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Published on March 27, 2008

Why the rush? And why will the public be given no opportunity to pass judgement on the yet-to-be-announced amendments. There will be no public referendum for the charter amendments, as this would cost Bt2 billion, and Parliament would not be dissolved after the amendments.

If this outrageous plan survives and is carried out, what will be the outcome? Will the people rise up and say "enough is enough"? Or will we see the usual mai pen rai attitude that allows crooked and corrupt politicians to feather their nests?

I foresee very unsettled and unhappy times ahead.

William Reynolds

Chiang Mai

Tibet has always been an independent nation

Re: "Religious extremism could take root in Tibet", Letters, March 26.

Though it is much appreciated that The Nation prints letters with all views, this letter is absurd. It was obviously written by a Chinese person who has been successfully indoctrinated by Beijing's propaganda, and who is probably in cahoots with the Chinese government. Why not sign his real name?

He bemoans rioting by monks. The difference in the uprisings in Tibet and Burma are slight. In Burma's case, they've been under iron-fisted rule for fifty years. Similarly, Tibetans have been controlled by the Beijing politburo for fifty years. Indeed, so many Han (lowland) Chinese have been sent to Tibet to settle, that Tibetans have become a disenfranchised minority in their own country.

RM says the Dalai Lama "is destroying a time-honoured religion by using it to achieve a political objective". What a silly statement. The Dalai Lama has been counselling peace and negotiations for decades. If I had been born in a country with centuries of independence (with its own army and government) that had been forcefully occupied via a military campaign, I wouldn't be as cool-headed as the Dalai Lama. 

For centuries, Chinese governments traded emissaries with the kingdom of Tibet. There was no question in previous Chinese epochs, nor with Tibet's neighbours, that Tibet had long been an independent kingdom. Instead of a succession of kings, it had a succession of lamas - purely a semantic difference. RM should take the paper-dragon mask off his head and do some objective research on the subject - before he submits such ridiculous assertions.

Ken Albertsen

Chiang Rai

Nationalism leads inevitably to racism

Re: "Chinese colonialism at the heart of the Tibet problem", Letters, March 25.

Sai Wansai writes, "Tibet and China are two different nations" and should therefore be two political entities. The Thais and the Malays in the South are also two different nations, so are the Turks and the Kurds.

The Germans and the Turks are also two different nations, but more than four million Turks live in Germany. Many countries have important ethnic minorities, old and new ones; just look across the border to Burma, Laos, Cambodia and Malaysia.

Sai Wansai calls for a revision of the "largely European colonial boundaries", because "this is an unending source of ethnic conflict, affecting internal stability". What Wansai proposes is "ethnic cleansing", the source of which is racism. For thousands of years, different ethnic communities have lived together under changing rulers and within changing borders. When nationalism, the concept of the nation-state, emerged, tensions between different "nations", ethnic groups, became inevitable.

Some radical Tibetan nationalists seem to dream of an ethnic ghetto with a huge signboard, "Chinese not welcome". Tibet has a long history of xenophobia. It should not be ignored, however, that more than one third of all Tibetans live in four Chinese provinces with mixed ethnic composition, where the Tibetans are a minority.

Manfred Liebig

GERMANY

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