[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 148 (Wednesday, November 30, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: November 30, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                       HONORING ABRAHAM ROSENTHAL

  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, a little less than two weeks ago I 
attended a marvelous event honoring Abraham Rosenthal and his work on 
behalf of the Tibetan people. Mr. Rosenthal has enjoyed an illustrious 
career at the New York Times and almost throughout has found time to 
remind us all of the continuing struggle of occupied Tibet.
  For his efforts, the International Campaign for Tibet honored him 
with the ``Light of Truth Award'' at which they presented him with a 
Tibetan ritual butter lamp from the Dalai Lama himself.
  Unfortunately, a recent illness prevented Mr. Rosenthal's attendance, 
however, his son, Andrew, was there to accept the award on his behalf 
and to read a statement which he had prepared. I was fortunate to be 
asked to make a few remarks before the award was presented. I ask 
unanimous consent that the text of my remarks and those of A.M. 
Rosenthal's be placed in the Record at this time.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

            International Campaign for Tibet Benefit Dinner

                    (Presented by Andrew Rosenthal)

       Sometimes, when I write about Tibet, readers ask genuinely 
     puzzled questions.
       Why do I care so much about Tibet? And, given all the other 
     things more immediate to American interest as they see it, 
     why should they care as much as I ask them to?
       A third question--since China has not budged for a half 
     century about Tibet, except to make its captivity of Tibet 
     ever more cruel, what makes me think Tibet will ever be 
     recognized for what it is, a nation among nations?
       These are important questions, decently intended. The fact 
     that they are still asked makes it more important that we 
     keep answering them. In truth, it is more and more important 
     that we keep answering them for ourselves to ourselves, to 
     keep alive the campaign for Tibet inside us.
       They all add up to one question: why? Why is Tibet, almost 
     alone among nations, denied the most elemental rights of 
     nationhood and freedom?
       When I was a young reporter, The Times assigned me to help 
     out a the bureau it had set up at the brand new U.N.
       The total membership of the U.N. then was fifty six. That 
     struck a British delegate as dangerously large. He warned one 
     day that if the U.N. kept growing, why one day it would be as 
     high as seventy or seventy-five.
       Today the membership of the U.N. stands at one hundred 
     eighty four. Among them are many that are minute in 
     population and size. Their most important industry is the 
     bureaucracy needed to run them.
       And we all know that there are many others whose people do 
     not share most of the qualities of nationhood--common 
     language, religion or history or historic boundary. Their 
     boundaries and nationhood were imposed on them by colonial 
     rulers in London, Paris, Berlin or Brussels. They were the 
     creations of the bureaucratic convenience of colonial 
     administrators thousands of miles away.
       Yet here they are, full members of the U.N. which as the 
     world has turned out most of them should be. Their flags fly 
     on First Avenue and their Ambassadors are treated with 
     dignity around the world--again as it should be.
       And yet here we have one nation excluded. Tibet, a nation 
     whose history is almost as old as the memory of mankind. A 
     nation with a common language, ancient borders, united 
     history, a culture unique to the world, a religion that binds 
     together not only its own people but attracts and embraces 
     men and women all over the world.
       Tibet is not only barred from the U.N. membership but its 
     representatives usually are not even welcome in its halls and 
     meeting rooms--or in foreign offices and state departments of 
     the world.
       So I tell people who write me that the question is not can 
     Tibet be a nation among nations but how did it come to be 
     that this nation, this quintessential embodiment of 
     nationhood, has been so long so cruelly barred and cast out?
       The great sadness is that we do not have to search for the 
     answer. Tibet is not recognized as a nation among nations 
     because the other countries of the world--American, European, 
     African and Asian--have made a deliberate decision to abandon 
     it to its captors.
       The most important reason is money.
       Beijing made it clear that it would reduce or eliminate 
     trade with those countries that supported human rights, let 
     alone political freedom, for the Tibetans. To this economic 
     pressure, virtually every country in the world simply 
     surrendered.
       Among these countries were many who really sympathized with 
     Beijing--United Nations members ruled by their own 
     dictatorships. For them, the liberation of any captive people 
     was simply encouragement to their own.
       At least they had some excuse--the brotherhood of tyranny.
       Our own nation, like the rest of the West, has none. We 
     must state it plainly: U.S. policy toward Tibet has been 
     determined by greed for trade with China at whatever cost in 
     human freedom. Others will put it more delicately. There is 
     no reason for us to do so, no excuse to do so.
       All this brings us back to our personal and national 
     interest in China. It is fairly simple. Tibet is a criminal. 
     So am I, so are all of you here, so is our entire American 
     nation.
       The same political crimes that bound us to the prisoners in 
     the Nazi concentration camps, the dissidents in the Soviet 
     Gulags, the Latin American and Khymer Rouge death pits, the 
     torture chambers of Syria, Iraq, Iran and Libya, bind us to 
     Tibet and Tibetans.
       Every day that we live under the grace of freedom we commit 
     the crimes for which Tibetans have been made captive, 
     tortured and massacred and for which their nations has been 
     sundered, occupied and burned. We talk, we write, we act, we 
     think, we pray. Those are the crimes that bind Americans to 
     all who yearn for freedom and suffer for it.
       The U.S. supported political freedom for Eastern Europe and 
     to its credit never recognized the Soviet occupation of the 
     Baltic nations. It supported the nationhood of Israel and is 
     now following a path that will lead to the independence of 
     Palestine. But Tibet has no ethnic or national constituency 
     in the United States.
       Only one thing distinguishes the U.S. from other nations, 
     and makes it cherished around the world. It is the belief 
     that political freedom should be universal. Without that 
     belief, we are just real estate, from sea to shining sea.
       So we, all of us who support Tibetan freedom, are the seeds 
     of the Tibetan constituency . If we love freedom, we are as 
     criminal as any people, any nation, held in captive 
     captivity. So we are all criminals for freedom. We are all 
     Tibetans--the largest American constituency any foreign 
     nation could enjoy in our land.
       I believe this, I believe this constituency will grow and 
     help Tibet taste liberty and I thank you for giving me the 
     chance to say so, through my son.
                                  ____


