Dalai Lama Says His Aides Are Talking to China

The Dalai Lama at a news conference in Seattle. He said it was unclear what talks with Chinese officials over Tibet might yield. Photo by Robert Sorbo/Reuters
SEATTLE: April 14th. (NY Times) — The Dalai Lama said Sunday that “some efforts” at diplomacy were under way between his representatives and those of the Chinese government even as officials in Beijing continue to portray him as having orchestrated protests in Tibet that have led to a crackdown and violence there. The Dalai Lama at a news conference in Seattle. He said it was unclear what talks with Chinese officials over Tibet might yield. Just a few days these are going on,” the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, said of the discussions. He said it was unclear what the talks might yield. He would not say specifically what matters were being discussed, and he said he had not been directly involved in the conversations.

Western leaders have encouraged China to resume discussions with the Dalai Lama in the wake of the unrest in Tibet, which began on March 10. As recently as Saturday, President Hu Jintao echoed other Chinese leaders who have accused the Dalai Lama of encouraging violence. Mr. Hu left open the door for dialogue but only if “the Dalai side stops activities splitting the motherland, stops activities scheming and instigating violence, and stops activities sabotaging the Beijing Olympic Games,” according to Xinhua, the government’s official news agency. The Dalai Lama, who is in Seattle for a conference, told reporters on Sunday that he was unaware of the comments by Mr. Hu and, as he has done repeatedly, denied that he had played any role in the violence. He noted that he had also been criticized by some Tibetans who have said his strategy of nonviolence has produced little change. He rejected the suggestion that Tibetan leaders might make concessions to engage in more extensive dialogue with China. “We’ve become refugees,” he said, adding that Tibetans had little left to concede.

Asked whether he would accept an invitation to the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, he laughed and said he did not expect to receive one. More important, he said, was for China to take steps to earn the international respect and trust it hopes the Olympics will help nurture. As part of doing this, he said, China should release Tibetans arrested since the protests began and provide those injured with proper medical care. He also said China should open Tibet to the news media. “Let them go there, see the actual situation,” he said. He restated positions he has made clear in the past: that he does not seek independence for Tibet but what he calls a more genuine autonomy and that he is eager for the Chinese people to know that Tibetans are neither anti-Chinese nor opposed to the Beijing Olympics. He said he met with a Chinese media agency here on Saturday with the hope of sending those messages directly to the Chinese people. He said he believed that the idea of a “harmonious society” promoted by Mr. Hu showed that the governing Communist Party was “in a state of transformation,” even as the Chinese government continues to distort information and manipulate its people. He said some Chinese officials were demanding that Tibetans put their thumbprints on statements saying they did not want the Dalai Lama to return.

The Dalai Lama has been leading a five-day conference, called Seeds of Compassion, that is focused on nurturing compassion in young children. The event was planned many months before the unrest began in Tibet, and the Dalai Lama had avoided directly discussing the troubles until Sunday, the third day of the conference.
by William Yardley
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China Rejects Bid by UN Rights Boss for April Visit

GENEVA, April 10 (Reuters the Guardian) - China has turned down a request by U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour to visit Tibet this month to look into anti-Chinese protests in which at least 19 people died, her spokesman said on Thursday. "The Chinese authorities came back to her... and said it wouldn't be convenient at this time," spokesman Rupert Colville told Reuters. "However they said she would be welcome to make a visit at a later date that would be mutually convenient," he said. Arbour made the request two weeks ago following widespread unrest and reports of killings and mass arrests in the Himalayan region.

The Tibetan protests and Chinese crackdown in Tibet have fuelled protests along the Olympic torch relay route through London, Paris and San Francisco ahead of the summer Olympic games hosted by Beijing in August. Arbour, a former U.N. war crimes prosecutor and Canadian Supreme Court judge, had sought to go to Tibet around mid-April to evaluate the situation after a series of protests by Buddhist monks and rioting in Lhasa on March 14, he said.

