The Eastern Turkistan Information Center report

Cooperation instead of Confrontation:

Chinese, Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongolians Favour Non-Violent Conflict Solution

Malente/Goettingen, Germany, October 6, 1997

For the first time, exile representatives from Tibet, Eastern Turkistan, Inner Mongolia and the Chinese democracy movement met to discuss joint initiatives together with German support organizations. The meeting was held from October 2 to 5, 1997 in Germany. The 16 organizations expressed their concern about the increase of human rights violations and appealed to the German parliament to send a delegation to China every year. They explicitly welcomed the September 1997 visit of the Subcommittee for Human Rights and Humanitarian Assistance of the German parliament to Beijing and Lhasa and stressed the necessity to investigate into the human rights situation in Eastern Turkistan (Xinjiang) and Inner Mongolia more thoroughly. The participants of the four day conference further called on the German federal government to lend support to the Chinese democracy movement.

The invitation to this consultation in the northern German town of Malente was issued by the Society for Threatened Peoples,( www.gfbv.de) Goettingen, the Hamburg regional office of the Tibet Support Group Germany, and the Gustav-Heineman-Eductional Institute, Malente. The organizations resolved to jointly advocate the nationality rights of Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongolians guaranteed by the Chinese constitution and the United Nations conventions signed by China to be finally implemented.

The participants conveyed their convictions that democratic change was the best precondition to end the human rights violations and to reach selfdetermination of the peoples. There is an urgent need to immediately stop the destruction of culture, religion, and language as well as any form of discrimination based on ethnicity, they said.

The Federation for a Democratic China (FDC) promised to contribute to the removal of prejudices between Chinese and the other nationalities and to inform and educate also inside China. The representatives of all organizations appealed to the government of the People's Republic of China and to the nationalities to solve the existing conflicts in Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Eastern Turkistan by peaceful means. To intensify the cooperation that was begun so successfully, the FDC, Paris, the Inner Mongolian League for the Defense of Human Rights, Cologne, the Eastern Turkistan Union in Europe, Munich, and the Tibetan representatives from Germany and Switzerland decided to meet in future on a regular basis.