Tibet group says 2 set themselves on fire in China
AP – 7 hrs ago
BEIJING (AP) — A Tibet activist group says two people have set themselves on fire in southwest China in the latest in a series of apparent self-immolation protests against Chinese rule.
The London-based Free Tibet said in an emailed statement late Friday night that witnesses saw a man set himself on fire Friday near a monastery in Aba prefecture in Sichuan province. It says security forces put out the flames and took the man away. His condition is unknown.
Free Tibet says someone else died about the same time in a self-immolation nearby. It gave no other details.
The claims could not be independently confirmed. A woman who answered the phone at the prefecture government office on Saturday said she did not know anything about the incidents and hung up without giving her name. Calls to local police offices rang unanswered.
http://news.yahoo.com/tibet-group-says-2-set-themselves-fire-china-032225991.html
This would be the 13th and 14th attempts at self-immolation in the last year, some of which have proved fatal. The PRC has moved security forces into the monastery and has ratcheted up its attempted cultural genocide against Tibet.
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The attitude of most foreign governments with whom Tibet maintained relations implied their recognition of Tibet's independent status. The British Government bound itself not to recognise Chinese suzerainty or any other rights over Tibet unless China signed the draft Simla Convention of 1914 with Britain and Tibet, which China never did. Nepal's recognition was confirmed by the Nepalese Government in 1949, in documents presented to the United Nations in support of that government's application for membership.
The turning point in Tibet's history came in 1949, when the People's Liberation Army of the PRC first crossed into Tibet. After defeating the small Tibetan army, the Chinese Government imposed the so-called "Seventeen-Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet" on the Tibetan Government in May 1951. Because it was signed under duress, the agreement was void under international law. The presence of 40,000 troops in Tibet, the threat of an immediate occupation of Lhasa and the prospect of the total obliteration of the Tibetan state left Tibetans little choice.
It should be noted that numerous countries made statements in the course of UN General Assembly debates following the invasion of Tibet that reflected their recognition of Tibet's independent status. Thus, for example, the delegate from the Philippines declared: "It is not clear that on the eve of the invasion [in] 1950, Tibet was not under the rule of any foreign country." The delegate from Thailand reminded the assembly that the majority of states "refute the contention that Tibet is a part of China." The US joined most other UN members in condemning the Chinese "aggression" and "invasion" of Tibet.
In the course of Tibet's 2,000-year history, the country came under a degree of foreign influence only for short periods of time in the 13th and 18th centuries. Few independent countries today can claim as impressive a record. As the ambassador to Ireland at the UN remarked during the General Assembly debates on the question of Tibet, "[f]or thousands of years, or for a couple of thousand of years at any rate, [Tibet] was as free and as fully in control of its own affairs as any nation in this Assembly, and a thousand times more free to look after its own affairs than many of the nations here."
http://www.freetibet.org/about/legal-status
The Peoples Republic of China is a totalitarian state that quashes dissent and the free flow of information.
