Section 3 - What needs to happen now Immediate future: Hu Jintao is heir apparent to become President of China in March 2003. Although he has a very bad record in Tibet, where he introduced martial law in 1989, he was acting as Deng Xiaoping's subordinate and wanted to prove himself as the good servant of the Chinese Communist Party. He might act differently when he comes to power. He appears, to demonstrators at any rate, to have a very different demeanour to the emotive Jiang Zemin. He appears cool, dispassionate, and possibly detached, objective, and opportunistic. It is therefore possible that he may wish to resolve the Tibet issue because he may feel that the international condemnation is not worth it. Why heap opprobrium on the heads of 2.1 billion people by oppressing 6 million ? Strategy and Action: Tibet Vigil therefore calls on the UK Government for a more meaningful policy towards Tibet, a policy that will put pressure on China in 2002 . The UK must increase pressure on China to hold talks with the Dalai Lama to resolve the Tibetans' rights to self-determination. The UK must of course continue to raise human rights concerns including the cases of particular Tibetan prisoners, and issues of religious intolerance, racism, freedom of expression, and the rights of indigenous peoples. The UK should urge China to agree to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Theo Van Boven's terms for visiting China and Tibet. The UK should do this both at the biannual talks and through resolution at Geneva, because this impasse has been going on for some years now. The terms sought by the Special Rapporteur include access to all places of detention and unsupervised/confidential interviews with detainees. The UK must make DFID funding to eradicate poverty in China conditional on China's policies ceasing to discriminate against Tibetans, particularly the education policy. The UK must take a lead in seeing that the EU Arms Embargo is reconfirmed. The UK should seek a common EU interpretation of the Embargo to cover all military goods. The UK should, in the meantime, ban all UK arms exports of items on the Military List, or at the very least all equipment supplied to the PLA. [See note two] The UK should take the lead in calling for a September 2004 UN referendum of the Tibetans in historical Tibet on the question of independence, if China has not come to the negotiating table before then. [See note three] UK firms must be forbidden from investing in Tibet without permission from the Tibetan Government In Exile, or until talks between China and the Dalai Lama have taken place [see note two] The UK should call for the EU to do likewise [see note two] The UK should recognise the Dalai Lama and Samdhong Rinpoche as political leaders of the Tibetans and they should be received as such on visits to the UK. The UK should condemn the continuing transfer of Han Chinese to ethnic Tibet and should challenge China over its claim in paragraph 15 of the Summary Record of the Committee On The elimination Of Racial Discrimination held at the Palais des Nations in Geneva on 1 August 2001 that "The Government had no plan whatsoever to encourage large scale non-ethnic Tibetan migration into Tibet. The 2000 census had recorded a total population in Tibet of just over 2,600,000....... Of those, about 92.5 per cent were ethnic Tibetans, 5.5 per cent Han Chinese and 2 per cent other ethnic minorities". [Paragraph 15]. China is thus claiming that only 143,000 Han Chinese have moved to Tibet and that any Han Chinese classified as 'temporary' are insignificant in number. Tibet support groups worldwide believe there are closer to 7.5 million Han Chinese in Tibet. Therefore we urge an independent review of the facts. The UK should condemn the recent banning of Tibetan language in Tibet's schools The UK should condemn the destruction of Tibetan Buddhist communities under the excuse of 'poor sanitary conditions', such as Serthar. The UK should take a lead in threatening a trade embargo if by a year after the Olympics the Tibet situation has not been resolved. [See note four] The UK should urge the EU to develop a system for verifying the origin of goods from China, to prevent laogai made goods being imported. [See note two] The UK should raise with China the 1995 Beijing Declaration of Indigenous Women's demand that the World Trade Organisation recognise the intellectual and cultural rights of indigenous peoples, and the Kari-Oca Declaration of 1992 [World Conference On Indigenous Peoples On Territory, Environment and Development] which demands, inter alia, the protection of indigenous languages, the right of indigenous peoples to control tourism, and recognition that traditional knowledge cannot be separated from control of territories. The UK should cease contributing to UN Population Fund while reports still come in that population control abuses (i.e. enforced sterilisations and abortions) are occurring in China in UN areas [though there are no recent reports of UN involvement since November 2001 in the continuing enforced abortions and sterilisations in Tibet]. Delegations from China should not be invited to UK arms exhibitions or to visit UK military companies or Ministry Of Defence Establishments. [See note two] The UK Government should put diplomatic pressure on the Nepalese Government to respect International Law and stop their officials from turning back Tibetan refugees at the Nepalese border. Tibet Vigil requests that the Foreign Office inform us of the itineraries of visiting Chinese ministers, in the same way that the press are informed, some 24/48 hours before a visit; so that we may exercise our right to peacefully demonstrate, especially in the run up to Hu Jintao's Presidency. next