by Christian Lanciai
[Published in “Fritänkaren”, issue 124, February 2004, published 31.1.2004, a monthly journal of music, literature, films, philosophy, religion, politics and travel.]
The Free Thinker – January 31st, 2004.
The Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg disappeared in Budapest January 1945 after a peerlessly heroic engagement to save tens of thousands, maybe up to 30,000 Jews from the Nazi holocaust in Hungary. He was last seen alive as he was escorted away by Russian officials of the Stalinist occupation. The Swedish government decided to be patient.
When two years later Moscow reported that Raoul Wallenberg was dead, this was swallowed by the Swedish government without comment. It also swallowed the Russian explanation that Raoul Wallenberg never had entered Soviet territory but had found his end in Hungary. It also swallowed that no evidence ever was produced by the Russians to confirm Wallenberg’s death. Whatever could the Swedish government do? The more important then to watch what they did not do.
When later there were witness reports that Wallenberg was alive, that he had been seen in Moscow by other prisoners and that these had been tapping messages between themselves through the prison walls of Lubyanka, that psychiatrists happened to mention they had had him as a patient and other such stuff, the Swedish government became active but in the opposite way to what would have been expected as rational. They silenced the matter. The foreign minister accepted the Russian word that Wallenberg was dead (without evidence) and refused to accept any other version or even any other possibility, since he did not want to offend the Russians. “The Soviet authorities are respectable. They wouldn’t tell a lie. We must believe them, we have no choice. We must respect them.”This cowardice even worsened during the years, during decades the cruelty of silence was the only policy allowed – there was a governmental effort to silence the matter to nothing, and this policy was maintained until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Not until then, after 50 years, one acknowledgement after the other started gradually to turn up. The Soviet authorities had been lying from the start, and Sweden had not even questioned the lies. The governmental policy was admitted to have been cowardly false. The first official excuses from the government to Raoul Wallenberg’s family were delivered – after 50 years.
This remarkable Raoul Wallenberg syndrome reappears in the even more revolting standpoint of the world in the Tibetan issue. Independent Tibet was occupied by military force by Communist China in 1950. Only El Salvador dared to raise the issue in the United Nations and was silenced. In 1956 the Chinese started their methodical destruction of Tibet with its culture and history by bombings and closing and looting of monasteries, the universities of Tibet, and their temples. Not until Dalai Lama’s escape in 1959 did the Tibetan issue start some attention. A commission of international jurists in Geneva decided to investigate the case and arrived at the conclusion that China had already committed genocide in Tibet. Nobody did anything about it. In 1966 commenced the total devastation of Tibet, which was allowed to rave at large for ten years while the United States by the initiative of Henry Kissinger withdrew their support for the Tibetan resistance movement and abandoned Taiwan (which actually was governed by the only legal government of China), to instead start making business with Communist China and Mao Zedong, the murderer of at least 43 million of his own subjects. (Taiwan is today a developed and working democracy while China after 54 years is still the world’s greatest dictatorship.) No one did anything for Tibet except specially invited leftist writers, like Han Suyin, who wrote books about Tibet depicting China as her benefactor and liberator. The first book to criticize China from inside Tibet was not written until 1979 (John F. Avedon’s “In Exile from the Land of Snows”.)
Thereby at last an opposition started to make itself heard in one upsetting testimonial account after the other, the flow of which has never been interrupted; but still the political establishments of the world continue to support China with cajolery: “But China is a respectable nation. They do as well as they can. Although their execution statistics surpass the whole rest of the world they make progress in human rights. After all, they don’t perform public executions any longer by shots in the neck but instead by injections in specially designed execution buses, so that the victims can die comfortably. We must respect China and acknowledge that Tibet is part of China, for the sake of China.” (China stands for 20% of the world´s population but 70% of the world’s executions.) While at the same time China enforces mass immigration of Chinese into Tibet to definitely sinocize Tibet by drowning the Tibetan people in Chinese masses, who are not even constituted to live in such an extreme climate; so that Lhasa, the magical capital of Tibet, is now a circus of Chinese brothels, Karaoke bars and sterile business complexes of concrete blocks, where all the profits are Chinese, while the Tibetans are marginalized and sorted out like a lower caste without any rights of their own as citizens or even as human beings.
Unlike the Raoul Wallenberg case, no Chinese has ever made any Tibetan excuses or indemnified anything of the Chinese holocaust against the Tibetan people and culture, which process instead is just kept rolling on and even accelerated together with the Chinese executions, which also are speeded up after constantly quicker summary trials; while the world keeps disinterestedly looking on and lick China under her feet as if in a kind of voluntary blindness and refusal to recognize the evidence of a 50 year old political problem, which by this neglect just keeps growing, given fresh fuel and dirt today in Nepal and France; as the authorities of Nepal in spite of international law returns Tibetan refugees to China (since China pays Nepalese policemen to do this) where the fugitives consequently are maltreated and vanish; and as the French president Jacques Chirac, duped by a Chinese economical charm offensive, tries to persuade the European Community to resume the trade of arms with China, which export was interrupted after the massacres by the Chinese authorities on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, June 4th 1989. For what purpose will China use those arms? Shoot more Tibetans and Uighurs? Start war against Taiwan?
