Dharamsala, March 24: A boycott of this summer’s Beijing Olympic Games should be considered if China does not re-evaluate its actions in Tibet, the president of the European Parliament said in an interview to be published in a German newspaper on Sunday.
“Beijing must decide. It must negotiate with the Dalai Lama immediately,” Hans-Gert Poettering told the mass circulation Bild newspaper.
Poettering added that boycott measures were justified, if there was no attempt at reconciling the differences.
“We should not exclude the possibility of a boycott of the Beijing Olympics. We want a successful Games, but not at the price of the cultural genocide of the Tibetans,” he said.
Poettering, a member of the conservative Christian bloc in the parliament, said the European Parliament would discuss the situation in Tibet on Wednesday.
China locked down the Tibetan capital last week after the largest and most violent protests against its rule in the region in nearly two decades, brining Beijing’s plans for a smooth run-up to August’s Olympics under International spotlight.
The Tibetan Government-in-Exile in India raised its death toll following China’s brutal crackdown on Tibetan demonstrators across the Tibetan region to 140 on Monday and has also released the names and details of 44 identified people killed in the crackdown.
The Tibetan Government on Monday claimed it had reliable information on other individuals killed during the demonstrations and said it needed more time to “gather more comprehensive information before releasing more names from the death toll list”.
