> Pro-Tibetan Independence groups, as well as the Dalai Lama himself
> had accused China of killing 1.2 million Tibetans. Is the accusation
>  factual?  Or is it a fabrication?
>
> The following is excerpted from "Tibet, Tibet -- A Personal History
> of a Lost Land" written by Patrick French, a founding member and
> a former director of Free Tibet Campaign.
>
> "When I looked at the origin of the 1.2 million figure more closely,
> it turned out that it had first appeared in public in the mid-1980s.
> In response to demands from foreign supporters of the Tibetan
> cause, the exiled government had come up with the sort of
> systematically researched numbers that were needed to impress
> Western legislators. The key thing was to have charts, lists, tables
> and data ? or what looked like data.  A commission was established
> in Dharamsala under a respected official, Kungo Dhakden-la, who
> sent envoys to the main Tibetan settlements in India, Nepal and
> Bhutan to examine the claims of recent refugees.  At the end of
> this process, it was concluded that precisely 1,207,387 Tibetans
> had died between 1950 and 1979 from starvation, fighting, torture,
> execution, suicide and struggle sessions.
>
> This figure began to be used in the exiles' publications and in the
> Dalai Lama's speeches.  The crucial moment in the development of its
> credibility as a serious statistic came in 1987, when the US House of
> Representatives attached a resolution to a State Department
> Authorization bill which included the claim that "over 1 million
> Tibetans" had died "as a direct result of the political instability,
> executions, imprisonment, and wide-scale famine engendered by the
> policies of the People's Republic of China in Tibet."  The Chinese
> government denounced this resolution in its usual heavy-handed way,
> but it had lost the propaganda war.  The assertion that there were
> 1.2 million Tibetan victims of Chinese genocide has been repeated
> again since then, with the sheer weight of repetition making it
> believable.
>
> The exiled government, aware that this figure is generally accepted,
> has kept a closed lid on the original survey and stopped outside
> researchers from having access to the documentation on which it is
> based.  In media terms, this has worked to its benefit.  In her 1990
> book Tibet: Behind the Ice Curtain, the journalist Vanya Kewley
> reported that Dharamsala "had only cross-checked the names of
> 1,207,487 [sic] Tibetans who had died."  She thought that this figure
> was sure to grow, since the exiles "have ready for international
> verification list of more checked names of the Tibetan dead.
> Undoubtedly the Tibetan government-in-exile has additional names and
> figures but they punctiliously refuse to release them till their
> exhaustive verification process is complete."  Kewley's approach was
> not unusual.
>
> After a couple of days of debate within the Department of Information
> and International Relations, I was allowed to look at paperwork
> behind the survey.  I was unsure why permission was given to me,
> but it seemed that new officials in the department favored a policy
> of
> openness, and may have been unaware of the significance of what I
> wanted to look at.  I went through the material slowly, helped by a
> young member of the staff, Topden, who had been born and brought
> up in exile in India, and was soon to leave for the United States.
> He tried to locate missing sections from the archives, and to explain
> the accompanying documents.
>
> After looking through the files for three days, it became clear to me
> that the figure of 1.2 million Tibetans deaths resulting from Chinese
> rule could not be accepted.  The documentation came in twenty-two
> sections, each divided into the regions of the ethnic Tibet: U-Tsang,
> Kham and Amdo.  Two sections were missing, with only the summaries
> being available.  The lists were broken down into males, females and
> incarnate lamas, and included the likely cause of death.  Much of the
> basic structure of the survey was plausible.  Escapees from a
> particular village or place would report that several hundred people
> had died of starvation between certain dates, or that a particular
> number of monks had been executed.  The survey was built up by
> accumulating the evidence of these survivors and eye-witnesses.
>
> There was however no lists of names, as had been promised, and in
> most cases it looked as if no names had ever been recorded.  The
> most significant difficulties came with the insertion of seemingly
> random figures into each section, and constant, unchecked
> duplication.
> The death tolls in some sparsely populated parts of northern and
> eastern Tibet were unfeasibly high.
