Bill Kaufmann, email: callet@sunpub.com

The Calgary Sun, Monday, July 28, 1997

As the demise of freedom in Hongkong follows its predictable course, China's rulers continue to rejoice in reversing a 150-year-old colonial injustice.

Perhaps it's well they should, since Britain's seizure of Hong Kong was spawned by the odious opium trade and a resulting war lost by the Chinese.

International law has finally been enacted, bleats Beijing, and imperialist humiliation banished.

The depths of Beijing's heartfelt devotion to the rule of international law, fairness and righting of historical wrongs would be comforting it it weren't for one niggling fly in the ointment.

It's a little matter called Tibet - that virtually forgotten Himalayan kingdom invaded and occupied by the Communist Chinese in violation of every notion of international law.

It's time for Beijing to show some consistency and release Tibet from its colonial servitude by honoring global decorum. But the worl shoudn't hold its breath.

Since the Communist invasion in 1950, Tibet has been subject to an encroaching genocide through violent, forced assimilation, diplacement, murder, torture and plunder.

Four years ago, Chinese in the occupied land outnumbered Tibetans eight million to six million, an ever widening gap.

A concerted pogrom of religious desecration has reportedly reduced the number of Buddhist monasteries from 6,000 to 10, with countless monks and nuns being executed or imprisoned.

Measured used to subdue the Tibetan people have added one of the darker chapters to this most violent centuries, while the Chinese government has raped the ecology of the once-pristine land.

But the Tibetan independence movement has proven courageously durable, inspired by their Buddhist spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, who fled into Indian exile in 1959.

House-to-house searches conducted throughout Tibet last year in a bid to root out portraits of the holy man attest to the Dalai Lama's profound influence and the anxiety he inflict on the Communists.

But for all their perseverence, the Tibetans are powerless by themselves even to gain some measure of autonomy they seek under Chinesee sovereignty.

Feted at a fund-raising dinner in Calgary last year, Maj.-Gen. Pan Zhenqiang of the People's Liberation Army of China summed up the situation: "Tibet is part of China - everyone knows that - the Canadian government agrees with that," said Zhenqiang.

And he's at least partly right; when the Dalai Lama visited Canada in 1989, the pacifist leader wasn't invited to address Parliament, no doubt due to the friction it would cause with our Chinese trading partner.

No objections about China's conduct in Tibet have been raised by a Canadian government that's become increasingly timid in its criticism of Beijing, though such censure would have only symbolic significance.

Said Calgary Tibetan-Canadian activist Lobsang Dorjee outside the dinner where Pan was guest speaker: "It's ironic that Canada has peacekeepers all over the world and we're bringing this general in who represents the most brutal regime."

Beijing was outraged when the Dalai Lama paid a visit earlier this year to that other thorn in the Communist side, Taiwan - an entity that is just beginning to establish a democratic tradition, as had Hong Kong.

Sadly, Beijing is more likely to try subjugating Taiwan than it is to show consistency in its sudden embrace of international law by freeing Tibet.