A Protest That Didn’t Make CNN
Saturday, April 26th, 2008I have been following a thread on a discussion forum on Couchsurfing.com about the Olympic Torch Relay in Australia. An Australian fellow who was among the Tibetan supporters wrote the following posts in response to what he experienced that day. Some of it is repetitious because he is responding to some others who are defending China, primarily a French girl living in Britain who felt that China should not be censored because the people there have not had much experience with protest movements. In the interest of space I am not reprinting her comments here… most of which were in marginal English and it was very difficult to tell what she was intending to say…which was part of the problem with the exchange. My intention, however, was just to reprint his description of what happened…not to argue the pros and cons of it.
However, that said, it is my opinion that the fired-up students were probably sent in to provoke the Tibetan demonstrators so China could capitalize on the unrest. I saw this repeatedly in Oaxaca Mexico during a peaceful teacher strike that was joined by many civil organizations. “Students” (called “porros”) were paid by the government to infiltrate the strike, provoke disturbances, and then the teachers would get blamed. The teachers never knew who was who during the marches when they were joined by several thousand supporters. We also saw it during the protests against the Viet Nam war. Sounds like China is getting the idea…it just needs to learn not to be so obvious.
[read on]
Zoe