KEY POINTS:
When Helen Clark issued New Zealand's limp comment on the uprising in Tibet this month I joined the chorus of condemnation. Then I did a moment's research.
The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World is always a good first stop for a concise, factual, rigorously neutral explanation of anything from anarchy to Zionism.
Here is what I gleaned of Tibet:
The place is a cold, high plateau overlooking India through Himalayan passes.
It has been strategically important to China for centuries. The economy is dirt poor, the people tribal and deeply loyal to a Buddhist theocracy which was actually installed from Beijing by the Mongol empire 800 years ago.
Thereafter the Dalai Lamas held absolute power except for periods when Tibet was ruled by monk regents or by agents sent by the Chinese government.
Early last century, after the fall of China's last imperial dynasty, Tibet enjoyed de facto independence for 37 years. In 1950, with the advent of communism, it was incorporated in the Chinese state.
The present Dalai Lama ruled in conjunction with Mao's officials until 1959 when an attempted revolt was crushed and he fled to India with 60,000 supporters.
Since then China has built roads, hospitals, schools, factories, airports, tourist facilities and, most recently, a difficult railway into the high plateau. However, these appear to have benefited a big influx of Chinese migrants more than Tibetans. Religious-ethnic antagonism abounds.
"China believes Tibet was never independent," says the Oxford Companion, "and the issue is historically murky."
Historically maybe, but not morally as far as I could tell from the tenor of all news coverage of the past two weeks.
It is curious that we unquestioningly support secession movements everywhere but at home. Independence seekers have only to raise their flag in Kosovo, Kurdistan, Chechnya, Darfur, Taiwan or Timor, and our sympathies are with them. Part of this reflects our dislike of the state they would escape.
We are not quite as sympathetic to rebels in Kashmir, Quebec or Catalonia. But even there we find it hard to understand the determination of nations to keep a disaffected region.
If people with a distinct territory with national aspirations wants to break away, what is the harm? Would we care if, say Tuhoe were determined to establish a truly sovereign nation in the Ureweras? The phlegmatic character of Kiwis might say good luck to them, see if they can survive without the services and support provided by wider taxation.
Suppose they believed they could, or were determined to proceed regardless, no assistance sought or desired? When it came to the crunch the vast majority of us, I have no doubt, could not abide the loss.
There is something sacred about national integrity. Historians of the American Civil War agree the north fought less to emancipate slaves in the south than to preserve the Union.
We might never have been to the Ureweras, have no plans ever to go and not much idea of what the nation might lose, but we would fight for its integrity. Why then is it so hard to credit China's attitude to Tibet, Sudan's to Darfur or, closer to home, Indonesia's to East Timor?
When after the Timorese independence referendum Indonesian paramilitaries set about the destruction of every road, school and hospital they built, I thought they had a point. Indonesia by all accounts had given East Timor much more than the Portuguese had left behind.
The Chinese seem to have done much the same for Tibet, albeit accompanied by migration on a scale Tibetans call "cultural genocide". But the white scarves that Tibetans strung on doorknobs this month to identify themselves to a rioting mob could have been pointers to genocide of a more chilling variety, had the uprising gone unchecked.
And what sort of state might have ensued?
The people who talked us into supporting East Timor's independence never seemed to doubt its viability.
When independence arrived it turned out to to be an economic sham. We were told to expect its permanent dependence on aid.
Now, with East Timor's president recuperating from an attempted assassination, even its political viability looks dubious.
So what of Tibet if the smiling man in saffron robes was ever to be restored to his absolute power? Would the result live up to the Western image of Shangri La?
China did itself no favours this month by remaining largely off limits to the Western press.
Having released film of the riots it must have supposed the violence and destruction would speak for itself.
Instead, the world waited for Tiananmen II, and when the reports of tourists suggested the Chinese were holding their fire for the sake of their Olympics, they were given no credit.
Olympians agonised over whether to speak out. Mark Todd said he would.
The view from the top of a horse must be further than I thought. If I was him all I could usefully say is that I have read one side of the story and suspect there is another.
