Another reason to boycott the Beijing Olympics

A couple of you had posted sites to this story, I am horrified that innocent people should be shot, “like dogs” in this manner. Here is another reason to boycott the Beijing elections.

Cold reality of Chinese occupation
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.

For once, there were witnesses.

Now the full story of what happened that day in the Himalayas has emerged. Survivors have spoken out in Delhi this week, and their accounts can be pieced together with those of the mountaineers who witnessed the shooting.

The group whose members were casually picked off as they struggled through the snow by the Chinese border guard had already been walking for 17 days. They had waded through deep snow and struggled over ice and rock. They had gone without food or sleep, and they were exhausted - all to escape the Chinese occupation of their homeland. It is a journey that is made by thousands of Tibetans every year as they continue to flee the occupation.

"There was no warning of any kind," Thubten Tsering, a Buddhist monk who was one of the group of refugees that day, said. "The bullets were so close I could hear them whizzing past. We scattered and ran."

There were 75 of them in the group when they left. Only 41 made it across the border into Nepal, and on to India.