China says 19 people died in the violence, but aides to the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, say some 140 people died in the unrest across Tibet and nearby provinces with large Tibetan populations. Separately, six U.N. human rights investigators called on China to show restraint and allow journalists and independent experts access to Tibet and nearby regions hit by violence. More than 570 Tibetan monks, including some children, were arrested in late March following raids by security forces on monasteries in Ngaba and Dzoge counties in Tibet, they said in a joint statement issued on Thursday. The U.N. investigators have global mandates to probe allegations of torture, killings, arbitrary detentions, minority issues, as well as curbs on freedom of opinion and expression, and on freedom of religion. They report to the U.N. Human Rights Council, the top U.N. rights forum whose 47 member states include China.

The U.N. investigators said China had organised several fact-finding delegations to visit Tibet but that these were no substitute for granting access to U.N. experts. Arbour, who has announced she will leave office at the end of her four-year term on June 30, previously visited China in September 2005. She said at the time she was "guardedly optimistic" China was making progress on human rights but brushed off Beijing's standard line that every nation should protect rights in its own way -- stressing that international standards had to be met.
By Stephanie Nebehay (Editing by Jonathan Lynn and Jon Boyle)
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Monks Protest During Press Tour of China

A Tibetan monk, center, spoke to foreign journalists at the Jokhang Monastery in Lhasa, Tibet, during a tour arranged Thursday by Chinese officials. (Andy Wong/Associated Press)
SHANGHAI Mar. 28th. (NY Times) — Weeping and yelling, "Tibet is not free,” a group of red-robed monks on Thursday disrupted a carefully scripted tour for foreign journalists in Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, as Chinese officials tried to portray the recent Tibetan riots as the work of thugs and separatists. The 15-minute protest by about 30 monks, who spoke first in Tibetan and then switched to Mandarin, was in the Jokhang Monastery, one of Tibet’s holiest shrines. The protest, videotaped by reporters, ended after government handlers shouted for the journalists to leave and tried to pull them away, an Associated Press correspondent on the tour said in an interview. The protest erupted during a tour of the temple. Some of the monks shouted that there was no religious freedom in Tibet and that the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader in exile, had been wrongly accused by China of orchestrating the protests to disrupt the Olympic Games, to be held in Beijing in August. Some journalists said one monk complained that the government had planted fake monks in the monastery to talk to the reporters. It was unclear whether the protesting monks were arrested. The government later said that the monks had lied but would not be punished.

The protest was another embarrassment for senior Chinese officials, who had invited the group of foreign journalists to visit Lhasa under escort to promote the government’s version of the unrest in Tibet, which China calls an autonomous region. Reporters were also shown a detention center that housed some of the rioters, The Associated Press reported. Interviews were closely monitored; the police interpreted for Tibetan prisoners, who spoke little Mandarin. Luoya, who like many Tibetans uses just one name, said he had burned down a motorcycle shop in Dazhi County, east of Lhasa. “All my friends were setting fires so I joined them,” he was quoted as saying. Reporters spoke to Mr. Luoya, 25, through the bars of his cell as a policeman stood by. When asked about relations between Tibetans and Chinese in Lhasa, Mr. Luoya said, “There are no relations.”

Foreign coverage and reaction of the violence in Tibet have focused on China’s heavy crackdown and arrests in the aftermath of the riots and have led to talk among some foreign officials of boycotting the opening ceremony of this summer’s Olympic Games. The Chinese wanted the reporters to see damage caused by the rioters and to interview Han Chinese victims of the violence, the worst here in 20 years. China’s official news agency, Xinhua, mentioned the unscripted monks’ protest in a brief dispatch, saying 12 monks “stormed into a briefing by a temple administrator to cause chaos.” Several American news organizations were invited to send representatives on the three-day press tour, but The New York Times was not. The protest came a day after President Bush encouraged President Hu Jintao of China in a telephone discussion to initiate talks with the Dalai Lama, who is based in India. China’s state-run media said that Mr. Hu responded that China had always been open to discussions with the Dalai Lama, as long as he renounced independence for Tibet and abandoned efforts to “fan and mastermind violent crimes.”

