Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chairman and honourable members of the subcommittee, ladies and gentlemen, it is indeed a great pleasure and honour for my senior colleague, Mr. Lodi Gyari, and me to have this opportunity to address the subcommittee and make opening brief remarks. I will start the remarks from our side.
I think the most important thing this morning would be to hear from Mr. Lodi Gyari, who is the special envoy of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, based in Washington, but more importantly he is the head of the delegation for negotiations with the Chinese government. He has this very difficult responsibility of trying to find a peacefully negotiated settlement to a very complicated and difficult problem.
I will just make a brief opening remark about the current situation in Tibet and the human rights issue. When we talk about the human rights issue, I think we are talking about symptoms of a much larger problem. It is just a symptom, I believe.
Recently I am sure you have been following a very tragic, sad incident that happened at the Tibet-Nepal border at the beginning of last month when a group of unarmed, innocent Tibet refugees escaping into exile were shot at and there was death and serious injuries. But this is not an isolated incident. This has been happening for more than five decades, but unfortunately much of it has gone unnoticed by the international community. What happened early last month received international attention because it happened in the presence of foreigners, the mountain climbers who had actually witnessed it.
But the interesting thing, which again is illustrative of the situation in Tibet and the problems our people have been facing, is the Chinese official response to this. They said that the shooting was done in self-defence. To make such a blatant statement, totally baseless, in the context of the whole incident having been witnessed by not only one or two individuals but a group of foreign mountain climbers, and I think it was an Albanian who in fact was able to record it.... I'm sure you have seen this. You have seen the reports. And now the whole video film is available on a website. This just illustrates how much distortion, how much has been presented by the Chinese government to the international community as being a completely different matter.
I'll just say this to give an illustration of the depth of the problem and of the difficulty the international community has in really understanding the problem. There was an earlier incident in 1987 in response to a peaceful demonstration by Tibetans in Lhasa, the capital city of Tibet. It was very ruthlessly suppressed; many people lost their lives. And again, that received a certain amount of international attention because there were foreigners in Lhasa at that time. Secondly, a very brave Tibetan, working in the Chinese information department, managed to get a copy of the official film, shot by the official team, of what exactly happened. Actually, that was not for publicity. That was smuggled out of Tibet within a matter of a couple of days and that was shown to the outside world.
At that time, also, the Chinese government tried to stage the whole story by saying that it was in response to provocations by Tibetans. A very interesting thing was that a Chinese journalist who was officially covering at that time and after that the Tiananmen Square event also sided with the Chinese students and came out. He wrote an account of that and he very clearly recorded that when the peaceful Tibetan demonstration was taking place, the Chinese officials had left loaded rifles on the street corners and they had positioned cameras. They wanted the Tibetans to pick up the loaded rifles and use them and that would have been the pretext for suppression.
The suppression did take place, and before the Tiananmen Square event in 1989. Tibet was under martial law in 1988.
That kind of situation just gives a very rough account of our situation in Tibet. And this has been going on, as I said, for more than five decades.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan leadership have decided to find a solution to this problem. I would describe this as a vicious circle. There is suppression, resistance, more suppression, and this has been going on. As has been recorded, more than 1.2 million Tibetans have died in the last 50 years. What happened early last month is just the tip of the iceberg. It's a much larger problem.
We have to get out of this vicious circle, this problem. The only way we can do it is through negotiations. Also, there is this Tibetan movement, this non-violent movement, this peaceful movement, and unfortunately, it doesn't attract that much international attention. At the same time, I think in the last number of years there have been, of course, governments, parliaments—
I would also mention here that we are very grateful to the Canadian government, the Canadian Parliament for their support, and particularly, I think, in the case of the recent instance of the foreign minister's very strong statement in Parliament in response to a question. This is something that we deeply appreciate, and we are very grateful for that. Also, over the years, members of Parliament have taken an interest. I think this kind of thing is of course important.
Sometimes I think there's an impression that China doesn't care about international opinion. I would venture to say that it is the opposite. They do care.
Some years ago--I think it was more than 15 years ago--there was a Chinese official internal document. It was a directive issued from Beijing to the local officials. It stated that the officials have to be very careful in how they handle the situation in Tibet. They said that if a pin dropped in Tibet, it would vibrate around the world. So they are sensitive.
The negotiation process, of course, was started about twenty years ago. It went through ups and downs, but it was never taken to its logical conclusion. There was a total breakdown for about ten years, and then about five or six years ago, His Holiness again wanted to restart this process. He appointed two of his senior advisers to restart this contact and start the process of dialogue. Mr. Lodi Gyari and his colleague, Mr. Kelsang Gyaltsen, were given this difficult responsibility. They have successfully re-established contact, and there have been five rounds of dialogue.
If I were to give an account of what is happening in Tibet now or what has happened, it would be a very sad, tragic story. But we don't want to be bogged down in the past. We want to move forward and find a solution. And that is what we are trying to do. There is a very sincere, committed effort to find a negotiated solution.
I think today it may be more useful for the committee to hear from Mr. Lodi Gyari, the person who is responsible for this, about the dialogue, its process, the difficulties in taking the dialogue forward, and the present status. I think that may be important. As I said, if we can solve the larger issue, the bigger problem, then the other issues, like human rights violations and these things, which are only symptoms.... We are now trying to tackle the main problem. I think it will be very important for the committee to hear from Mr. Lodi Gyari about this important issue.
Thank you very much.