His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s Special Envoy calls on Tibetans to record their sufferingThursday, 2 April 2009, 12:41 p.m.

Harry Wu (L), Executive Director of the Laogai Research Foundation, with Lodi Gyari, Special Envoy for His Holiness the Dalai Lama (R) on 31 March 2009

Washington: Lodi
Gyari, Special Envoy of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, has issued a call
for Tibetans, in Tibet and around the world to record their experiences
of suffering over the past 50 years. “It is vitally important,
especially as a testament to those Tibetans no longer here, that we
record our personal experiences of suffering. We should do this, not to
fuel resentments but to help the Chinese people understand our true
history and to know that we are justified in our hopes for a future
Tibet.”Speaking at the 31 March opening of an exhibit on prison
labor camps in Tibet, Lodi Gyari praised the work of Harry Wu, the
founder and Executive Director of the Laogai Research Foundation, in
documenting the vast network of labor camps in China and Tibet. “Harry
Wu’s work at the Laogai Museum is done for the same reasons that the
Holocaust Museum was founded: to remember and to expose these ugly
truths so that such things will never happen again,” Gyari said. “The
Tibetan people can learn to forgive, but we must not forget.”Lodi
Gyari urged Tibetan youth in particular to learn about their family
experiences from their parents and relatives. “This is a part of the
legacy our Tibetan children have inherited, and it is the moral
responsibility of every Tibetan family to know their history and to
collect evidence of the events that have shaped their lives.”The
exhibit at the Laogai Museum opened exactly 50 years to the day that
His Holiness the Dalai Lama crossed the Tibetan border into India,
having departed Lhasa in the dark of night on March 17, to seek asylum
from the Indian government and, as he has written, “to devote myself to
keeping hope alive for my people everywhere.”Harry Wu recalled
in his remarks at the opening of the exhibit that, as a young man in
Beijing in 1959, he went to an exhibition which purported to show
atrocities in Tibet prior to its so called “peaceful liberation.”In
reality, as soon as the People’s Liberation Army had assumed full
control of Tibet, an enormous program of labor camp construction got
underway for the incarceration of the thousands of Tibetans who
actively opposed or who were suspected of opposing China’s invasion of
Tibet.”What has happened over 50 years in Tibet?” Wu asked.
“One, temples and monasteries were destroyed. Two, labor camps were
built. This exhibit is here to portray that suffering,” Wu concluded.The
exhibit, “Laogai in Tibet” has been produced in collaboration with the
International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) and will run until 30 May at the
Laogai Museum located at 1109 M Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20005.–ICT report