There was also pressure on Thursday from an international group of distinguished scholars, who wrote an open letter to Mr. Hu calling on China to “take steps to end the harsh repression” in Tibet. The scholars, who specialize in Tibetan studies, also said the “tactic of blaming the unrest on the Dalai Lama masks a refusal, on the part of the Chinese government, to recognize the failures of its own policies.” For nearly a week, the state-controlled media have contended that some Western news organizations have wrongly described the riots in Tibet as “peaceful protests” and that some photographs distorted the government’s actions in Tibet. China’s state-controlled media, though, have been allowed to publish only favorable articles on the government’s role in Tibet. At the same time, some foreign journalists in China have complained about efforts to impede or disrupt their reporting, despite the government’s pledges of greater openness in the months leading up to the Olympics. On Thursday, The Associated Press reported that after the protest at the Lhasa temple, the area was sealed off. Later in the day, journalists seeking to report independently, away from government guides, were followed, making Tibetans reluctant to talk.
By David Barboza with Chen Yang contributed research.
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At Shuttered Gateway to Tibet, Unrest Simmers Against Chinese Rule

In a vast area of mountainous Chinese villages near the Tibet border, life centers on the spiritual, as at a nunnery, above, but the area remains a battle zone. (Greg Baker/Associated Press)
CHENGDU, China: Mar. 26th. (NY Times) — In the back room of a Tibetan teahouse, three robed monks spoke in whispers. One monk said his home in Luhuo County had been littered with fliers calling on Tibetans to protest. A second monk said soldiers had surrounded his monastery in Aba County. The third dialed home. After folding shut his cellphone, he said the police had killed one Tibetan protester and injured nine others in Serta County. “Tibetans are dying for no reason,” said the Luhuo monk, as the whine of a police siren drifted through an open window. “But this is happening in remote places, and nobody knows.” From this city of 10 million people in the middle of China, all roads leading west have been closed — except to convoys carrying soldiers and riot police officers to subdue Tibetan antigovernment protests. Chengdu has always been a gateway to the remote Tibetan plateau, but now it feels like a border outpost, tense and anxious, at the eastern edge of what several Tibetans here described as a war. If it is a war, it is one the outside world cannot see. Police roadblocks have closed off a mountainous region about the size of France, spanning parts of the provinces of Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai. Foreign journalists trying to investigate reports of bloodshed are turned away or detained. Even in big cities like Chengdu, Tibetans say they are wary of police retaliation. They pass along secondhand accounts of clashes mostly on condition that their names will not appear in print.

What seems clear is that in the isolated region west of Chengdu, the sometimes violent protests, already the broadest and most sustained agitation against Chinese rule in two decades, have continued despite the influx of armed security forces. Lhasa itself is now under heel. But a vast area of highlands and placid villages, where Tibetan life usually centers on temples and monasteries built of wood and earth, remains a battle zone. On Tuesday, protesters and the police clashed in Garze, a prefecture of Sichuan, state media and a Tibetan rights group said. Some 200 monks and nuns began a march earlier in the day that turned violent when the police sought to suppress the crowd, the India-based Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy said. China’s Xinhua news agency said the police opened fire in self-defense after the demonstrators attacked them with knives and stones. The rights group said one 18-year-old monk was killed and another was critically injured, while Xinhua said protesters killed one policeman. In Chengdu, Tibetans gravitate to a neighborhood that is beside an ancient Chinese temple called Wuhouci. The area is known for a teeming marketplace that sells Tibetan Buddhist ceremonial objects, clothing and art. Usually, Tibetan monks and traders pass through the market, buying crimson robes or printed scriptures, but the police lockdown has left many people stranded and desperate for news from home. “Do you know how many died in Aba?” asked Nyima, 28, a monk from the Garong monastery in Nyagrong County. He has lived in Chengdu for three months, sleeping above his shop.

After the unrest in Lhasa, violent clashes between Tibetans and security forces erupted in Aba. Officials later said the police fired in self-defense on a crowd of Tibetans that had attacked the local police station and set it on fire. Tibetans who have called relatives in Aba say the death toll may be more than 20; that could not be independently confirmed. A young Tibetan woman from Aba who sells Buddhist statues and jewelry at a local shop said her family was safe but had also warned her that the conflict in Aba had not yet ended. “They are fighting a war,” said the woman. A Tibetan college student from Aba had also made a worried call home. His relatives described a confrontation that began at the local Kirti monastery. The student’s family said a huge contingent of soldiers arrived with weapons. “People got very nervous,” the student said. In recent years, authorities tightened religious restrictions, including closing down a religious school. On March 16, protests began at Aba after a monk at Kirti declared that Tibetans should not have to live under Chinese rule. Protesters holding images of the Dalai Lama marched through the streets, the student said.

