Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-03-10-Speech-4-192"
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"en.20050310.22.4-192"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, I am very glad that we are having this debate, for this year marks 23 years since this House, here in Strasbourg, adopted the Habsburg Report on the decolonisation of the Baltic states and asked the UN’s decolonisation sub-committee to take up their cause.
Having at the time been on the rapporteur’s staff, I still remember the counter-arguments to the effect that independence for the Baltic states would never be possible, that this was utopian fantasy, that the Balts possessed no right to self-determination, and so on.
The fact that there are, today, Members and Commissioners from the Baltic states sitting in this House should encourage us not to be deterred from our course where Tibet is concerned. Tibet is – as has been said here today many times – not only in essence a human rights problem, but much more than that. There are those who talk of it being a minorities issue, but to do so is to misread the facts. Tibet is not a minority problem; the problem is that it is a country that has been overrun by colonisers. China is a colonial power – no more and no less. If the Chinese want to go on living together with the Tibetans – a possibility to which the Dalai Lama has referred – then it is they who must take the first and crucial step and gain the trust of the Tibetan people – something they can do only by acknowledging and defending their right of self-determination, their own culture and religion and their rights as human beings. It is only through partnership that integration is possible. Suppression integrates nobody; it results in disintegration.
That is why it makes such an impact that so many former human rights activists – Milan Horáček, who is sitting here, his former fellow-campaigner Václav Havel, many of our Polish Members – are so strong in their support for Tibet, for it is a clear sign that Europe’s freedom and Tibet’s are, in the long run, inseparable one from another, and that freedom is indivisible.
So my thanks go to Mr Thomas Mann and to all the others in our group with primary responsibility for Tibet, for having joined with Members from other groups in securing for us this debate on a current issue before we move on to matters of urgent importance. The only thing I have to say to the Chinese leadership is that we, in the European Parliament, will not give up until this symbol of a free Tibet that we have set up here can indeed shine forth in freedom, and until the Tibetans can follow their own democratically chosen path."@en1
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