Jamyang Norbu has an incredibly powerful essay on Phayul titled, “Looking Back From Nangpa-La.” I recommend every supporter of Tibetan independence and human rights read this essay and share it with friends. Here’s a small excerpt:

It is important to place the context of the shooting in its correct perspective. Of course only two people were killed this time around (though we can be certain that, unknown to us, more have been killed before) and there are, unquestionably, greater massacres taking place around the world. It is the deliberate casualness of the act that sets it apart. In fact it could be argued that the shooting deaths of these two young people was far more cold-blooded and criminal than many other cases of killings of civilians around the world. First of all the Nangpa-la shootings did not happen in conflict area. Tibetans are not launching Qasam rockets against China. Tibetans are not sending suicide bombers to Chinese cities. Tibetan leaders are not calling for Communist China “to be wiped off the face of the earth”. They are in fact doing everything they can to accommodate Beijing’s demands.

The Tiananmen massacre has been rationalized by some Western experts with the observation that the regime’s power was being threatened by the students. But what threat did those young Nangpa-la escapees constitute to China’s control of Tibet? The killing of the two Tibetans could not even be compared to the shooting of innocent civilians by policemen, that sometimes happens in New York or LA when policemen panic, overreact or make a bad judgment call. In Nangpa-la there was no threat (real or even perceived) no panic and no mistake. The shootings took place in bright sunlight and the victims were many hundreds of yards away with their backs to the Chinese soldiers and moving away slowly; clearly no threat at all. But the Chinese did not even bother to shout at the Tibetans to stop, or even fire a warning shot. A Czech climbing expedition leader, Josef Simunek, who witnessed the shooting, stated: “We felt as though it was 20 years ago in our country in the Communist time, when Czech soldiers killed Czech citizens in their escape over the ‘Iron Curtain’.” While on the subject of the “iron curtain” it must be said that as standard procedure the VoPo (the East German police) always fired a warning shot before they actually opened fire on anyone attempting to escape across the wall.

The Chinese callously gunned down these two Tibetans because they knew they could get away with it. They knew that there would be little outcry in the world, and the little there was would be played down or explained away by the increasing number of media people, academics, businessmen and politicians in the West who do their bidding. Even though the shootings were most fortuitously caught on video and appeared as brief news-reports on TV networks worldwide, there were practically no editorials, op-eds or commentaries from any major newspaper or TV networks condemning the shooting. Even the usually reliable BBC did just a barebones report. The New York Times carried nothing, but managed to come out with a full color, front page, tourist attraction piece on Tibet in its Sunday Travel Section, a few weeks later. The European Parliament and a couple of other heads of legislative bodies raised some formal objections. Tibetans around the world demonstrated, held vigils and prayers but nowhere on the scale and fervor as before.