[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 118 (Tuesday, September 9, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E1693]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

[[Page E1693]]


                  REPRESENTATIVE WOLF'S TRIP TO TIBET

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. NEWT GINGRICH

                               of georgia

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, September 9, 1997

  Mr. GINGRICH. Mr. Speaker, I would like to submit for the 
Congressional Record two articles from the Washington Post about my 
Republican colleague Frank Wolf's recent trip to Tibet. Gaining 
admittance only by concealing his identity as a Member of Congress, 
Representative Wolf observed first hand the repression of human rights 
that stands in sharp contrast to all that America stands for.
  The time has come for President Clinton to join with Representative 
Wolf and me in encouraging the new Chinese leadership to move toward a 
freer and more open Tibet, where individuals can worship without fear 
and unleash their creativity and talents in ways that will bring 
increased prosperity not only to Tibet, but to China as well. As the 
world's beacon of hope and freedom, America must do her part to 
encourage this transition.

               [From the Washington Post, Aug. 22, 1997]

                  Representative Wolf's Trip to Tibet

       Northern Virginia Rep. Frank Wolf has never been one for 
     the typical junket. His advocacy of human rights and 
     religious freedom in other countries has taken him to the 
     Siberian gulag, to Ceausescu's Romania and to war-ravaged 
     Chechnya. Now he is just back from Tibet--the first House 
     member to visit that oppressed land, he says, since Chinese 
     forces moved in nearly 40 years ago.
       What Mr. Wolf found will not shock anyone who has followed 
     Beijing's brutal repression of Tibetan culture, religion, 
     language and people--a repression applied with what Sen. 
     Daniel Patrick Moynihan has called ``Stalinoid dementia.'' We 
     hope, though, that Mr. Wolf's report will awaken some 
     Americans who haven't paid sufficient attention to Tibet's 
     slow suffocation.
       A vast land along the Himalayan top of the world, Tibet is 
     home to only 6 million people--no conceivable threat to 
     China's billion-plus. But China has virtually sealed Tibet 
     off, keeping reporters and human rights observers out and 
     even barring California Rep. Christopher Cox, a member of the 
     Republican leadership. Mr. Wolf gained access, along with an 
     aide and a Tibetan-speaker, by joining a tour group and not 
     advertising his profession. (He dressed in ``traditional 
     tourist garb,'' Mr. Wolf says.)
       What he found, Mr. Wolf says, is repression more brutal 
     than he witnessed in Soviet Russia or Communist Romania. 
     While Chinese in Beijing have won some measure of liberty, at 
     least in economic affairs, he says, ``there is no freedom in 
     Tibet, period.'' People are watched and afraid--yet, when 
     they realized Mr. Wolf and his associates were from America, 
     they were willing to risk imprisonment to describe their 
     plight. Like their leader in exile, the Dalai Lama, most 
     Tibetans are not seeking independence but only the freedom to 
     speak their language and practice their Buddhism without 
     being thrown in jail or having their children taken away.
       Mr. Wolf, like many members of Congress of both parties, 
     urges the Clinton administration to make Tibet--and the 
     hundreds of Tibetan prisoners of conscience--an important 
     part of U.S.-China dialogue leading up to and during a 
     planned presidential summit this fall. He also urges U.S. 
     churches, synagogues and citizens to mount the kind of 
     letter-writing, prisoner-adopting campaigns that helped 
     sustain Soviet dissidents. Tibetans don't have the kind of 
     diaspora that kept Soviet Jewry, Armenia, Poland and other 
     captive nations on the U.S. agenda during the Cold War. But 
     they have an equal claim on America's conscience, and their 
     treatment provides a useful measure of the true nature of the 
     Chinese regime.


