That 'Peaceful Mission'

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXII, Issue 21, 26 May 1904, Page 18

That 'Peaceful Mission '

Tibet is a little storm centre in mid-Asda just now. The project of ' interference ' in Tibet (presumably for frontier defence purposes) has been in the air for at least five years. It was treated by the ' Times of India ' as a proposal for ' cold-Mooded buccaneering ' anid by the ' Pioneer ' as a ' wild cat scheme of aJinexation.' What it may tturn out, we do not 'know. But, at any rate, what was officially termed ' a peaceful mission ' set out for Lhassa, the Tibetan capital, armed to the teeth and stuffed to the chin v ith munitions of war. The slow-witted hillmen of the mid-Asian Switzerland mistook the ' peaceful mission ' for 'an armed invasion of their mountain territory. In the effort to cotfvince them of the peaceful nature of the mission, several hundred Tibetans were pounded into mince-meat "by repeating rifles and Maxims and mountain-guns. And now Lord Lansdowne has, like the Tibetans and the rest of the world, discovered that, after all, the thing that is happening along the rocky road to Lhassa is war— war to the knife 1 . /Tibet is a border country. Worse still, it is rich m mineral wealth. Worst of all, it is a buffer-State between British and Rjussian territory. And it locks as if its long seclusion were now to be broken, not by a ' peaceful mission,' but by a war which has apparently for its object the annexation of the country or its reduction to a tributary State nr a ' sphere of influence.'