     Dinner Given by the Campaign for Tibet Honoring A.M. Rosenthal

                         (By Senator Moynihan)

       It is indeed an honor to be asked to speak on an occasion 
     honoring A.M. Rosenthal. I have known him ever so long, and 
     learned from him ever so much, most especially as regards the 
     cause which brings us together this evening, the 
     International Campaign for Tibet.
       My first encounter with this transcending issue came with 
     my appointment as ambassador to India a near quarter century 
     ago. What I knew of that region I had mostly learned from Mr. 
     Rosenthal's reporting in the New York Times, not least of 
     which was the fact that India had given refuge to the Dalai 
     Lama after the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1949. Whilst in 
     New Delhi, I came to know Jagat Mehta, the Indian diplomat 
     who had made these arrangements on instructions from Indian 
     Prime Minister Nehru. In 1974, I attended the coronation of 
     King Jigme Singye Wangchuck of Bhutan, A Buddhist 
     principality bordering Tibet, whose independence the Indians 
     had insisted upon, and in that sense, preserved. Even as the 
     Chinese had seized Tibet.
       In 1975, along with my daughter Maura, I visited China as a 
     guest of George Bush, who was then Chief of our U.S. Liaison 
     Office in Peking. By this time, I was persuaded the Soviet 
     Union would break up along ethnic lines. But I was not 
     prepared for the intensity of ethnic concerns in the People's 
     Republic. One was met at the Canton railroad station by a 
     giant mural of Mao surrounded by ecstatic non-Chinese peoples 
     who occupy more than half the nominal territory of the 
     People's Republic. In Beijing, three year-olds in the 
     Neighborhood Revolutionary Committee of Chi Eh Tao nursery 
     school sang a patriotic song for us which began:

     We will grow up quickly to settle the border regions.
     We will denounce and crush Lin Piao and Confucius.

