Annexation of Tibet by the People's Republic of China

"The Dalai Lama has often been asked how many Tibetans were killed during the 20th century? To which he responds without hesitation: “Directly 200,000 at the very least. Indirectly [silence], we don't know, maybe a million, that is to say one Tibetan in six. »"

"During the Tibetan uprising against the Chinese army on March 10, 1959 in Lhasa, many Tibetan women took up arms. Some were killed and others arrested and thrown in prison, notably in the sinister Drapchi jail. There, they were tortured and the Chinese burst their eardrums, firing revolver bullets close to their ears. When they were executed, witnesses found that they were missing an ear and that most of their hair had been torn out. One of them was not finished off by the salvo – and before receiving the final blow, she had time to shout: “Freedom for Tibet! » Anne Riquier, author of Paroles de Tibétaines (Éditions Plon), who met Tibetan women who survived torture, quotes one of them: “They had tied our knees to our chest, tied our hands behind the back and they put rubbers in our mouths to keep them open. They first urinated in our mouths, then they stuck their penises in there. If we closed our eyes, they hit us with belts so that we kept them wide open,” says Dolma, who was arrested for distributing leaflets supporting her country’s independence."

"Nehru's absolute refusal to support the Tibetans even at the diplomatic level when they were overrun by the Chinese army, cannot just be attributed to circumstances or the influence of collaborators: his hand-over of Tibet to communist China was quite consistent with his own political convictions."

"A retired Indian Army commander has explained to me how an intervention force well within India's capacity, could have stopped the Chinese in Eastern Tibet. It would have been a war, but it would have been a genuine war of independence, and the number of casualties would have been far less than the lakhs of Tibetans that have by now been killed by the Chinese occupation force. Short, for such a noble cause, a prime minister with a kshatriya spirit would have gone in. And failing that, he could have opened a diplomatic offensive. But he chose to totally betray Tibet...."

"When Tibet was invaded by the Chinese Red Army in October 1950... the only reaction from Pandit Nehru was to start apologising for Peking immediately... Nothing could be done immediately to mobilise public opinion and put pressure on the Government of India to change its China policy... The meeting set up a Tibet Committee and announced a Tibet Day to be observed in September. But as soon as the news of this idea being mooted appeared in the press, the Prime Minister came out against it in a public statement issued the very next day. According to Hindustan Times dated August 26, "He referred to a report that some persons proposed to hold a Tibet Day. He thought that it was ill-advised and asked members not to take any interest in it." The Prime Minister felt annoyed with this effort. He put pressure on the press in New Delhi not to publish news of the Tibet Day demonstration and meeting... A few days later, the Prime Minister did something infinitely worse. Speaking on Foreign Affairs in the Rajya Sabha on September 23, he denounced and threatened the organisers of the Tibet Day in a language which was wild. ... This statement was full of insinuations. Here was the Prime Minister of a democratic country showing extreme intolerance for, and interfering publicly with other people's freedom to think and express opinion about matters which concerned the security of the nation."

"A Tibet Committee was organised in August 1953 and a Tibet Day was observed in September that year when a demonstration and a meeting were organised in New Delhi...But the programme could not be carried further than that because Prime Minister Nehru sprang a surprise with his Panchshila surrender over Tibet in April 1954, and the Hindi-Chini Bhai-Bhai movement misled the whole country soon after... It was perhaps the most painful experience of our lives to see the Prime Minister of a democratic country openly patronising the Chinese lobby led by the Communist Party of India, and angrily denouncing tried and tested patriots of a long standing in India's freedom movement. The communist press in India and abroad came out against the SDFA since its very inception... In August 1953, the SDFA organised a Tibet Committee which announced a Tibet Day to be observed in September. As many as 12 M.Ps including Professor N.G. Ranga were associated with the Committee. The Prime Minister came out against the Committee the day after it was formed. He called upon Congressmen not to associate with the Committee in any way...But since the SDFA could not be stopped from its own course of action, the Prime Minister used the floor of the Parliament to denounce the organisers of Tibet Day, and threatened them with Government action."

"Instead of fleeing, he (the Dalai Lama) asked England and the United States—two countries he had only ever heard tell of—for help. And when they refused, he turned to the U.N.—an organization no one had told him anything about. The U.N. refused to intervene, and in spring of 1951 the first Chinese detachments marched into Lhasa, bringing with them enor­mous portraits of Mao Tse-tsung and Chu En Lai.... His freedom grew more and more limited, he was confined to five rooms in the palace, and he began to hear news of monasteries destroyed, convents looted, Lamas tortured and killed, useless rebellions by peasants armed only with pitchforks. When he looked out of the windows through which he had once admired the luxurious processions, he saw Chinese camps and billboards that accused Buddha of being a reactionary. He was no longer in charge of anything. One day he fell ill and a doctor came to see him; he thanked the doctor with a gift, a piece of jade. But as soon as the doctor left the room, the jade was taken by a Maoist official who claimed that the jade belonged to the Chinese people. Gold statues and vases were melted into slabs and sent to Peking. The sacred furnishings were ripped apart and turned into theater costumes. The thousand-year-old parchments were burned, along with the sacred images, the religious images; there was noth­ing left of Potala but the walls. This state of catastrophe ushered in March 1959, the Tiger-Water year."