By Tony Iltis
March 28, 2008 -- A
demonstration by Buddhist monks in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, on March
10 to commemorate the anniversary of China’s crushing of the Tibetan
independence movement in 1959 triggered protests for self-determination
that, by March 14, had escalated into anti-Chinese riots in which 19
people were killed.
Over 100 Tibetans are reported to have been killed, and hundreds more arrested, by Chinese occupation forces.
This eruption of mass anger — that spread to cities throughout the
Tibetan Autonomous Region and the neighbouring provinces of Gansu,
Qinghai and Sichuan, historically part of Tibet and with large ethnic
Tibetan communities — was a response not only to the 58-year-old
Chinese military occupation of Tibet, but to the dispossession and
marginalisation of Tibetans by an influx of both global capital and Han
Chinese transmigrants.