Mr. Speaker, on the 10th anniversary of the massacre at Tiananmen Square the NDP pays tribute to the memory of those who were killed that day and to the courage of the students and others who stood up for democracy.
Since then progress on the all important political and human rights front has been tragically absent in China. The NDP calls on China to realize that while we understand the concern about stability in a country with a history of internal conflict, the reality of the world today is that countries which bottle up dissenting views and squash dissenters are courting disaster. We therefore call on the government of China to release those still in prison.
We also call on China to moderate its views on Tibet, and on the World Bank not to approve a project which would move Chinese farmers into an area used by Tibetan and Mongolian herders for centuries.
We have seen all too recently the ethnic conflict that eventually occurs when the historic population of an area is demographically attacked by an influx of a politically dominant group. The World Bank should not finance such a scheme.