The police initially did not stop them. But when protesters burned a police station, soldiers with machine guns fired into crowds, killing at least 13 Tibetans, the student said. He said several Chinese soldiers had been killed. “The next day, the town looked green with the soldiers,” he said. “Every day, helicopters hover over the city.” The police said Chengdu itself is secure. But the Wuhouci neighborhood is enduring its own lockdown. Armed police officers now surround the neighborhood. White patrol cars cruise the streets, flashing their lights as officers bark through megaphones at vehicles to keep them moving. Last week, the local police called a news conference to dispel rumors of a bomb threat. Chinese shopkeepers gossiped about reports that a Tibetan man from Aba had stabbed and killed two Han Chinese in the city. The police confirmed that a stabbing had occurred but said a single victim had only minor injuries.

Monks and other Tibetans are meeting in quiet corners. In the back room of the Tibetan teahouse, the three monks compared notes. One, age 40, told news of Serta County, where he said Tibetans had taken over a government compound and raised the Tibetan national flag. Another monk had come to Chengdu from Aba to purchase printed Buddhist scriptures. Now, he gathered information by telephone. Armed police officers had circled six monasteries in Aba and arrested “many, many” monks, he said. He was told that 23 people had died so far, even though China’s state-run media has reported only four injuries. Two days later, one of the three monks again called his hometown of Luhuo. “The sound of gunfire can be heard in Luhuo,” the monk said. “A lama died. A soldier died. They are fighting a war now.”

By JAKE HOOKER with Jimmy Wang contributed reporting from Chengdu, and Jim Yardley from Beijing.
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China seals off TibetanCapital

Chinese authorities have sealed Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, cutting off the city from visitors with a large military and armed police presence ahead of a “surrender deadline” of Monday at midnight.
China: March 16th. (Financial Times) - The government has also tightened control over information coming out of the Himalayan region, blocking many Internet sites, including Youtube, which could be used to upload video content of the protests over the last week. The protests began on March 10, when Buddhist monks staged protests against Chinese rule over Tibet, which China administers as a “special autonomous region”. Last week marked the 49th anniversary of the flight by the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, to exile in Dharamsala, India. Chinese media have reported 10 “innocent civilian” deaths and injuries among police and troops sent in to restore order. Exiled Tibetan officials in Dharamsala have said that at least 80 people were killed, according to Reuters.

Beijing faces difficult decisions in coming days over the level of violence it authorises to suppress demonstrations and regain control of Lhasa, and some monasteries elsewhere in Tibet and China where there is unrest. The resolution of the issue is taking place against the backdrop of the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics, and the huge international attention that event is generating. Wen Jiabao, China’s Premier, will hold his annual press conference on Tuesday, at the close of the National People’s Congress, which is telecast live. Residents of Lhasa contacted on Sunday said sporadic gunshots could be heard through the day as Chinese police attempted to keep people off streets and rooftops. The spectre of inter-ethnic violence also loomed, after Hui Muslim Chinese reportedly attacked Tibetan homes to avenge pro-independence protests that escalated on Friday, when demonstrators ransacked businesses owned by Han Chinese, China’s dominant ethnic group, Huis and other settlers.

Chinese state media dropped a country-wide reporting ban on the unrest at the weekend, as it became untenable after widespread leaks of eyewitness accounts, pictures and video footage of the growing violence in Lhasa. Official media footage showed Tibetans overturning police cars, looting businesses and assaulting ethnic Chinese on the streets of the regional capital. However, state media showed no images of the suppression of the protests, and stuck to the official line that the unrest had been orchestrated by a “separatist Dalai Lama clique”. Even more ominously for Beijing, protests have flared further afield in cities in neighbouring Qinghai and Sichuan provinces, where there are large monasteries and sizeable Tibetan populations. Reuters reported that a police station in Aba county, Sichuan, was burned down, quoting a police officer at the scene. This year’s violence in Tibet marks the most serious clashes since the late eighties, when independence protests were forcibly quelled. China’s current president, Hu Jintao, was then party secretary of the country’s most restive region.
By Richard McGregor and Jamil Anderlini in Beijing, and Tom Mitchell in Hong Kong
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Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Mozlink’ for any or all of the articles/images placed here. The placing of an article does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
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