"Over a million Tibetans have died because of Communist massacres and organized famines; forced sterilizations (which the 1948 UN convention on genocide considers a full-blooded act of genocide) have taken place on a proportionately large scale. But this is hotly denied or at least strongly minimized by the regime and its supporters abroad. Like the Holocaust negationists, our Communist negationists prefer to de-emphasize the real issue, and to draw the attention towards fault-finding with the victims, and towards the aggressor's glorious achievements. Thus the old system in Tibet was an obscurantist, archfedual, even cannibalist theocracy, and the Tibetans have been lucky to be forced into enjoying the benefits of Maoism. While the communist version of pre-communist history (defended abroad by A.T. Grunfeld in: The Making of Modern Tibet) is a grim caricature, it is true that Tibetan society needed social as well as material modernization; but this does not justify the occupation of the country, any more than it would justify the European colonization (which had equally been advertised as a generous act of helping the natives to modernize). Non-colonized Japan adopted modernization much faster and more smoothly than any colonized country, and left to itself, the modernization which had already been started by the 13th Dalai Lama would certainly have picked up momentum over the years and done a lot more good to Tibet than any colonization could. At any rate, none of these considerations anyhow justifies the gradual genocide which the Chinese occupiers have been carrying out in Tibet. Like the Holocaust negationists, our Communist negationists are very inventive when it comes to explaining away inconvenient facts. In 1989, when journalist and Tibet-lover Frans Boenders had reported how he had heard a long round of shooting from his hotel room in Lhasa, the president of the Belgo-Chinese Friendship Association dismissed the report, saying that Mr. Boenders, because of his lack of familiarity with local culture, had mistaken festive fireworks for gunfire. Some months later, a defecting Chinese official revealed that 1988-89 had been a time of intense repression in Tibet, including a razzia with 460 people killed in April 1989."