UN experts accuse China's government of separating hundreds of thousands of children in Tibet from their parents in order to "assimilate" them.
Beijing dismisses the claims as "lies".
Munich/Beijing – When Xi Jinping talks about the many peoples who live in China, he likes to use the image of the pomegranate.
The Han Chinese and the officially 55 ethnic minorities in the country, China's head of state and party leader keeps saying, should be "like the seeds of a pomegranate - tightly bound together in a Chinese nation".
However, many Tibetans feel increasingly constricted.
Children who are separated from their parents in order to be taught in forced boarding schools seem to suffer particularly badly under Chinese rule.
This is suggested by a new UN report, which speaks of “around one million children” who are affected by the measures.
The boarding school system aims to "assimilate" Tibetan children to the Han majority culture, according to the three UN special rapporteurs who helped draft the report.
Her accusation: Children in Tibet are forced to only speak Chinese at the boarding schools.
“As a result, Tibetan children are losing the ability to speak their mother tongue and communicate in Tibetan with their parents and grandparents, contributing to their assimilation and the erosion of their identity.” UN Special Rapporteurs are unpaid and independent experts who used by the UN Human Rights Council.
Forced boarding schools in China?
Beijing speaks of “lies and rumours”
China's foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning rejected the allegations on Wednesday.
The UN experts "maliciously attacked and discredited China and supported lies and rumours," Mao said.
However, the allegations are not new.
Last year, Penpa Tsering, head of the Tibetan government-in-exile, said Xi Jinping was trying to "destroy the identity of Tibetans by suppressing the Tibetan language."
In an interview with the
Frankfurter Rundschau by IPPEN.MEDIA
, Tsering expressed the fear that "in ten or 15 years there will be people in Tibet who no longer speak their own language" because they were "indoctrinated" as children in Chinese boarding schools.
Tibet
Tibet and China share a long history, during which the two countries were closely linked politically and culturally.
After the end of the Chinese Empire in 1912, Tibet was effectively an independent country.
In 1950, one year after the founding of the People's Republic of China, the Chinese People's Liberation Army invaded Tibet and occupied the "roof of the world".
In 1959 the Dalai Lama, the spiritual and political leader of the Tibetans, fled into exile in Dharamsala in northern India, where he still lives today.
Especially in the years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) countless monasteries and other cultural treasures were destroyed in Tibet, hundreds of thousands of people were murdered.
Tibet is now one of the poorest Chinese provinces.
Thinlay Chukki, representative of the Tibet office in Geneva, told a public hearing on Wednesday that forced boarding schools "affect not only the present generation, but also the future ones".
Tenzin Lekshay, spokesman for the Tibetan government-in-exile, said at the hearing that people who work to preserve traditional Tibetan culture are "persecuted, tortured or imprisoned".
FDP politician: boarding schools in Tibet are “another gross violation of human rights”
The UN special rapporteurs wrote to the Chinese government in November.
It has information that "the Chinese authorities are conducting a large-scale campaign to assimilate Tibetan culture and language," the letter said at the time.
There has apparently been no answer so far, in any case China's foreign ministry recently did not want to answer a corresponding press inquiry.
+
Tibetan schoolchildren in Yunnan province (archive photo): lessons in Chinese.
© Xinhua/Imago
Criticism of the boarding school system also comes from Germany.
The Chair of the Committee on Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid of the German Bundestag, Renata Alt, spoke of "another gross violation of human rights committed by the Communist Party against the Tibetan people".
According to the FDP politician, the Federal Republic of Germany "must not stand by while Tibetan culture is being systematically wiped out".
A strategy for dealing with China is "more urgent than ever".
The federal government is currently working on a China strategy in which guidelines for dealing with the People's Republic are to be laid down.
In the document, the question of human rights "plays an important role," said our editors from the Federal Foreign Office.
In addition to the conditions in Tibet, the situation in the province of Xinjiang, where hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and members of other minorities are said to be imprisoned in re-education camps, is also subject to criticism.
Rubric list picture: © Xinhua/Imago