A forgotten tragedy

A pacific people and an ancient culture in danger

The culture of Tibet and its values of tolerance and non-violence, deeply rooted in its people, is a patrimony for the whole humanity but it risks to disappear forever.

The Tibetan people tragedy has been lasting for over 50 years.

All the nations were indifferent, they had no interest in an area with no oil and so, in 1959 the Chinese People’s Liberation Army completed the occupation of Tibet, that begun on the sly in 1950, and annexed a territory as vast as half Europe, opening a way towards southern Asia.

To win the rooted spirit of independence of the Tibetans, the Chinese government carried out a systematic program of elimination of all the cultural and religious points of reference, that brought to the almost total destruction of schools, libraries, places of worship and sacred artwork often dating back to more than a thousand years.

It’s estimated that in these four decades around 1.200.000 Tibetans are dead because of repression and the deriving social and economic upsetting.

In this tragedy there is not only human suffering, we are also risking the disappearance of a pacific culture based on the Buddhist teachings of non-violence and respect for others, a concrete example that an oppressed population can fight for their rights without losing their own humanity.

The refugees

Besides the Dalai Lama, awarder with the Nobel prize for peace in 1989, more than 135.000 out of six million of Tibetans are refugees in India and Nepal. They escaped the religious persecution and tried to preserve the principles of their culture, and many are still running away to reach the refugee camps.

Among these people there are men and women of every age and many children, and in these four decades many others were born, often under prohibitive conditions.

In the clear air of the Tibetan highlands, infectious illnesses were practically unknown, but in the refugee camps, tuberculosis, malaria and undernourishment have raged for long years, before some humanitarian organizations succeeded in mitigating the situation.