Someone has a guilty conscience……

Raj’s second post of the day!

Chinese authorities to witnesses of Tibetan murder – “Shut up!”

Yes, you remember Sha Zukang telling the US to “shut up”. China is obviously making a habit of this, by now threatening witnesses to the shooting of Tibetan refugees by Chinese soldiers.

Chinese diplomats in the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu are tracking down and trying to silence hundreds of Western climbers and Sherpas who witnessed the killing of Tibetan refugees on the Nangpa La mountain pass last week.

What I think is equally disgusting is the silence from many climbers. Maybe they would have reacted differently if a foreign climber had been shot. Then they’d be scared. But, hey, who cares if some Tibetan dies so long as they can keep climbing?

An American climber, who asked not to be identified, told of his revulsion at the failure of other climbers to speak out. “Did it make anyone turn away and go home? Not one,” he said. “People are climbing right in front of you to escape persecution while you are trying to climb a mountain. It’s insane.”

Of course a few courageous climbers have come forward with evidence, such as Steve Lawes, a British policeman who witnessed the event.

The shooting happened at around 10.30am on 30 September. Mr Laws said: “A group of between 20 and 30 people on foot [was] heading towards the Nangpa La Pass. Then those of us at advance base camp heard two shots, which may have been warning shots. The group started to cross the glacier and there were more shots. We were probably about 300 yards away from the Chinese who were shooting. This time it definitely wasn’t warning shots: the soldiers were putting their rifles to their shoulders, taking aim, and firing towards the group. One person fell, got up, but then fell again. We had a telescope with us but the soldiers took this. Later they used it to look at the dead body.”

It’s important that these murders not fly under the radar. They happened and the attempts to cover them up make them even more heinous. But, hey, we expect that from the Chinese authorities now. Maybe their long-term goal is that people will get so used to hearing about this sort of thing they don’t take any notice, and thus they can escape criticism. Well I think we shouldn’t let them get away with it.

The Discussion: 26 Comments

This brazen act by the Chinese soldiers at the border induling in extrajudicial killing of a Tibetan woman is just an example of sort of treatment that the Tibetans in Tibet are undergoing. If the Chinese Government really wants to project itself as a responsible international player, it is imperative that the authorities in Beijing should take stern action against those responsible for the action. What I see now is Beijing defending the inhumane action.

Even if it is a law and order issue, every Tibetan in Tibet has the right to justice.

October 13, 2006 @ 2:12 am | Comment

Here comes the official story.

http://tinyurl.com/ybwrm3

So why didn’t any of the foreign climbers report about the soldiers being attacked? Let me guess – because they weren’t……….

October 13, 2006 @ 3:06 am | Comment

So what can we do to ensure that more people know about this, and that representatives of the Chinese government around the world are confronted with it?

October 13, 2006 @ 5:53 am | Comment

Write to your MP/foreign secretary, the Chinese embassy, letters to The Times, etc.

October 13, 2006 @ 6:33 am | Comment

And if you have a blog, write a post, especially if you use technorati and such. We’ve now done two here at TPD – I know that Richard has a number of journalists among his readers.

October 13, 2006 @ 6:43 am | Comment

to be fair, if you were the solider, how would you know it’s tibetan refugee not some terrorist dressed like tibetan? if you were a US border patrol guard, and you saw someone trying to cross border illegally and wouldn’t stop after you warned him, what would you do? send him a letter?

October 13, 2006 @ 7:12 am | Comment

I’m kind of curious as to why the PAP border guards in this case would be interested in stoping Tibetans leaving Tibet. This isn’t like former East Germany when the exodus of people was considered a threat to the DDR. One more refugee is one notch up in the Han-Tibetan population ratio. He’ll, I’d bet the CPC would be delighted if they all upped and left.

October 13, 2006 @ 7:31 am | Comment

UU:

If they were terrorists then the border guards should be glad that they’re leaving the country, now wouldn’t they.

Idiot.

October 13, 2006 @ 7:44 am | Comment

Also, the Himalayas are not exactly a primary target of terrrorists. What the hell damage are they going to do there? Melt some snow?

October 13, 2006 @ 7:45 am | Comment

Does anyone have a link to the official denial/rebuttal from the Chinese media?

October 13, 2006 @ 8:10 am | Comment

They could make yellow snow snowballs, those are vicious weapons. That’s actually what the Soviet army ended up using near the later part of the war, hurt the nazi’s pretty bad.;)

October 13, 2006 @ 8:13 am | Comment

if you were a US border patrol guard, and you saw someone trying to cross border illegally and wouldn’t stop after you warned him, what would you do? send him a letter?

US Border Patrol does not shoot at migrants crossing the border in either direction, UU.

I’m kind of curious as to why the PAP border guards in this case would be interested in stoping Tibetans leaving Tibet.

Because they bring stories of repression with them. Norks hunt down their refugees in China for the same reason.

October 13, 2006 @ 8:39 am | Comment

The foreign editors at China Daily describe this as “the perfect anti-China story” and “everything you want to read if you think China sucks.”
(http://www.20six.co.uk/positivesolutions)

No guilty conscience there!

