Dharamsala, Jan. 16 – China has once again resorted to Dalai Lama bashing, saying the 89’ Nobel peace laureate is responsible for “sabotage” to slow Tibet’s progress.
“It’s the current Tibet that allows Tibetans to enjoy the fruits of the reform and opening up and the feeling of being their own masters,” the official Xinhua news agency quoted Tibet Communist Party secretary Zhang Qingli as saying.
According to state run media Xinhua, plans to build Tibet’s first expressway, a four-lane road stretching 40 km (25 miles) from Lhasa, and to provide all counties with roads by next year and electricity by 2015, are underway.
“The Dalai Lama and his followers have constantly organised sabotage activities and had tried ‘by all means to prevent Tibet’s development’,” Xinhua quoted Legqog, the ethnic Tibetan head of the region’s congress, as saying.
In March 2008, Tibet saw the biggest anti-China protests that spread across the three traditional provinces of Tibet in the run up to the Beijing Olympics last year.
China blamed the region’s unrest to the Dalai Lama, whom it called a “wolf in monk’s robe” attempting to split the motherland. The Tibetan leader denied the allegations saying the protests were an “…outburst of long pent-up physical and mental anguish of the Tibetans and the feeling of deep resentment against the suppression of the rights of Tibetan people,…”
The 73 year old Tibetan leader says he seeks a genuine autonomy for the Himalayan region within the framework of the People’s Republic of China as enshrined in the Chinese constitution. 8 rounds of talks between his envoys and China since the revival of contacts in September 2002 has failed to produce any result.
China was quick in blaming the Tibetan side for the failure. However, the Tibetan envoys said they presented the Chinese side a ‘memorandum’ of genuine autonomy as asked by them during the 7th round of talks. The envoys said Chinese statements “distort the position and proposal we have outlined in our paper” and therefore made the memorandum public on November 16, 2008.
A special meeting called by the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala in November 2008 which was attended by over 500 Tibetans from around the world reaffirmed the Tibetans’ absolute “faith and allegiance” in the Dalai Lama’s leadership and reached a consensus to pursue the Middle way policy. However, the Tibetan exiles did not rule out a possible shift of policy to independence if current policy fails to yield any result in the near future.
The exile Tibetan government says the violent crackdown on Tibetan protesters following the unrest in March left 219 Tibetans dead, 1294 injured, 5,600 arrested or detained and more than 1000 still missing.
