FOURTH DECADE OF BLOODY OCCUPATION AND GENOCIDE AGAINST A PEOPLE -- THE TIBETAN PEOPLE, WHICH, LIKE THE CHINESE PEOPLE ITSELF, IS OPPRESSED BY THE SAME COMMUNIST ARISTOCRACY, WHILE THE CHINESE LEADER JANG ZEMIN IS ABOUT TO ARRIVE IN ROME

Declaration by Olivier Dupuis, Secretary of the PR and European Parliament Representative:

"Another decade has come to an end, the fourth since the massacre of Lhasa, the capital of a country, Tibet, that has been occupied for half a century. The Tibetans, like all the inhabitants of the most populous country in the world, continue to be under the domination of the despotic and murderous aristocracy of the 50 million Communist Chinese who dominate all of China. We are talking about a class -- a caste -- that meticulously responds to every opening by the West by stepping up repression, by arrests of democrats and of dissidents, and by group -- and sometimes by mass -- capital punishment. With the "laogai" -- a word that translates into German literally by "lager", and into Russian by "gulag" -- China, even if its strength lies primarily in appearances, is nevertheless in a position of strength; Europe is not.

The countries of the European Union are in competition with one another to win the most succulent slice of the vast Chinese market, disregarding the extreme precariousness of a market that is not based on the rule of law and on democracy.

The fortieth anniversary of the Lhasa massacre and of the exile of the Dalai Lama finds a Europe that is bereft of a common policy, a political Lilliputian whose member countries queue up -- hat in hand -- in Beijing, or in Rome, as we shall see in the coming weeks when Jang Zemin, the Chinese leader, comes to Italy, on a date that is halfway between the anniversary of the Lhasa massacre and the massacre of Tiananmen Square".

[Published by DEMOCRACY IN CHINA/FREEDOM FOR TIBET ! -Issue 75, March 20, 1999 (Year IV)]