Madam, - The situation now facing Tibet is even worse than the gloomy picture Clifford Coonan paints in his report on the opening of China's Golmud-Lhasa railway (The Irish Times, June 30th).
Fifty-six years ago Radio Beijing announced: "The task of the People's Liberation Army for 1950 is to liberate Tibet." Since that year hundreds of thousands of Tibetans have died as a result of this "liberation". Today, Tibetans are a minority in Lhasa, their own capital, Chinese has replaced Tibetan as the official language and independent research puts the number of Chinese in the "Tibet Autonomous Region" at between 5 million and 5.5 million, with 4.5 million Tibetans.
Of course this migration has always been actively encouraged by Beijing. Already poor Chinese are lured to Tibet by promises of higher wages and a superior social status than Tibetans. This has created an impoverished Tibetan underclass and exacerbated the dilution of Tibetan culture.
The Golmud-Lhasa railway has the potential to facilitate an unprecedented acceleration of Chinese migration into Tibet, which will definitely worsen the plight of its long-suffering indigenous people.
Speaking about the railway's impact the Dalai Lama said last year that "some kind of cultural genocide is taking place. . .In general, a railway link is very useful in order to develop, but not when politically motivated to bring about demographic change."
Isn't it strange how Irish political parties wrangle and bleat about whom they will and will not enter coalition with, but once in government have no difficulty whatever in wining, dining and doing business with a regime responsible for the slow destruction of a unique culture and people. - Yours, etc,
STEPHEN KELLY, Woodside, Rathfarnham, Dublin 14.