“China’s Tibet Railway: Designed to Destroy.”

Police detained three women from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom; their whereabouts remain unknown.

“China’s Tibet railway has been engineered to destroy the very fabric of Tibetan identity,” said Lhadon Tethong, the Executive Director of Students for a Free Tibet. “China plans to use the railway to transport Chinese settlers directly into the heart of Tibet in order to overwhelm the Tibetan population and tighten its stranglehold over our people. We will continue to take action to defend Tibetan culture and today’s protest is but a preview of what China can expect as we approach the 2008 Beijing Olympics.”

Hu Jintao, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and former Party Secretary of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, will officially open the railway on 1 July in Golmud – an eastern Tibetan town and starting point for the newly extended 1,200 km line to Lhasa. Chinese authorities claim the railway will bring economic development to Tibet while Tibetans hold that the true motivation is consolidation of China’s political control of the region.

Tibetans fear that the railway will facilitate the entry of large numbers of Chinese settlers into Tibet, further marginalizing Tibetans socially and economically, bolster China’s military strength in the region, and cause irreparable damage to Tibet’s high-altitude ecosystem. Many Tibetans see the railway as the final phase in China’s plan to wipe out Tibetan identity and culture.

“The Chinese government openly admits its political motivation for this project”, said Matt Whitticase, Campaign Spokesperson for Free Tibet Campaign. “The completion of the railway marks the realization of Mao’s dream to assimilate Tibet into China. Through our global day of action we hope to expose this reality and give voice to Tibetans inside Tibet who are not free to speak out in opposition to this devastating project.”

A Tibetan news website based in India has posted statements from Tibetan refugees recently-arrived in Nepal testifying to their concerns about the railway. Yamphel from Rebkong County says, “The Railway has become a matter of concern for all Tibetans, when older generation passes away, younger generations would be converted into Chinese.”

Tibetans and their supporters will hold protests worldwide on 1 July to denounce the launch of the railway (Australian protest will take place in Brisbane).

The “Reject the Railway” campaign will see protests at Chinese embassies and consulates in major cities around the world, including Ottawa, New York, London, and Dharamsala, India. Tibetans in exile are wearing black armbands to symbolize their resistance to the railway and China’s ongoing occupation of Tibet and to show their solidarity with Tibetans suffering under Chinese rule. Tibetan shopkeepers and restaurants in Dharamsala, home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government in Exile, will close their businesses on July 1st in support of the “Reject the Railway” campaign.

BACKGROUND: DETAINED ACTIVISTS

(1) Katie Mallin, 34, from London works for Free Tibet Campaign

(2) Omi Hodwitz is a 29-year old Canadian woman from rural eastern British Columbia. After graduating high school, she went to work for Greenpeace, serving on the Rainbow Warrior and climbing in many dramatic protest actions to defend the environment and speak up for human rights.
She is a senior Action Climbing Trainer who teaches nonviolent activists the safe and effective use of nonviolent direct action. She has worked with Students for a Free Tibet since 1998. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree with honours in Criminology from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia.

(3) Kathy Ni Keefe, a 36 year-old American woman, began her activism in 1990 by joining Parisian students in a sit-in under the Eiffel Tower to protest the first Gulf War. She returned to the U.S. and began working with Greenpeace and The Ruckus Society on environmental and human rights campaigns. Kathy first joined up with SFT in 1998, teaching nonviolence and climbing workshops at Free Tibet! Action Camps, and working on the direct action protests that helped stop the World Bank from funding China’s population transfer project. Kathy currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

BACKGROUND: GOLMUD-LHASA RAILWAY

Following the 1949 victory in the Civil War, Mao and the Chinese Communist Party had dreamed of constructing a railway into the western interiors of Xinjiang and Tibet. A railway would enable rapid movement of troops and ethnic Chinese population in and out of the region, thereby enabling the Party to dominate the region and integrate it successfully with China. The goal was partly achieved with the completion of a line from Lanzhou to Urumqi in Xinjiang (NW China). But building a line to Lhasa was far more complicated due to the scientific challenges of track having to traverse long tracts of unstable permafrost.

The Chinese Communist Party and present leadership has invested huge propaganda resources into promoting their perception of so accomplished an engineering feat. The railway’s intensely political nature is evidenced by its estimated US$4.3 billion cost with a budget that has increased by 50%: by irreversibly re-assimilating Tibet into China, the railway confers huge legitimacy and prestige on the Party as the institution that has reversed centuries of weakness and territorial fragmentation through such an impressive feat of engineering.

If you live in or around Brisbane, we encourage you to support this campaign and join in the protest at 5pm on 3 July outside the Chinese Consulate. More…