This is a picture from graffiti made today in Zurich, Switzerland. Here’s a description of what happened today at the event, which was put on by the Tibetan Youth Association of Europe.

On the occasion of the global day of action, friends and members of Tibetan Youth Association Europe held a huge graffiti event in Zurich, Switzerland. There were street-artists from different countries working the whole day and after having finished the main-piece, a 30m long graffiti with the slogan “stand up for Tibet”, the spectators could leave their own message on the wall. Many supporters and media people were present – the idea behind was to encourage the swiss people, especially the young ones, to get active and to show, that everyone can leave a message, which will be heard, seen, read. More pics will be uploaded soon on our website: www.tibetanyouth.org

You can see more pics from Zurich here.

If there was any doubt about the hopes China has for using the Olympic torch as a tool to validate their control over Tibet, one need look no farther than the route the Olympic flame is now taking. Jim Yardley of the NY Times reports:

President Hu Jintao of China waved the Olympic torch at a ceremony in Tiananmen Square on Monday, smiling broadly as balloons, streamers and confetti rose into a mostly blue sky.

Then came the uncertain part. Mr. Hu sent the torch on a 130-day journey around the globe where protests and controversy likely await. First stop on what Beijing is calling a “Journey of Harmony” will be Lhasa, the Tibetan capital still simmering from violent anti-government protests…

Earlier on Monday morning, the Olympic flame arrived in Beijing from Athens on board a specially outfitted Air China jetliner decorated with golden flames. This week, the Olympic flame is actually being split into two torches. One will be flown on Tuesday to Almaty, Kazakhstan, to begin an international relay that will cover five continents, including one stop in the United States in San Francisco.

The other torch is being flown to Lhasa and then taken to a base camp below Mount Everest. There, the flame is expected to be stored in a special lantern until May, when a team of climbers — escorted by two specially trained cameramen for Chinese state television — will attempt to carry the burning torch to the summit of the world’s highest mountain and then back down. By then, the international relay should be completed and the two torches will be reunited into one in Lhasa to begin a tour through the Chinese mainland that concludes in Beijing at the opening of the Games on Aug. 8. [Emphasis added]

As far as I can tell from the relay route, other than Beijing, the Olympic torch will spend more time in Lhasa than any other city in the rest of the world. The torch will be inside Tibet, either in Lhasa or at Mount Everest, for the duration of the international tour of the second flame. The only explanation for bringing the torch to Tibet and bringing it to Lhasa is that China wants to world to see it as the definition of their control over Tibet. The fact that there is an uprising going on in Tibet does not matter – China will use the torch as a stamp of approval and them make sure the whole world knows that they control Tibet.

Take action to oppose the torch route through Tibet.

Nick Kristof.

The No Torch In Tibet campaign has launched, complete with a petition to International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge asking him to withdraw Tibet from the Olympic torch relay route.

Get the Facebook Application here.

Use ClearSpring to embed or social bookmark the Torch Smackdown animation. I already started with some posts. Digg it here and here. Reddit here.

This is obviously a very powerful animation and one that clearly represents the Chinese brutality that is being approved by running the Olympic torch through Tibet. You can get the code to put it on your blog and help it go viral at NoTorchInTibet.org.

Today’s LA Times includes a column by Philip Hersh, who calls on International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge to respond to growing sentiment among world leaders and Olympic athletes alike that the Beijing games are creating a political problem that demand attention from the IOC. Hersh writes in response to Dutch swimmer Pieter van den Hoogenband’s request for Rogge to put forward a statement from the IOC that addresses China’s more-apparent-than-ever human rights abuses:

Yes, this mixes politics and the Olympics, but that is nothing new. Remember the IOC’s admirable decision to ban South Africa because its Olympic committee hewed to the politics of South African governments who legislated racial discrimination?

The 2001 decision to give the Games to China was largely political and commercial, even if the technical quality of its bid was unquestionably excellent.

It was about giving the IOC’s global sponsors a chance to ingrain themselves in the Chinese market and about allowing the world’s most populous country to loom even larger on the global stage.

So, Jacques, you can keep defying common sense by saying the IOC is not a political organization.

How about an irrelevant one?

Hersh is right. Common sense tells us that the IOC is a political organization and the Olympics have been a political event, at least since the 1936 Games in Nazi Germany. It was there that the concept of touring the torch first took hold, as Hitler paraded the Olympic flame in an effort to glorify the Nazi regime. Now we see the Beijing government plan to run the Olympic torch up Mount Everest and through Tibet as a means of validating their military occupation. Organizations that side with dictatorships and totalitarian governments’ efforts to repress people and prevent freedom tend to end up in the same place as those foul governments – in the dustbin of history. Rogge’s silence in the face of requests from athletes, governments, and Tibetans only solidifies the perception of him and the IOC as blindly subservient to the needs and desires of the Chinese government. In that sense, his actions, as Hersh suggests, make the IOC irrelevant. If they will not embrace their political power, then they must be seen as having no power at all.