October 13, 2006 @ 9:06 am | Comment

That was also the main reason for the Berlin Wall, and Jing is being typically disingenuous in pretending otherwise. But that’s just what Communist apologists do, excusing the inexcusable.

October 13, 2006 @ 9:09 am | Comment

Raj, China Digital Times has an update with lots of new links. I’m not going to have time to do anything about it tonight or tomorrow AM (I’m posting this at 5:30 pm PST) if you want to post it. Photos of the incident taken by one of the climbers, etc.

read it here

October 13, 2006 @ 9:27 am | Comment

What is funny about this post is the story cited from “The Independent” stated that Chinese diplomats are trying to gag hundreds of western climbers from telling the story, and yet there was nothing in their story to offer a thread of evidence.

Ya right, those Chinese diplomats are so dumb that they think they could gag hundreds of western climbers. LMAO.

But the gagging story surely made quite a few people very happy!

October 13, 2006 @ 9:46 am | Comment

“What I think is equally disgusting is the silence from many climbers.”

in fact this has been a topic of major discussion on many climbing boards. mounteverest.net, which is is the climbing equivalent of nytimes has been covering it extensively. http://www.mounteverest.net/news.php?news=15159

October 13, 2006 @ 10:01 am | Comment

Actually, the Chinese soldiers only fired in self defence when attacked by the Tibetans, according to Xinhua (http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/mountain-shooting-was-self-defence-china/2006/10/13/1160246293121.html). This is what happens when you try to extricate yourself from the warm embrace of the motherland.

October 13, 2006 @ 2:50 pm | Comment

The ultimate excuse… they’ve tried to pull that one on ’89 also. The only place that’s gonna fly is the mainland information vortex.

October 13, 2006 @ 4:23 pm | Comment

Ah, yeah, they shot in “self-defense.” That reminds me of the recurring South Park routine where the hunters say “it’s OK to shoot at anything as long as it’s in self-defense”, and then they shoot at harmless little creatures, but just before they shoot, they ritually shout:

“Look out! It’s coming right at us!” And then they shoot at whatever they want to shoot at.

October 13, 2006 @ 4:53 pm | Comment

Jing: Nepal next door happens to have an active Maoist rebellion. Arms traders probably come and go; how else do the Maoist get armed? Leaving is not such a problem as coming; when you leave, you contribute to the Maoist insurgency, forcing the Nepalese government to buy more arms, possibly Chinese. If the Maoists win; India get a terrorist state on its border. A weaker India is more amenable to Chinese interests; a strong India will be nationalistic and will attempt to set itself up as an opposite pole to Beijing.

Coming is more of a problem. Tibet still has its independence activists, and some of them are radicals. And while the Chinese would not mind Tibetan terrorists, as that would severely weaken Western support for “Free Tibet”, terrorists are unpredictable and it’s best that they have only a minimum of firepower.

October 13, 2006 @ 5:25 pm | Comment

From the SCMP:
“An unnamed British climber told the Washington-based pressure group the International Campaign for Tibet how he watched “Chinese soldiers quite close to Advance Base Camp kneeling, taking aim and shooting, again and again, at the group, who were completely defenceless”.”
Who should I believe in this case… well, no unnamed British climbers have lied to me recently, and the gov here has, so my bet is on “unnamed British climber.”

October 13, 2006 @ 6:28 pm | Comment

kevin, I don’t know why the SCMP didn’t name him – it was published elsewhere. Maybe they ran the story before it had been confirmed.

The British climber was a policeman, Steve Marsh.

October 13, 2006 @ 7:24 pm | Comment

I really think the title of this thread, “Someone has a guitly conscience” should be changed, because it’s very misleading…

…because Communists have no conscience. That is what THEY say, that is the official ideology of the Chinese Communist Party: The CCP pigs base their claim to absolute authority on their descent from the ideology of Lenin (the “CORRECT” path of Marxist-Leninist thought), whose (now dead) Russian Communist Party categorically denied any and all transcendent morality, and any and all personal, private conscience.

And don’t any of you CCP apologists come around here and say (as you so often do) that today’s CCP is “different” from the old CCP. As long as the CCP bases its claim to absolutely unchallengable dictatorship on Marxist-Leninism, their official ideology will continue to be: “No transcendent morality, no conscience, nothing matters except for the power of the Communist Party.”

They have no conscience. They officially deny any kind of conscience or morality whatsover, except for whatever serves the power of the filthy, ugly, barbarian, ignorant, superstitious, Communist Party who pretended to take the place of God.

October 13, 2006 @ 10:13 pm | Comment

The indenpendence named another British mountaineer-police man, Steve Lawes.

Despite of these named witness, there is a growing trend of being anonymous fearing China’s possible retribution. Going this way, more and more Chinese atrocities will go without any witness. And Tibetans are not likely the lone victim.

October 13, 2006 @ 10:27 pm | Comment

Yeah, I didn’t mean to suggest that I didn’t believe it. What I meant was that I’d trust pretty much any anonymous source in the news far more than I’d trust a named source in the China Daily or any other trash media.

October 15, 2006 @ 10:12 pm | Comment

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