資料紹介
The Tibetan government's position on negotiations with China
The Xinhua News Agency published an article on 17 April I997, entitled "Dalai Lama's Negotiations Offer "Trickery" Hiding Separatist Intent." The article is a gross distortion of reality intended to mislead the international public. We, therefore, present below the gist of factual account of the relationship between the Tibetan leadership and the Chinese leadership from 1978 to 1997.
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資料の原本内容
The Tibetan government's position on negotiations with China The Xinhua News Agency published an article on 17 April I997, entitled "Dalai Lama's Negotiations Offer "Trickery" Hiding Separatist Intent." The article is a gross distortion of reality intended to mislead the international public. We, therefore, present below the gist of factual account of the relationship between the Tibetan leadership and the Chinese leadership from 1978 to 1997. We leave it to the international public to judge the sincerity of our efforts and why genuine negotiations have failed to take place.
China demanded that His Holiness the Dalai Lama recognise Tibet as part of China as a pre-condition before any negotiations can start. This is tantamount to asking him to distort history.
The facts: Until recently, Communist China based its claim to Tibet on the marriage of Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo to a Chinese princess in the seventh Century, conveniently forgetting the Tibetan king's senior queen, princess Brikuti Devi of Nepal. When Beijing could not sustain this position any longer, they shifted the period of their claim to the thirteenth century, basing it on the establishment of Mongol influence in Tibet. However, the Mongols are a different nation and the Chinese have always considered them as aliens. In 191I, when the Nationalist revolution toppled the Manchu dynasty, Sun Yatsen said that China had been occupied twice by foreign powers: the first by the Mongols and the second by the Manchu emperors.
In any case, the Mongol influence in Tibet came to an end in 1350, eighteen years before China overthrew them.
In 1949, when Nepal applied for UN membership, it cited its diplomatic relations with Tibet to prove that it was a sovereign nation. The UN accepted this argument and thus effectively recognised Tibet's status as a sovereign nation.
During the UN General Assembly debate on Tibet, Irish Representative Frank Aitken stated: "For thousands of years, or for a couple of thousand years at any rate, (Tibet) was a free and as fully in control of its own affairs as any nation in this Assembly, and a thousand times more free to look after its own affairs that many of the nations here."
The studies of International Commission of Jurists, the USA Congress, the German Bundestag and many other independent bodies testified to Tibet's independent status at the time of its invasion by China.
Tibetan people, including His Holiness the Dalai Lama, acknowledge that the traditional Tibetan society was by no means perfect. However, people lived a life of contentment and free of starvation for 2,000 years until Chinese invasion in 1949. His Holiness the Dalai Lama initiated far-reaching reforms in Tibet as soon as he assumed temporal authority and continued to democratise the Tibetan society and political system. In 1960, the first representative form of government, through the Assembly of Tibetan People's Deputies (Tibetan Parliament in Exile) was introduced in India. In 1963, His Holiness the Dalai Lama promulgated a Constitution for the future Tibet based on the principles of modern democracy.
In February 1992, His Holiness the Dalai Lama announced the "Guidelines for Future Tibet's Polity and the Basic Features of its Constitution" wherein he stated that he would not play any role in the future government of Tibet, let alone seek the Dalai Lama's traditional political position. The future government of Tibet, His Holiness the Dalai Lama said, would be elected by the people on the basis of adult franchise. The struggle of the Tibetan people is neither to restore the past traditional system nor for the restoration of die status of a few individuals.
The Chinese government's claim of China historically granting the title of the Dalai Lama and approving the selection of the Dalai Lamas is false as evidenced by these two examples. The title of the "Talai (Dalai) Lama was first conferred on the third Dalai Lama, Sonam Gyatso, by the Mongol court of Altan Khan. The f...
