World Tibet Network News Wednesday, April 29, 1998

Brussels-Rome, April 29, 1998

Dear Mr. Prime Minister and Members of the Cabinet,

The initiative of the hunger-strike undertaken some weeks ago in New Delhi by six Tibetans, is provoking a growing emotion all over the world. This initiative has the unquestionable merit of recalling to the conscience of public opinion the tragedy of your people, their inexpressible sufferings during those last forty years, the inability of the international community to affirm the value of Law and of dialogue, the hypocrisy of the ruling classes as prolix in words as miserly in actions.

Unfortunately, the initiative of the Tibetan activists, as understandable as it is urgent and necessary, risks failing if one does not proceed immediately to convert the objectives of this action into really attainable and concrete goals. Their hope, as well as that which their action triggered in millions of people, risks, tragically, to end in despair.

We need to take action at once, to bring this initiative back towards a "new possible", reasonably and concretely achievable today. The objective of 1.300 parliamentarians from all the world asking the UN General secretary, Mr Kofi Annan, to receive H.H. the Dalai Lama is something possible. It could become

- together with that of the appointment of a UN special rapporteur for Tibet

and the introduction of Tibet on the agenda of the next General assembly, for

example - the first stage of the worldwide Satyagraha for the freedom of Tibet and for democracy in China.

But, in these dramatic times, the priority is put elsewhere. Responsibility lies in the hands of the Tibetan Government in exile. It is up to it, primarily, to reanimate and pick up this flame, this hope, taking a stand and indicating a "strategy of the possible", defining the objectives of a worldwide nonviolent movement of citizens, parliamentarians, representatives of governments and culture: in a word, the worldwide Satyagraha for freedom and democracy today as wished by so many people of good will and as we have been proposing to H.H. the Dalai-Lama since several years.

Now, only an official intervention of the Tibetan Government, through an explicit conversion of the objectives addressed, in the first place, to the activists on hunger-strike, offering a numerical and qualitative extension of the struggle, can bring back the nonviolent fight for the freedom of the tibetan people under the "sign of the possible" and achievable, under the sign of hope.

Radical Party