What's this Tibet fuss about?

I must admit that I didn't know much about the Tibet situation. I just found it amusing how the Olympic torch was almost extinguished by a protestor. And how one of the runners for the torch pulled out a Tibetan flag from her sleeve and was then immediately set upon by security. Or those serious Chinese dudes (who in fact are Chinese paramilitary) running with the torch get into a full security pose when something happens. Its quite a circus with what's happening with the torch.

So I thought to myself, what is all this Tibet fuss about? Our Prime Minister, K-Rudd (what a mad nickname) aka Kevin Rudd has raised the issue of Tibet with the China's Prime Minister. Using the words "serious human rights abuses" - that takes a lot of balls to do that - and in Chinese too! He didnt skirt around the issue, he raised it several times.

All this stuff raised my curiosity - I mean these people are protesting for a reason. If anything, they have at least raised the issue around the world. I knew nothing, so I did the next best thing, I googled "Tibet" and read the first couple of links.

I checked out the Wikipedia entry on Tibet, which is way too in depth because its about everything - the history, geography, etc.. But its good for getting an overview about Tibet. So I picked bits which were interesting, but still didnt quite understand what it was about. Then I checked out Tibet.com, which is supposedly the official site for the government in exile in Tibet - but the site didnt seem to user friendly. That left me with Google news, where I found some debate about whether Extinguising the flame does anything for the situation. Well of course it doesn't. Sports and politics don't mix. Or do they?


But it achieved its primary objective - awareness of the situation. To someone young like myself, who keeps up to date with world affairs but didn't know a lot, it gave me an interest. It raised the issue and made me curious. I've know looked it up. I think that's the first step to issues like this. Its about drawing the world's attention to something that is going on - that has been largely ignored. We hear news stories every day, that get buried. Another terrorist bombing in Israel. Soldiers clash with guerrillas in Kashmir. Riots in Africa.

Somehow, this issue was raised from all the dredge that we call news - because the Olympics are in Beijing, and nearly all governments don't want to piss off this big bad monster called China. Even Google toed the line with China, and limited searches only to China approved sites - they banned BBC.com, Blogger, etc.. The fact that Kevin Rudd raised the human rights abuses was in my eyes monumental and he didn't back down from his comments, despite the official chinese newspaper re-reporting those comments in a typical china friendly kind of way.

These protestors wanted the world to know about the situation in Tibet. This begs the question - so what now?

I'm out like the Olympic torch,

DJ Ho.