By Waseem Aslam- "During the torture, one of the Chinese guards pointed his finger at me and said, ‘We will castrate the inferior masculinity of your turban-heads and prostitute your girls. What can you turban-heads do to our great Chinese nation? With our spit, you will all drown.' Then, they used electric clubs to knock me down again and again."
That is one man's story of everyday life under Chinese rule - a story of oppression, incarceration and even death. China has been accused of cultural and ethnic cleansing. We are reminded of its atrocious human rights record on a frequent basis.
Yet in spite of its record, countries and companies continue to chase the Yuan in a bid to take advantage of cheap manufacturing costs and the untapped market for Western products. Nevertheless, there is something about China that makes the average Joe Bloggs feel somewhat uneasy.
It has taken something as conflicting as the Olympic Games to galvanize people in taking China to task about it's oppression in Tibet! Pierre de Coubertin's idealistic vision of the Olympic Games still strikes a chord with the majority of folks and hardly a day goes by without questions being raised about which world leader will or will not be attending the opening ceremony in Beijing. Gordon Brown won't be going, George Bush may or may not be going , the Dalia Lama - the exiled spiritual head of the Tibetan struggle - won't be there for sure.
It is now the 'done thing' to criticise China about Tibet. However, the situation in Tibet is nothing new. Indeed, it has been going on for decades, but for once the Tibetan Monks have taken it upon themselves to demonstrate their plight in the most vocal manner. The Chinese have cried foul and claimed the unrest is due to American influence and funding for the Monks and other Tibetan groups.
The timing of the torch relay and protests have if nothing else caused huge embarrassment to China, highlighting the very thing it would want to be hidden from Western eyes. Strange then to see open calls for violence by some Tibetan activists have not sent the usual alarm bells off in Washington or London. Direct action at the torch relay has not triggered massive anti-terror sirens in London, Paris or San Francisco. Tibet has become the perfect stick to beat China with, a little political gamesmanship to show who is boss, and how easily media can be used to show a super power like China in a bad light.
There is real hidden tragedy amongst all the pro-Tibetan fervour around the world. That tragedy isn't that it is quite plausible that many activists in Tibet were used by America to humiliate China at a time when it is in the spotlight. Nor is it the fact that despite all this diplomatic finger wagging at China, the very people that label China an oppressive regime continue to do business with it on a massive scale.
The real human tragedy is that the story I related at the beginning of this article is not one from Tibet, and it will not be heard by many people for it makes no political sense to discuss it. That testimony was from Aman Turkel, who is from the Xinjiang province an autonomous region of China, bordering Tibet and where the majority of people are not Buddhists but Muslims. Descending from the Turkmens of Central Asia, the Uyghur population of Xinjiang have been fighting their own freedom struggle for decades now -but to be honest no one cares.
The response of the Western powers has been simple and systematic. Firstly to ignore what is going on in Xinjiang. Secondly when pressed, link Uyghur demands for independence to the "terror network" that they say exists across the Muslim world. This has for China given them a green light to describe their polices in Xinjiang as their own little "war on terror"! They have even gone as far as blaming the Uyghur's for the unrest in Tibet.
They say one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist, yet in the eyes of the West a Muslim's freedom is not even worth fighting for.
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