Statement of Protest Concerning the Rejection of our Tibet-Tongzhou Joint
Nomination to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register
Fund for Archives of the Tongzhou Massacre
October 31, 2017(1.) On October 30, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and CulturalOrganization) released on its homepage a list of seventy-eight new items to be registered inthe Memory of the World Register. Previously, the Fund for Archives of the Tongzhou
Massacre (represented by Professor Fujioka Nobukatsu) and Gyari Bhutuk (former memberof the Tibetan Parliament in Exile) had jointly nominated for registration a document
collection entitled "Abuses of Human Rights – Tibet and Tongzhou" (Registration CodeMoW2016-75). However, this nomination was not included on UNESCO's list, and it isthus apparent that UNESCO has decided to reject it for inclusion.
(2.) The process that led to this decision was as follows. On April 10, 2017, the Memory of
the World Register Sub-Committee presented us with a letter pointing out two problems
with our nomination. Firstly, our description of the location of the documents wasincomplete, and secondly, any nomination submitted with the aim of reinterpreting thehistory of East Asia was against the mandate of the Memory of the World Programme. Thisletter constituted de facto rejection of our nomination, but we were told that any objections
to the opinions of the sub-committee would be conveyed in full to the International
Advisory Committee that is in charge of handing down the final verdict.
Therefore, we the nominators prepared a concrete rebuttal to expose the ways in which thesub-committee had completely misunderstood our intentions. We also improved the flawed
descriptions of our twenty-seven submitted documents and revamped the whole text of ourwritten application in order to change passages that had been criticized as being biased. We
delivered these materials to UNESCO before the deadline of May 8. Nonetheless, by thetime that UNESCO had announced its list of new registrations, we had still received noreply concerning the status of our revised nomination.
(3.) In Tibet, the victims of massacres exceeded 1.2 million people. Though these are theofficial figures released by the Tibetan Government in Exile, the Chinese government has
never provided the international community with a fact-based rebuttal of this estimate. Thisis because the Chinese side also acknowledges that massacres did occur, even if it disputes
some of the details, and the historical records of the atrocities are already publicly available
to the international community. Therefore, having these records included in the Memory of
the World Register is not an attack on China, but rather an attempt to have one of theunsavory events of human history officially registered. In the past, the UN itself has issued
statements on the human rights problem in Tibet on three separate occasions.

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The Tongzhou Massacre of 1937 may have been a much smaller incident in scale, but justlike the atrocities perpetrated in Tibet, it was a barbaric violation of human rights and anaffront to human decency. As two of the negative legacies of twentieth century humanhistory, our memory of these terrible tragedies must not be consigned to oblivion by future
generations of people.
We the nominators deeply regret that UNESCO failed to make the right decision on thisoccasion and accept our just submission to the Memory of the World Register.
(4.) Since UNESCO claims to be unable to register these historical facts, next time we will
make sure to ask for an explanation as to why it was able to recognize the nomination
submitted by China concerning the so-called "massacre" perpetrated by the Japanese Armyin Nanking, even though its very existence has been called into doubt by experts.
This double standard by UNESCO is an unacceptable violation of the spirit of both theUnited Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is causing greatdamage to UNESCO's reputation as an international organization.
Recently, UNESCO has moved up implementation of its procedural reforms at the initiativeof the Japanese government, and they are having some effect. UNESCO postponed its
judgment on two nominations concerning the comfort women from starkly different
perspectives, and recommended that both sides discuss the matter with one another. We do
not deny that this represents a small improvement. If the Memory of the World Programme
were to avoid politically contentious topics from now on, it could likely be a constructive
step in the right direction.
Nevertheless, as long as the conditions that led to the Chinese government's politicallymotivated nomination of the factually dubious "Nanking Massacre" still exist, we intend tocontinue to assert the legitimacy of our claims in order to encourage UNESCO to adhere toits stated mandate.

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