"One account documented a former health worker from Eastern Tibet. In 1988 she became pregnant for the second time. Resisting initial pressures from family planning officials to have an abortion, she was fined 1500 Yuan (an enormous amount of money for most Tibetans). On hearing of her pregnancy, a Chinese doctor at the hospital in which she worked, pressurised her by saying: 'If you insist on having the child, the financial punishment is a small matter compared with the political crime you are committing. From now on, you will only get 30 per cent of your salary. Your salary will never increase. Your child will not have the right to claim his ration card and will not be admitted to school.'
Some four months into the pregnancy she collapsed under incessant pressure and submitted to 'menstrual termination of pregnancy (MTP)'. She says about her operation: 'The complications and pain I suffered in the course of this operation were so terrible that I can't talk about it. However, it was nothing compared to what women suffer when they are operated on during their sixth and seventh months of pregnancy, which happens quite often at this hospital. In such cases, 0.2 ml of a solution called le xun nur is injected into the foetal bag by using a 12-inch syringe. The foetus loses its blood and stops breathing. About 72 hours later the dead foetus is delivered. I know at least twelve women who underwent such operations.'"

Operation like these can be seriously damaging emotional ly and physically. After such an operation a woman's menstrual flow can become erratic. It also causes constant pain the back and intestines. Sometimes women are taken from there home in the night to be sterilized and have their pregnncies aborted. There are also mobile birth control teams who arrive in a village and sterilize all women of childbearing age then the team members moved on to the next village.

Girls are also treated inhumanly. Many are left to die in China's state orphanages as a result of China's one-child policy and Chinese traditional preference for boys. In 1981 Deng Xiaoping advised family planning officers: "In order to control the population use whatever means you must, but do it." In 1992 Cheng Bangzhu, Deputy Governor of Hunan province, ordered birth control teams: "In the autumn family planning drive, urban and rural areas must closely co-operate with one another, and must comb every household for unscheduled pregnancies, for which remedial measures should be taken."

The scale of human rights violations and the suffering of Tibetan and Chinese women is staggering. It is estimated that between 1971 and 1985 alone there have been some 100 million coercive 'birth control operations', involving forced sterilisations and abortions. The resulting birth control programme has had a devastating impact on the Tibetan population. Some 1.2 million Tibetans are thought to have perished through famine, disease, and in the 'Twenty Year War' of resistance (1954-74).

Since the Nazi obsession with eugenics, no state has attached so much importance to what has been comprehensively described as 'the management and breeding for the purpose of improving stock.'

China's Gansu province (which contains large parts of annexed Tibetan territory) issued a mandatory sterilisation regulation 'prohibiting reproduction by the mentally retarded'. China's definition of what constitutes retardation includes having an IQ of less than 49, or 'handicaps' in 'language, memory, orientation and thinking.' Similar eugenics laws were adopted by at least five other provinces.

Tibetan women find themselves at the mercy of politically motivated decisions that result in mass sterilisation campaigns. Some 65,000 women and men have been sterilised in just two months. 36

Films on these atrocities towards women - Women of the Yellow Earth, The Dying Rooms, and Return to the Dying Rooms

Political Prisoners
Situated in the north eastern outskirts of Lhasa, opened in 1965 and built with forced labor it is known in Chinese as Di Yi Jianyu-No 1. Prison. It is arranged into a series of nine units with an estimated population of 1000 of which some 600 are thought to be political prisoners ranging in age from 18 to 85. Most of these are monks and nuns. Conditions inside are harsh with a brutalising regime of forced labour, systematic torture, poor diet, and constant brainwashing programmes. Alarming cases of forcible blood and human organ extractions have also been known to happen.

Atrocities on Religion
"During the Cultural Revolution, monasteries, temples and cultural centers were systematically looted of value and then dismantled. Valuable religious statues, thangkas, metal artifacts and other treasures were shipped to China either to be sold in international antique markets or to be melted down. Religious texts were burnt and mixed with field manure and sacred Mani stones were used for making toilets and pavements. Over 6,000 monasteries were destroyed and Tens of Thousands of monks and nuns were executed, sent to concentration camps or sent back to their villages. All religious activity was banned.