               [From the Washington Post, August 3, 1997]

                       The Man Who Won't Give Up

                           (By Mary McGrory)

       Frank Wolf, the Republican congressman from Northern 
     Virginia, has a conscience. He assumes that his fellow 
     Americans do too, and that if he tells them how bad things 
     are in countries they seldom hear about, they will do 
     something about it. He is inevitably considered naive. He 
     doesn't mind. His faith in his fellow man comes from his 
     faith in God. He is a devout Presbyterian who believes 
     passionately in good works and has raised his five children 
     to volunteer on behalf of the unfortunate.
       Wolf is just back from another of his trips to difficult, 
     dangerous places. This time it was Tibet, which has been 
     groaning under the Chinese yoke. He slipped in on an ordinary 
     tourist visa, which did not identify him as a member of 
     Congress. Tibetans risked their lives to tell him about the 
     oppression and religious persecution they are suffering. His 
     press conference afterwards at the National Press Club was 
     packed--perhaps because it is August, and the news drought is 
     severe. He told an international audience that ``China is 
     squeezing the life out of Tibet. . . . It is unspeakably 
     brutal.''
       Wolf's success in rousing the American people is still to 
     be seen, but he got China's attention. The New China News 
     Agency issued a statement of outrage from a Tibetan official 
     who accused Wolf of being a troublemaker and a bad reporter: 
     There is no religious persecution and all is well with happy 
     Tibetans. Wolf was, of course, delighted with additional 
     notice to his cause.
       Some reporters may have been goaded into attendance at the 
     press conference by one of Wolf's typically reproachful, 
     guilt-producing letters calling on the recipient to fulfill a 
     moral obligation by spreading the word about whatever ghastly 
     situation he has just observed. Last January, Wolf went to 
     East Timor in Indonesia and brought back an account of 
     killing that he thought President Clinton should do something 
     about. He later wrote to him in terms that show he has heeded 
     the counsel of the 15th-century German mystic Thomas a 
     Kempis: ``Fawn not upon the great.'' In Wolf's letter of May 
     29, he told the president that he better shape up on East 
     Timor because people are making connections between U.S. 
     inaction in that wretched land and the campaign scandal of 
     the White House raking in millions from Asians with axes 
     to grind.
       ``Respectfully but with candor, Mr. President, many believe 
     your administration has adopted or changed its policy with 
     regard to Indonesia and East Timor because of influence 
     exerted by the Riadys and as a result of the for profit 
     relationship which developed between the Lippo Group and Mr. 
     Web Hubble (sic). Press reports of Mr. Hubble's personal 
     visit to East Timor have only fueled this belief. I do not 
     know if this is true. . . . I do know, however, that we have 
     no effective policy . . . . in East Timor.''
       Wolf gives himself a missionary's license to speak truth to 
     the mighty. The appalling conditions he describes vindicate 
     his frankness and his importunities. His Northern Virginia 
     constituency may not relate to his anguish over such places 
     as El Salvador, Burma, Sudan, Bosnia, Chechnya and Ethiopia. 
     But Wolf keeps both feet on the ground--or rather on the 
     highway--at all times. He is chairman of the House 
     Appropriations subcommittee on transportation, a post that 
     gives him great power. And his constituent service--watching 
     over the rights of the many federal workers who live in 
     Virginia's 10th District--is famous.
       His evolution from ``pothole politician'' to watchman on 
     the ramparts of world freedom happened gradually. First, he 
     went to Ethiopia in 1984 with Rep. Tony Hall (D-Ohio), a 
     crusader against hunger who is Wolf's best friend in Congress 
     and a fellow member of a House Bible study group. They went 
     to Romania together and saw misery that made them come home 
     and promote a bill against Most Favored Nation (MFN) 
     treatment for the Ceausescu government. Since then, Wolf has 
     never looked back or lost hope.
       At his press conference, he urged Americans to write 
     letters to Tibetan political prisoners. Based on the 
     experience with Soviet prisoners of conscience, he says the 
     Tibetans might not get the letters, but wardens made 
     conscious of outside observation might give better treatment. 
     He wants more congressional delegations in Tibet so that 
     Chinese overlords will know the world has not forgotten. And 
     he can see the day, when MFN will be denied to China. The 
     American people are way ahead of Congress, their president 
     and the business community, according to polls. One showed 
     overwhelming opposition to MFN for China, 67 percent to 18 
     percent.
       Wolf's inspiration is William Wilberforce, a prominent 
     19th-century British politician who spent his life working to 
     abolish the slave trade. It took 34 years for Parliament to 
     outlaw it, a month after Wilberforce's death. ``It just takes 
     time,'' says Wolf.

     

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