Over at Beijing Wide Open Lhadon Tethong, Executive Director of Students for a Free Tibet, speaks about the fundamental issues surrounding the uprising in Tibet and the success China has had in framing the story around violence, as opposed to the underlying struggle for freedom.

Shortly following the start of protests in Tibet on March 10th, the Chinese government expelled all foreign journalists from Tibet, including areas traditionally part of Tibet that are currently outside the Tibetan Autonomous Region. This has brought a loud outcry from the international community and media outlets.

Now, rather than responding to this pressure by opening up all of Tibet to foreign journalists, China is launching a three day propaganda tour with with twenty-six journalists. Bloomberg reports:

Journalists from 19 organizations including the Associated Press, the U.K.’s Financial Times, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post and Taiwan’s Central News Agency, set off today for a three-day guided tour, state-run Xinhua News Agency said. Bloomberg News wasn’t invited to participate in the event, arranged in response to media requests for access to the region.

The New York Times adds more disturbing details:

To sway international opinion, Beijing allowed a group of about 26 hand-picked foreign journalists to travel to Lhasa on Wednesday to witness the damage in the city and interview victims of the riots, according to the state-controlled media.

Very few journalists have been able to report from inside Tibet. Shortly after the March 14 riots, the government began forcing foreign journalists out of Lhasa. Government blockades have also prevented foreign journalists from reaching Tibetan areas in neighboring provinces.

A Tibetan-American friend, sharing the Times article with me, writes:

The crazy thing is, the TAR has always been a special case of “off limits” to journalists, but now even parts of Tibet incorporated into other provinces are blockaded. This is in clear violation of the explicit commitment made by Beijing ahead of the Olympic Games that everywhere in China (except TAR and Xinjiang) would be free for reporting.

To recap, China banned foreign journalists from Tibet. Then they picked 26 journalists that they are comfortable with and invited them on a guided tour of Tibet. They are scheduling interviews with Chinese government approved “victims of the riots,” a term that almost certainly applies to Han Chinese settlers who may have been hurt in protests. Undoubtedly, these journalists will not be given access to Tibetan political prisoners, or monks, nuns, and lay people shot by the Chinese security forces, or Tibetans whose family members were killed in this crackdown.

I am always hesitant to make comparisons between contemporary events and the actions of Nazi Germany, but this propaganda junket immediately reminds me of the charade put on for the Red Cross at Theresienstadt concentration camp. It will be up to these Communist Party-approved journalists to see if they see through the hoax better than the Red Cross did.

Hand-picked journalists being given a “guided tour” is propaganda and window dressing, not press freedom. This cannot be welcomed one bit, as doing so would only credit the PRC propaganda machine for achieving the response that they seek to receive. I hope those governments and organizations pressing for media access to Tibet do not accept this junket as anything other than a continuation of China’s propaganda and disinformation campaign regarding Tibet.

The Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy reports that following prayer sessions mourning the murder of a Tibetan monk yesterday in Luhuo, a protest started that was met with gun fire by Chinese security forces. At least one monk was shot and is now in critical condition; other monks, nuns, and lay people are likely to have been arrested.

The European Union has called on China to stop its violent crackdown on Tibetans. It is considering a boycott of the Beijing Olympics:

“If there are no signals of compromise, then I believe the boycott measures would be justified,” President Hans-Gert Pottering said in an interview with German newspaper Bild am Sonntag Tuesday.

“We must not exclude the possibility of a boycott of the Beijing Olympics. We want them (the Games) to be a success, but not at the expense of the cultural genocide of Tibetans,” the official added.

Amnesty International, French Prime Minister Anthony Sarkozy, and the United Nations have all been outspoken this week in their condemnation of China’s actions.

The BBC has another report on how Chinese cyber attacks are targeting Tibetan independence groups outside of Tibet, as well as groups that are working to stop the genocide in Darfur.

Much attention is starting to shift towards China’s expulsion of all foreign journalists from Tibet shortly after the violent crackdown on pro-independence protests started.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, told the Canadian broadcaster CBC last week that Beijing needed to account fully and credibly for what is happening in Tibet.

“China is ready to open its door to 30,000 foreign journalists in August. Why can’t it open its door to one or two foreign journalists in Tibet now, when the world is equally interested in what is happening in Tibet as it will be in what will be happening in the Olympics?” she said.

The Albany Project reports on New York City police officers beating and threatening to kill Tibetans who were taking part in a peaceful protest for Tibet outside of the United Nations. As Student for a Free Tibet’s Deputy Director Tenzin Dorjee said when he was arrested by plain clothes Greek security officers at the lighting of the Olympic torch earlier this week:

“The Chinese government is oppressing me even in a free country, the Chinese government is spreading its oppression and
dictatorship like a cancer around the world.

“Instead of the world changing China, China is changing the world – dragging it in the direction of oppression.”

This is not what the Olympics were supposed to do. The presence of the international community was supposed to liberalize China’s human rights policies. Instead, we have watched them consistently regress to the point where murder is the operative crowd control tactic and there is not one single foreign journalist inside a Tibet, which makes up about 25% of the total land controlled by China. We have watched the Indian government, the Nepali government, and the Greek government play integral roles in stopping peaceful, lawful protests of China’s occupation of Tibet. We have watched the International Olympic Committee alternatively defend China’s human rights progress and refuse to dialogue with Tibetan independence groups over their grievances.