Above: Three kick ass activists who don’t have time to smile

The Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest national paper, had a huge, front page, above the fold article yesterday on three Canadian women who have been at the forefront of the Tibetan independence movement through Students for a Free Tibet: Kate Woznow, Freya Putt, and SFT’s Executive Director Lhadon Tethong. I had the privilege of working on staff at SFT with all three of these magnificent ladies for two years and am really happy to see them get this kind of recognition for their persistent leadership on behalf of Tibet. All three have taken part in nonviolent direct actions for Tibet in Beijing and continue to lead the global campaign to make Tibet the front and center issue as the Beijing Olympics approach. Go read the full article, as the full scope of its awesomeness doesn’t lend itself well to excerpting.

Cold Mtn at Tibet Will Be Free directs our attention to large protests that happened again in Lhasa yesterday, just as or shortly after a guided tour of foreign diplomats left Tibet’s capital.

Details are emerging about fresh protests in Lhasa today. According to Radio Free Asia:

Witnesses in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, say fresh protests erupted there on Saturday afternoon despite a massive Chinese police and paramilitary presence there.

Witnesses told RFA’s Tibetan service that several hundred Tibetans rallied around 2 p.m. on March 29, beginning in the area near Center Beijing Road. Shops near the central post ofice on Lhasa Youth Road were closed, as security forces surrounded the Tibetan residential areas in Barkhor and Kama Kunsang, Ramoche, and the Jokhang temple.

“People were running in every direction,” one witness said. “It was a huge protest and people were shouting.”

According to the Associated Press, the protests occurred “as diplomats wrapped up a visit organized by Beijing in an effort to blunt criticism of its crackdown on unrest in the region.”

The 15-member delegation of diplomats from the U.S., Japan, and European countries apparently left Lhasa about an hour before the protests erupted. The U.S. Embassy in Beijing issued a brief statement after the visit that shouldn’t surprise anyone: “The delegation was not permitted to move about independently in Lhasa, and was unable to hold unsupervised conversations with local residents.” [Emphasis added]

Yet again, when presented with an opportunity to allow real access to Tibet, China chose to wall outsiders off from what is really going on in Tibet. Tibetans remain silenced from speaking to the press or diplomats. The world has not yet heard the full extent of Tibetans’ accounts of what has happened in Lhasa and elsewhere over the last 20 days.  It’s truly a testament to the bravery and patriotism of Tibetans inside Tibet that both of China’s dog and pony shows guided tours of journalists and diplomats have been met by large, visible acts of protests that belie China’s claims of control over Tibet. Only in this way, by their continued resistance and defiance to the Chinese military crackdown against their protests, do Tibetans show the world their unequivocal opposition to China’s occupation of Tibet.

Jim Yardley has an article in today’s International Herald Tribune about the relationship between Chinese nationalism and the crackdown in Tibet.

“We couldn’t believe our government was being so weak and cowardly,” said Meng, 52, a mother and office worker, who was appalled that the authorities had initially failed to douse the violence. “The Dalai Lama is trying to separate China, and it is not acceptable at all. We must crack down on the rioters.”

For two weeks, as Chinese security forces have tried to extinguish continuing Tibetan protests, Chinese officials have tried to demonstrate the party’s resolve to people like Meng. They have blasted the foreign media as biased against China, castigated the Dalai Lama as a terrorist “jackal” and called for a “people’s war” to fight separatism in Tibet.

If the tough tactics have startled the outside world, the Communist Party for now seems more concerned with rallying domestic opinion by using and responding to the deep strains of nationalism in Chinese society. Playing to national pride, and national insecurities, the party has used censorship and propaganda to position itself as defender of the motherland – and block any examination of Tibetan grievances or its own performance in the crisis.

I and other people I know working in the Tibetan independence movement, including pretty much all Tibetans, have no grievance with the Chinese people. It is the Chinese government that has created and enforced policies of oppression and cultural genocide in Tibet, not the Chinese people, and as such the proper target of our campaigns for Tibet has been the Chinese government.  Yardley’s piece on Chinese nationalism, though, is deeply troubling as a sign of what obstacles may lie in the way of a policy shift in the Chinese government.

There are two key things to take away from this, though. First, the existence of Chinese nationalism (or Han chauvinism) has been fomented and grown by the Chinese Communist Party. It does not exist like this in a vacuum, but has been amplified be a source of support for the government. Second, the prejudices of a population do not have to veto the right course of action by a government. In America, schools were desegregated despite widespread racism. Women were given the right to vote despite centuries of ingrained misogyny in Western culture. There may be large swaths of rabid nationalists in China, but that should not be what prevents the Chinese government from ceasing their violent crackdown in Tibet, nor should be an obstacle to the CCP Chairman Hu Jintao negotiating directly with the Tibetan Government-in-Exile.