Free Tibet

Last night's ITN News led with the horrific video footage of Chinese border guards shooting dead 2 unarmed Tibetans - one a 17 year-old Buddhist nun - as they attempted to flee the country - and herding off dozens of other Tibetans, including children, with no word given yet of their fate.

It seemed like a good time to post another link to the Free Tibet campaign: http://www.freetibet.org/

ITN reported the Chinese Foreign Ministry as talking about a "fight to the death with the Dalai Lama". On one side the world's largest armed forces. On the other pacifist nuns and monks.

Quite apart from the horrendous human rights abuses perpetrated inside China - documented by Amnesty here - http://web.amnesty.org/library/eng-chn/index - Tibet has been an occupied country since the 1950s and effectively subject to cultural cleansing as ethnic Chinese settlers are moved in and Tibetan indigenous culture repressed.

There is only a very narrow window in which the West can effectively put pressure on China to clean up its human rights act before it becomes too powerful militarily and economically for our protests to have any effect.