Friday, August 22, 1997

The Washington Post - Editorial

NORTHERN Virginia Rep. Frank Wolf has never been one for the typical junket. His advocacy of human rights and religious freedom in other countries has taken him to the Siberian gulag, to Ceausescu's Romania and to war-ravaged Chechnya. Now he is just back from Tibet the first House member to visit that oppressed land, he says, since Chinese forces moved in nearly 40 years ago.

What Mr. Wolf found will not shock anyone who has followed Beijing's brutal repression of Tibetan culture, religion, language and people a repression applied with what Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan has called "Stalinoid dementia." We hope, though, that Mr. Wolf's report will awaken some Americans who haven't paid sufficient attention to Tibet's slow suffocation.

A vast land along the Himalayan top of the world, Tibet is home to only 6 million people no conceivable threat to China's billion-plus. But China has virtually sealed Tibet off, keeping reporters and human rights observers out and even barring California Rep. Christopher Cox, a member of the Republican leadership. Mr. Wolf gained access, along with an aide and a Tibetan-speaker, by joining a tour group and not advertising his profession. (He dressed in "traditional tourist garb," Mr. Wolf says.)

What he found, Mr. Wolf says, is repression more brutal than he witnessed in Soviet Russia or Communist Romania. While Chinese in Beijing have won some measure of liberty, at least in economic affairs, he says, "there is no freedom in Tibet, period." People are watched and afraid yet, when they realized Mr. Wolf and his associates were from America, they were willing to risk imprisonment to describe their plight. Like their leader in exile, the Dalai Lama, most Tibetans are not seeking independence but only the freedom to speak their language and practice their Buddhism without being thrown in jail or having their children taken away.

Mr. Wolf, like many members of Congress of both parties, urges the Clinton administration to make Tibet and the hundreds of Tibetan prisoners of conscience an important part of U.S.-China dialogue leading up to and during a planned presidential summit this fall. He also urges U.S. churches, synagogues and citizens to mount the kind of letter-writing, prisoner-adopting campaigns that helped sustain Soviet dissidents. Tibetans don't have the kind of diaspora that kept Soviet Jewry, Armenia, Poland and other captive nations on the U.S. agenda during the Cold War. But they have an equal claim on America's conscience, and their treatment provides a useful measure of the true nature of the Chinese regime.