China’s actions in Tibet continue to be the rightful target of international condemnation. Tibetans inside and outside Tibet are clear in their aspiration for freedom. The voices from the worlds’ governments and NGOs must only become louder. And they must be prepared to back up their words with actions, consequences, and punishments for China’s systemic violence against Tibetans.

Avaaz.org’s petition to Chinese President Hu Jintao, asking him to stop the violent crackdown against pro-independence protests in Tibet, has crossed the 1,000,000 signatory mark in just seven days.  They have now adjusted their goal to 2 million co-sponsors, something that  while incredibly far off may actually be achievable based on the viral nature of this petition.

While I will state up front that it is not an apples to apples comparison for a number of reasons*, I think it’s interesting to place the viral growth of this petition next to the much-hyped Facebook group Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack). Created after Obama announced his candidacy in 2007, 1 Million Strong for Barack was considered the largest and fastest growing Facebook group. It attracted much media and blog attention and was a testament to the social organizing powers of Facebook. That said, it never reached 1,000,000 members and took well over a week for it to become viral.

The point I’m trying to make by putting this Facebook group in parallel to this petition by Avaaz is that there is tremendous sentiment for Tibet. It’s remarkable to me as someone who has been involved in the Tibetan independence movement for over eight years to see such a tremendous outpouring of support for Tibet around the world, just as it’s remarkable for me to the international press and world governments finally pay attention to the Tibet issue and China’s attitude towards basic human rights. This Avaaz petition is a clear quantification of the global resonance for Tibet. Tibetans inside Tibet and outside Tibet have stood up to demand their freedom and the world has responded by supporting them.

If you have not yet signed Avaaz.org’s petition to stop China’s violent crackdown against Tibetans, please do so today. If you have already signed the petition, click here to send an email to your friends asking them to join you.

* Facebook is much smaller than the whole internet. The Obama group was relevant only to the Facebook users who were engaged in American politics. Avaaz.org’s membership is international, as is the support for the Tibet issue, thus creating a larger natural constituency than the Obama group has recourse to. Avaaz is an existing organization with their own email list that helped seed the growth of this petition. My comparison is one of sentiment and viral political activity, not raw numbers or capacity for growth.

Map courtesy of Mikel Dunham.

Pico Iyer has an article in Time about the Dalai Lama. For those that are only being introduced to Tibet’s struggle for freedom and the Dalai Lama’s leadership through non-violence while in exile, I highly recommend this piece.

China’s violent crackdown on monks, nuns, and lay people of Tibet who want freedom continues:

Paramilitary police opened fire on hundreds of monks, nuns and Tibetans who tried to march on a local government office in western China yesterday to demand the return of the Dalai Lama.

Residents of Luhuo said that a monk and a farmer appeared to have been killed and about a dozen people wounded in the latest violence in Tibetan areas of China. Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, said that one officer was killed when police confronted a “lawless mob” in Luhuo.

The demonstration began at 4pm when about 200 nuns from Woge nunnery and a similar number of monks from Jueri monastery marched towards the Luhuo Third District government office. They were joined by several hundred farmers and nomads, witnesses said.

Shouting “Long Live the Dalai Lama” and “Tibet belongs to Tibetans”, they approached the office. The paramilitary People’s Armed Police appeared and ordered the crowd to turn back. Witnesses said that shots were fired and two people appeared to have died. They identified one as Congun Dengzhu, a farmer, and the second as an unknown monk.

Public assembly and petition is met by bullets. This does not sound like restraint to me.

Also, the Avaaz petition in support of Tibet is approaching one million signatories.

The Tibetan Government-in-Exile has updated their confirmed death toll to 130 throughout Tibet.

“These are not necessarily new casualties. This could be information that we could not get before,” [TGIE Prime Minister Samdhong] Rinpoche said, adding that the numbers also included fatalities from Tibetan areas in provinces such as Gansu and Sichuan.

“We are afraid the number could go up when we get more information from remote areas,” he said.

The TGIE is obviously being very conservative in their statements, only releasing people who have been confirmed dead. Reports from Tibet have indicated higher numbers, though the absence of any foreign media in Tibet thanks to the Chinese government’s expulsion of all foreign journalists makes getting confirmation hard.

Avaaz, the international equivalent of MoveOn.org, sent out an action alert to their list of over 2 million or so supporters about a week ago, asking them to sign a petition to Chinese Communist Party Chairman Hu Jintao regarding Tibet. The petition reads:

Petition to Chinese President Hu Jintao:

As citizens around the world, we call on you to show restraint and respect for human rights in your response to the protests in Tibet, and to address the concerns of all Tibetans by opening meaningful dialogue with the Dalai Lama. Only dialogue and reform will bring lasting stability. China’s brightest future, and its most positive relationship with the world, lies in harmonious development, dialogue and respect.

When I signed the petition last night, there were about 837,000 signatories. This morning, that number has climbed to 905,513. They will probably cross 1,000,000 signatories some time today or tomorrow.

I’ve done a lot of work with internet petitions and advocacy campaigns – for Tibet, for FISA, for Iraq, and many other issues. This is a truly astonishing  outpouring of support for Tibet and Tibetan freedom.

Sign the Avaaz petition to stand with Tibet and be sure to pass it along to your family and friends.