Throughout the course of its historical evolvement since the very beginning of human society, the management and control of the Tibetan nation with regard to its political matters, governance, and legal system have been carried out by its own people without any sort of external dominion authority. This was because Tibet was a free and fully independent country. Its status as such was fully in keeping with today’s universally defined conditions for the recognition of a sovereign, independent country and for the recognition of the nationality by which such a nationhood is constituted. Besides, Tibet’s history of independence has been more robust and much longer than that of many other sovereign independent countries of today. Notwithstanding this fact, however, the People’s Republic of China launched an armed invasion of the country in 1949. The development culminated on the 10th of March in 1959, when people from all the three provinces of Tibet – monastics as well as the lay public – staged a massive uprising in capital Lhasa in a spontaneous outburst of united protest against the occupying communist Chinese power due the policies they implemented and the military domination they imposed in the country. We are today commemorating the 67th anniversary of that event. It is a day impossible for any Tibetan person to ever forget. It is not only a day of immense importance to all the Tibetan people, for it is also our Martyr’s Day to commemorate the men and women who have sacrificed their all, including their very lives, for the religion, polity, and people of Tibet. And so, for all those who have thus far sacrificed their everything, including their precious lives, for the cause of the people of the Tibetan nation and their freedom, and those who continue to be subjected to limitless inhuman hardship, persecuted by the communist Chinese government under all manners of false pretexts even today, the Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile commend the martyrs for their resoluteness, valour, and selfless patriotism. Along with it, we offer ardent prayers that the heartfelt wishes of the Tibetan people, the living as well as the dead, for the victorious revival of the freedom of Tibet may be realized with utmost certainty, and that they be embraced with the protective compassion of the patron-deity Avalokiteshvara of Tibet for all lifetimes to come.
Read more