Lastly, said Gyari, Tibet for all of its years of independence had been a natural wilderness park. All the Chinese would have to do to preserve Tibetan wilderness would be to leave Tibet, he said. As in other parts of the world, the dictatorship's crimes against nature are paralleled by crimes against humanity. One-sixth of the Tibetan population has been exterminated in prison camps or by starvation. Six thousand Buddhist monasteries, temples, and other cultural structures have been destroyed.
Chinese soldiers garrison every major town in Tibet to prevent rebellion.
Elite soldiers watch the regular troops, to keep them from revolting. Life in Tibet before the Chinese Communist invasion was pastoral, primitive, and peaceful. Now the majority of the population in much of Tibet is Chinese immigrants living in concrete apartment blocks. President Bush led the United States into war against Saddam Hussein and his Hitlerian practices of genocide and ecocide. Yet the President has refused to take any action against the Chinese government, whose pillage of Kuwait is at least as destructive of human rights and the environment as was Saddam's pillage of Kuwait.