| Published on 06-05-2008 In General | | Viewed 897 times | | Written by
Amit Sengupta | 
Power indeed flows from the barrel of the gun. This time, it's yet again happening in the roof of the world: Tibet.
Between crime and punishment, democracy and totalitarian one-party dictatorship, this is quick injustice. While the Olympic torch flies from one time zone to another protected by tens of thousands of armed gunmen, its xeroxed flame hitting the base camp of Everest in its journey onwards towards Beijing, while the bloody wounds in Tibet have still not healed, a Chinese kangaroo court has unilaterally jailed 30 Tibetans. The terms range from three years to life. They have been accused for their role in the anti-China, free-Tibet protests in Lhasa and elsewhere.
The Lhasa Intermediate People's Court – whatever it means, extrajudicial, no legal niceties, no norms or protocols of justice, etc – announced the verdict at an "open trial" that lasted all day. Three people were sentenced to life, including a monk. A total of seven people were reportedly sentenced to 15 years in prison, and 20 received sentences between three and 14 years. China has said 22 people died in the riots and accused the Tibetans of rampage, arson, violence etc. The Tibetans claim that the unofficial figure of the Tibetan death count is 200 plus, and no one knows how many more were forcibly compelled to surrender and hundreds of others who have been picked up and packed off to unknown detention and torture centres.
Those who pump their chests arguing that China is an economic role model must rethink their positions. There are no official records, but several unrecorded and scattered documentary evidence keep emerging of the several monks and dissenters picked up and sentenced for various charges; dissenters in mainland China and in the Muslim province of Xingiang have been routinely picked up and jailed in unknown interrogation centres and prisons. Protests have been brutally crushed. No one knows what will be the fate of all those people who have earned the wrath of the Chinese Communist Party and its mafia-like regime in Beijing and in the provinces.
China is not a communist country. By all priniciples of basic Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, it has no credibility to call itself either democratic, socialist or humanist in its structure of governance, politicis and economics. In principle it is a totalitarian capitalist dictatorship, where not an iota of decentralised democracy can operate, not even basic debate on first, the acceptance of Mao's red book, and second, on the rejection of Mao during and post Deng Xiao Peng's regime – except perhaps for the red Mao lighters sold at Tiananmen Square for American tourists.
Who are the new leaders and second rung leaders of China and its so called communist party? What is their politics or political line – apart from cold-blooded strategic thinking for their vested interets in a totally inward-looking stance of total self interest? From where have they emerged, these leaders? What do they think of global struggles, the peaceful resistance against globalisation, the protests against militarism and wars, the reaffirmation of the greater common good.
Do they believe in Marx's utopia, or do they believe only in absolute control and domination of private capital, police and army? Whatever happened to the ideas of the Maoist revolution and the cultural revolution and the peasant collectives, as China moves full throttle towards privatisation and industrialisation, destroying ecology, poisioning rivers, killing forests, mountains, peasant societies and collectives through sheer brute force.
Even internet is not accessible freely in China. All media structures are controlled by the State. All courts, public spaces, colleges, village committees, municipal zones, universities, TV stations and newspapers, are controlled by the State. Not even a word which is critical of the regime, or in affirmation of a different idea of the world is accepted – you will be picked up and sent to jail – no questions asked. You can't protest, not even peacefully, you can't write different kind of literature, no alternative music or cinema for you, no graphics or digital innovations. No freedom to worship or choose one's faith. No wonder, several Falung Gong loyalists are apparently victims of grave human rights violations. China must be one of the top countries leading in human rights violations in the world.
In most provinces there are no labour rights, with long hours, bad wages and work conditions, and beatings and exploitation when rights are demanded. Sweat shops apparently are swarming in many parts, and there are reports of prostitution booming in Lhasa backed by the Han Chinese. A latest report says that thousands of children in southwest China have been sold into slavery like "cabbages" to work as labourers in the more prosperous areas, such as the booming southen province of Guangdong.
And like the US when it backed the apartheid regime in South Africa, drug lords and warlords and banana republics of sundry dictators in Latin America, China now does the same. In fact, it gave arms to the king's regime to eliminate Maoists and backed the emergency. From North Korea and Burma's insane authoritarianism, to Pakistan's military regimes, trust China to patronise the most notorious regimes in the world.
No wonder, China and the US are riding each other's lucrative bandwagon: pushing each other's economies (and politics) like long lost friends. Human rights, freedom and democracy can go to hell. So why did the US go after Soviet Union during the Cold War, when it can get so pally with 'Communist China' post war?
This is because, over the years, they have begun to look like each other. Between Guantanamo Bay and Iraq's killing fields, and the Tibetan monks condemned for life in some dingy prison, with no access to justice or fair trial, and the blood on Lhasa's streets, there is a similarity. The same shadow of the big bully in different mirrors. That's why Bush will be there during the inaugration of the Olympics.
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