Re-photo

I’m not a great traveller and it is pretty unlikely I’ll ever go to Tibet, but one of the advantages of being based in London (or at least just on its edge) is that London is a place more or less the whole world comes to.  And comes to in order to protest on its streets about what goes on in their country.

We are Tibetans, not Chinese

Once our country had a great record for giving refuge to the oppressed from other countries. Many of the great revolutionary figures of the nineteenth and twentieth lived at least for a short time in London and their time here is marked by statues, blue plaques or both. Of course our reputation has now been tarnished by restrictions on entry and a heavy-handed enforcement of these by immigration officers which have turned away many genuine refugees and a shocking system of detention centres.

Last Saturday’s march to mark the 50th anniversary today of the popular demonstrations in Lhasa against the Chinese occupation of Tibet was, as in previous years a noisy and colourful event. As well as a large proportion of the UK’s small Tibetan community there were also Tibetans who had travelled from Europe to be there and many British supporters.  There are the usual discrepancies about the number of demonstrators taking part, with reports ranging from “a small number” on CNN, 500 on Sky and Reuters and over 1000 on AFP.  Before I left the march I stood and counted as best I could the people going past me down Regent St, and AFP seemed to have got it about right.

Palden Gyatso and Tibetan flag

Among those was at least one man who had been in Lhasa on 10 March 1959. Then a young Tibetan monk,  Palden Gyatso took part in the peaceful demonstrations. In the violent repression that followed, some 80,000 Tibetans were killed and many imprisoned. He spent 33 years in jail and prison camps, and was subjected to beatings and extreme torture. At the start of the march he attempted to deliver a letter to Chinese Ambassador at the Chinese Embassy which included detailed evidence about his treatment by the Chinese, but the police on duty refused to allow this to be delivered by hand.

You can read more Tibet,  Palden Gyatso, and the London march on My London Diary, which also has pictures of this annual march from some previous years: 2000,  2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007  and 2008.

I also photographed it in 2001, and there is one picture on the web site,  along with a link that says “more pictures to follow” which I wrote at the time but never got round to putting them on-line.  And the first few years I only have black and white on-line as I was still shooting film and only had a black and white flatbed scanner.  Looking back on work from just a few years ago is a reminder of how much things have changed in those few years, and how we’ve come to take those changes for granted.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 11:26 am and is filed under My Own Work, Political Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.