This summer I was fortunate enough to be selected as one of 18 Loyola students to attend Loyola’s first study abroad trip to India. I came back from the trip with a tremendous sense of respect for the Tibetan people as well as a sense of grief for my lack of knowledge of the Tibetans’ struggle to gain basic human rights. Before China was awarded the right to host the 2008 Olympic Games, it promised the International Olympic Committee that it would complete media freedom reforms. Also, it would create reforms guaranteeing the protection of minority nationality rights within China.
However, if you pick up any accurate description of the “progress” being made in Tibet, it’s clear a cultural genocide is underway. Taking away the right to practice Buddhism from the Tibetan people is like taking Catholicism out of the Vatican. Culturally, Buddhism is ingrained in the everyday life of the Tibetans.
The slow progress China has made toward freedom of religion and speech is a joke. A higher standard of living and education are great goals, but not at the cost of the rape of natural resources and the death of cultural practices and human rights for the Tibetan people.
While the Loyola program was visiting India, our eyes were first opened by the extreme measures of the Tibetan hunger strikes in New Delhi. I have never seen so many dedicated individuals before. They represented a wide variety of ages that had been without food for over 20 days, and they were expecting never to eat again. They weren’t demanding a great deal, just evidence from the Chinese that the innocent child XI Panchen Lama was still alive and that basic human rights were being improved in Tibet.
If we choose to listen past the Chinese-controlled news reports, we can clearly hear the cries from those being fed to the fires that drive China’s economic engine, the hundreds of thousands of Tibetans and Sudanese that are being oppressed and the Chinese families who are under unethical government population control measures. But instead, no one says anything, and we award China with the honor of hosting the 2008 Olympic Games. I’m outraged at the lack of public interest and at the fact that no other country has openly stated that they will boycott the Olympic Games. Only a few organizations like Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders seem to have any problem with China.
Someone at least needs to stand up for the values for which the Olympics stand and call China what it is-a Communist dictatorship that suppresses the political and religious freedoms of its own people and that of its neighbors. It is a country that openly supports brutal dictatorships around the globe, such as in Sudan. It’s not just the next superpower.
To do anything less than protest would be to commit the same mistake many athletes made in Germany in 1936.
