Tuesday, January 18, 2011

The scale of human rights violations and the suffering of Tibetan and Chinese women is staggering; Dr Jonathan Aird, former senior China specialist at the US Bureau of the Census, estimated that between 1971 and 1985 alone there have been some 100 million coercive 'birth control operations', involving forced sterilisations and abortions (Aird, 1992). For Tibetans these population policies not only violate human rights principles, but form a dangerous and potentially disastrous assault upon an already severely diminished Tibetan population. Chinese population control abuses are now widely recognised, yet some demographers, presumably keen to maintain career links and/or research opportunities with China, choose to ignore the evidence of such violations. In Tibet and China, however, this is exactly what is happening, as the United Nations, governments, Britain's Department for International Development and multilateral population agencies ignore the wealth of evidence of these abuses, muttering absurd arguments about China having a potential for change. This reasoning could equally have been applied to Nazi SS units which forcibly sterilised countless numbers of 'racially inferior' women across Europe. Those who defend China's population control programmes are asking the world to accept something just as controversial and distasteful, to say nothing about the atrocities, the traumas, the terror and devastation inflicted upon women simply because 'there is potential for improvement'.

A young Tibetan girl is raped before being taken to a hillside by Chinese soldier and shot point blank in the head

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