Human Rights Violations In Tibet

Another issue is human rights and peace building in Tibet. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) defined that human rights are rights, which are equally entitled for all people in the world, no matter nationality, race or ethnicity, sex, religion, cultures or any other status. Despite the clear definition, there are a great number of human rights violations occurred in Tibet by the authority as previously noted about gender-based violence. Even though China ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948), they use any means to attain their aims or to gain their profits. Their heart-less rationalism has no mercy for anything, no matter historical heritages, sense of dignity nor human life.

Generally, such a frustrated situation causes armed conflicts as a means to resist against state power. Nevertheless, most Tibetan strongly follow the non-violence policy advocated by the Dalai Lama as a way to insist their voice, even in grass-roots level. One of the ways is self-immolation. The International Campaign for Tibet (2015) recently updated their investigation, describing that 143 Tibetans have self-immolated since February 27, 2009, 117 men and 26 women, including 24 youths were the age of 18 or even under. Most of them are monks or nuns, but also housewives or students. According to Arimoto (2011), because Tibetan Buddhism strictly forbids destruction of life, self-immolation is not in conformity with the teaching, especially for monks and nuns. However, they put on fire by themselves as a last resort of appeal for freedom, instead of peaceful demonstration. In spite of these desperate plea against relentless repression, Tibet does not have any concrete supports by the international

Education is the principal approach for promoting peace. Adams (2002) stated that education for peace building needs to contain “second literacy”, which means “learning to live together”. Certainly, education is not only for the basic literacy or memorizing formulas, but also for the cultivation of sociality, moral sense and diversity with peace-oriented values. While education has a strong possibility to develop inner peace, it also has a risk to spoil invisible possessions, such as traditional culture, original language, concept of values and philosophies. As regards the issue of Tibet, the Chinese government uses education as a main assimilation policy. The educational system is unfair for Tibetans because of the contents. The investigation by the Central Tibetan Administration Department of Information and International Relations (2000) criticized that the government force children to learn the main stream culture instead of Tibetan one. As a result, the education system formed the Tibetan who cannot speak Tibetan language but speak Mandarin having the biased view in favor of the Han race. The research added that although there were a few educational institutions in Tibet before 1959 as the authority insisting, monasteries served as complex institutions acquiring traditional prajna to fulfill people’s enthusiasm for study in those days. From this perspective, it is skeptical whether