Activists accused China on Monday of seeking to “erase” the cultural and religious identity of Tibetans, and demanded that a review of Beijing's human rights policies at the United Nations on Tuesday focus on “cultural genocide.”
• Read also: Landslide in China: Dozens missing, at least eight dead
According to independent experts and Tibetan activists, more than one million children in Tibet between the ages of three and eighteen have been separated from their families and placed in a network of boarding schools.
“This represents almost 80% of Tibetan school-age children, (…) the vast majority of Tibetan children,” denounced Ladon Tithong, director of the Tibetan Labor Institute on Monday in Geneva, on the eve of the review by the Human Rights Commission. China Human Rights Register Rights Council.
Beijing defends this boarding school system, believing it respects cultural rights and insisting it is especially necessary in remote, highland and sparsely populated areas, where children often have to travel long distances to get to school.
But an independent UN panel of experts warned last year that the system “appears to operate as a large-scale coercive program aimed at assimilating Tibetans into the majority Han culture, which is contrary to international human rights standards.”
In schools, children face “very intense indoctrination,” Tithong accused in an interview with AFP in Geneva.
According to her, they leave these schools barely able to communicate in the Tibetan language and are critical of Tibetan traditions.
“This is a case of cultural genocide, and it is clear,” she said.
AFP requested a comment from China's Permanent Representation in Geneva, but did not receive any immediate response.
China will undergo its universal periodic review on Tuesday before the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
This Council mechanism subjects each member state to questions from its peers regarding its human rights policy.
In addition to Tibet, the suppression of civil liberties in Xinjiang will certainly be mentioned, as will the situation in Hong Kong.
Political indoctrination
“We have seen a deterioration of rights in China, especially in Tibet,” Thinlai Chokye, a representative of exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, said at Monday’s meeting.
Tibet has alternated over the centuries between independence and control from China, which it says “peacefully liberated the country” in 1951 and brought a modern infrastructure and education system to the previously underdeveloped region.
It is a way of seeing that many Tibetans who condemn the oppression and erasure of their culture do not share this view.
The network of boarding schools was the main tool for erasing Tibetan culture, according to Ms. Tithong.
She compares the system to residential schools in Canada and the United States that were intended for indigenous children to be forcibly assimilated into “white Christian” culture.
In Tibet, “it's not just about depriving children of their traditional identity, their language, their culture and their religion, it's actually about trying to imprint on them this kind of hyper-Chinese identity. Nationalism with this Communist Party as its foundation,” she says. He says.
For this activist, it is important to take advantage of China's Universal Periodic Review to highlight this issue and demand that Beijing put an end to “this very visible campaign of assimilation, … eliminating the identity and culture of Tibetan children through school.” System.”