       A refrain which ended:

     We will each grow a pair of industrial hands.

       Much of that Stalinoid dementia has disappeared from the 
     coastal regions of China, at least for the moment, but not 
     from Tibet. Daughter Maura, just returned from Lhasa, reports 
     that the Mao posters, the population transfers, the anti-
     religious campaigns are as great or greater than ever.
       Is the world to accept the destruction of Tibetan 
     civilization? Are we? Whatever the case with the executive 
     branch, it is hugely important for Americans to be clear that 
     the United States Congress does not. The Foreign Relations 
     Authorization Act, fiscal years 1994 and 1995, Public Law 
     103-226 signed April 30, 1994, states the matter 
     unequivocally.
       ``Congress has determined that Tibet is an occupied 
     sovereign country under international law and that its true 
     representatives are the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government 
     in exile--''
       To drive this postion home, the Senate Committee on Foreign 
     Relations required: ``a report on the state of relations 
     between the United States and those recognized by Congress as 
     the true representatives of the Tibetan people.''
       The report entitle, ``Relations of the United States with 
     Tibet'', was submitted by the Department of State just last 
     month. It is not without merit, and its authors should be 
     treated with respect, given the policy of the executive 
     branch. But one sentence tell all: ``Our policy seeks to 
     support respect for the human rights of ethnic Tibetans, as 
     we do for all Chinese citizens.''
       In diplomacy this is called ``semantic infiltration''. Get 
     the other side in a negotiation to use your terms to describe 
     reality as they would wish it understood. Which is to say 
     that Tibetans are ``Chinese citizens.''
       They are not. They are Chinese prisoners, and will remain 
     so until our nation understands the import of A.M. 
     Rosenthal's words written in 1991: ``Tibet remains in prison, 
     and the United States still refuses to recognize the right of 
     that ancient nation and people to the self rule it had for 
     centuries.''


                               Postscript

       While assembling materials for these remarks, my associate, 
     Michael Lostumbo, found a draft of a ``Letter From Peking'' 
     dated January 26, 1975, which I wrote and submitted to The 
     New Yorker. The closing passage begins as follows:
       ``While it is agreed that few Marxist-Leninist predictions 
     have come true in the twentieth century, it is perhaps not 
     sufficiently noticed that certain predictions about Marxist-
     Leninist regimes have proved durable enough. Lincoln Steffens 
     returned from Moscow in the early years, pronouncing that he 
     had seen the future, and it worked. Well, it was one future, 
     and it has worked for a half century, and may have 
     considerable time left before ethnicity breaks it up. Red 
     China works, too, and is likely to last even longer. It is 
     more than worth a visit, this capital city, and its nursery 
     school of the Neighborhood Revolutionary Committee of Chi Eh 
     Tao. This is also a future, and one even more foreboding.''
       I believe this is the first time in my writing that I 
     stated the belief that the Soviet Union would one day break 
     up along ethnic lines. A no longer brief acquaintance with 
     Central Asia and its history had about convinced me that the 
     Czarist empire was finished. I thought then, at mid-decade, 
     that this dissolution might require ``considerable time.'' By 
     the end of the 1970s I was persuaded it would happen in the 
     1980s. A continuing puzzlement to me, which I hope others 
     would come to share, is why it is that American foreign 
     policy has shown so little understanding of this subject. 
     ``Chinese citizens'', indeed!
       I should note that the ``Letter From Peking'' was never 
     published. The editors at The New Yorker, notably the late 
     Robert K. Bingham, liked it and accepted it. But in the 
     leisurely manner of that eminent journal in those distant 
     days, they were in no rush to publish it. Five months went by 
     and I was appointed by President Ford to be U.S. Permanent 
     Representative to the United Nations. Given the general 
     hostility of my observations, I thought it prudent to ask 
     that the article be withdrawn. The New Yorker editors 
     graciously agreed.

                          ____________________