>
> To take some examples: an account of the numbers killed in battle in
> Amdo was inflated by a bald claim that fifty thousand people had died
> fighting near Trigan; a document showed 13,574 people dying in
> Labrang Tashikyil in 1959, but another document listed a further
> fifteen
> thousand killed in the same place during the same period; a figure of
> 69,517 executions in Amdo had no clear origin, and seemed to have
> been take from a contentious report issued by the International
> Commission of Jurists; a claim of 43,286 killed in fighting in Kham
> was
> accompanied by documentation for only around ten thousand; a single
> interviewee claimed that twenty thousand people died in prisons near
> Karong; a table of those tortured to death in Kham included ten
> thousand who had already been listed under the heading of executions;
> one informant asserted with no evidence that nineteen thousand people
> had been executed near Kongbo; a captured Chinese publication stated
> that 87,884 Tibetan rebels had been killed in central Tibet after the
> uprising of 1959, but this figure was added to the existing figures
> for U-Tsang, rather than being treated as a total.  Even when I added
> together all the numbers, credible or not, the total came to just
> under 1.1 million, rather than 1.2 million.
>
> Most disturbing of all was the fact that of the nearly 1.1 million
> deaths listed, only 23,364 were female.  This would have meant that
> 1.07 million victims were male, which was clearly impossible, given
> that there were only around 1.25 million Tibetan men in 1950.
>
> I was left with the unwelcome conclusion that this survey was a
> well-intentioned but statistically useless attempt to justify Western
> demands for data and tabulation.  Briefly, I was tempted to suppress
> this, and to report that the survey was generally believable, even if
> there were some gaps in it.  But I knew, after everything I had seen
> in Tibet, that truth was more important than continuing to back the
> cause in its present form.  More realism was needed, not less, when
> it came to Tibet.  It was a land that had suffered for too long from
> the
> well-intentioned projections of visiting foreigners."
>
> Conclusion: The figure was sheer fabrication. The Dalai Lama and the
> pro-tibetan supporters who repeated the fabrications are liers..
>
> More bout the author Patrick French.http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040416.bkread041
>
> "French is a talented English writer whose recent book Tibet, Tibet
> (Knopf, 2003) attacks not only the Chinese invaders but also the
> foreign "Tibetophiles" who practise "Dalaidolatry." French speaks
> from experience: A former director of the Free Tibet campaign in
> London, he named his son Tenzin in honour of the Dalai Lama.
>
> Like Maraini, he visited Tibet twice. A trip in the 1980s, when he
> was a student, led him to work for Tibetan freedom. A longer visit in
> the late '90s brought disillusionment. French now believes that Tibet
> will never again be independent; that the statistics used by pro-
> Tibet
> campaigners are often unreliable; and "that the Dalai Lama had lost
> the battle, and had probably missed the slender chances offered to
> him for a settlement with China." "
>
> Pro-Tibetan Independence groups, some racist in nature, as well
> as the Dalai Lama himself had accused China of killing 1.2 million
> Tibetans. Is the accusation factual?  Or is it a fabrication?
>
> The following is excerpted from "Tibet, Tibet -- A Personal History
> of a Lost Land" written by Patrick French, a founding member and
> a former director of Free Tibet Campaign.conccening this very
> serious accusation.
>
> "When I looked at the origin of the 1.2 million figure more closely,
> it turned out that it had first appeared in public in the mid-1980s.
> In response to demands from foreign supporters of the Tibetan
> cause, the exiled government had come up with the sort of
> systematically researched numbers that were needed to impress
> Western legislators. The key thing was to have charts, lists, tables
> and data ? or what looked like data.  A commission was established
> in Dharamsala under a respected official, Kungo Dhakden-la, who
> sent envoys to the main Tibetan settlements in India, Nepal and
> Bhutan to examine the claims of recent refugees.  At the end of
> this process, it was concluded that precisely 1,207,387 Tibetans
> had died between 1950 and 1979 from starvation, fighting, torture,
> execution, suicide and struggle sessions.
>
> This figure began to be used in the exiles' publications and in the
> Dalai Lama's speeches.  The crucial moment in the development of its
> credibility as a serious statistic came in 1987, when the US House of
> Representatives attached a resolution to a State Department
> Authorization bill which included the claim that "over 1 million
> Tibetans" had died "as a direct result of the political instability,
> executions, imprisonment, and wide-scale famine engendered by the
> policies of the People's Republic of China in Tibet."  The Chinese
> government denounced this resolution in its usual heavy-handed way,
> but it had lost the propaganda war.  The assertion that there were
> 1.2 million Tibetan victims of Chinese genocide has been repeated
> again since then, with the sheer weight of repetition making it
> believable.
>
> The exiled government, aware that this figure is generally accepted,
> has kept a closed lid on the original survey and stopped outside
> researchers from having access ...
>
> read more »