The Independent provides another update on the shooting of Tibetan refugees fleeing to Nepal earlier this month:
A few minutes of jerky video footage shot by a Romanian cameraman on a mountaineering trip brought the plight of Tibetans under Chinese rule into Western living rooms this month. For once, the world was able to watch the cruelty of occupation as it played out. In the video, a Chinese border guard calmly opens fire from a mountain ridge on a group of unarmed, defenceless Tibetans below, as they struggled through the snow to escape from occupied Tibet. Two figures drop to the ground.
“They’re shooting them like, like dogs,” says an incredulous voice, one of the other mountaineers standing beside the cameraman. And then the camera trains on the dead body of one of the Tibetans in the distance.
It was a moment that changed the way the world looks at China. In recent years, all the talk has been of a liberalised China, the world’s fastest-growing economy that has put the worst excesses of its totalitarian past behind it. But this was a rare glimpse of another China, and of a modern-day Iron Curtain. And for once, there were witnesses. [Full text]
Human Rights Watch has called for an investigation into the shooting.
