Not under the medieval Islamic laws of Afghanistan. There, they are thrown into prison and only released if they agree to marry their rapists.
Assadulah Sher Mohammed raped his 19-year-old relative, Gulnaz. She was unwise enough to report the crime to the police. She was hauled before an Islamic court and sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment for adultery. She gave birth to her rapist’s child on the floor of her prison cell in Kabul’s infamous Pul-e-Charkhi Prison. Gulnaz has resigned herself to marrying the rapist becuse she wants to get out of prison and does not want her daughter to grow up without a father.
No doubt, her marriage will not be noticeably more unpleasant than that of many women in that barbaric, Islam-ridden country.
The story has an equally shameful sequal. The European Union made a documentary film about the crime, and about another woman, Farida, who escaped from an abusive husband and was convicted of adultery. The film has now been supressed. Gulnaz had hoped the film’s release would help to save other women from a similar fate.
The EU suppressed the film, “In-Justice,” days before it was due to be screened, citing concerns about the women’s safety and “relations with justice (sic) institutions.”
The Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) (http://www.rawa.org/women.php) said the EU’s action was “treason against Afghan women.” It accused the EU of “support for warlords and mafia drug-lords seated in ministries . . . instead of voicing our ill-fated people’s pains.”
Were the Taliban really much worse than the present regime? Is Afghanistan worth the life of a single British or American soldier?
Michael House
Michael House, FRGS was born, of rural, peasant stock, in Somerset, England. He read law at Exeter College, Oxford and was elected President of the Oxford Union. In 1974, along with five colleagues, House started up a set of barristers' chambers in three little rooms in Lincoln's Inn, London, specializing in human rights and in representing the poor and dispossessed. The set now comprises 170 members and occupies a 17th-century building that was home to the only British Prime Minister to be assassinated (Spencer Perceval, 1812). In 1987, depressed by Mrs. Thatcher's third election victory, House fled to Greece for three years, where he was published in The Athenian and The Southeastern Review. He also there met his archaeologist wife, Diane. The pair returned to England in 1990 after a half-year, round-the-world trip, and settled in London and Northamptonshire. Since then, by way of escape from humdrum criminality, House has traveled in Tibet, Nepal, Sikkim, Ladakh, Uzbekistan, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, Libya, Mongolia, Kashmir, and Sri Lanka, where only the stout walls of Galle Fort saved him and his spouse from being swept away by the tsunami. House returns to Greece, his second home, almost every year. He has written for, inter alia, History Today, the Universities Quarterly, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Rough Guide to Greece. House practices criminal defense law from Garden Court Chambers, Lincoln's Inn Fields, in London, and hopes that if he keeps on practicing, he may eventually get the hang of it. His yet unachieved ambitions are: to farm alpacas; see Tibet liberated from the Chinese jackboot; and live to see Britain a socialist republic. (Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)
2 Comments
Helen Noakes
Thank you for reminding the world about the brutality of the Chinese occupation of Tibet. America and the world refuse to hold the PRC responsible for the atrocities perpetrated against a nation that never provoked the Chinese communist’s attack. Some years ago I was involved with Amnesty International and worked on their Tibet campaign. The case histories I read were rife with the disturbing details of an occupation force that was bound by no laws of human decency. I urge everyone who reads your article to boycott Chinese goods. I do. If the USA won’t instigate sanctions against China, I certainly can. One drop in the ocean, you might say, but without those drops the ocean wouldn’t exist.
As for the treatment of rape victims in Afghanistan, sadly it is not the only Islamic country that behaves in such a barbaric fashion.
Michael House
Thanks, Helen. A boycott of Chinese goods is the only way ordinary people can make any impact on the monolithic tyranny that is China.