By Phurbu Thinley
Dharamsala, June 16: A two-day meeting of the Tibetan Task Force for negotiation started here today.
This is the 19th meeting of the Task force and second such meeting after rounds of talks with the Chinese leadership started since 2002 ended in complete deadlock last year.
The Task Force was set up in 1999 to mainly assist the envoys of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in their talks with the representatives of the Chinese government. The members of the unit last met in the Indian capital of New Delhi in February this year.
Talks between Dalai Lama’s envoys and Beijing came to a standstill after a “Memorandum on Genuine Autonomy for the Tibetan People” submitted by the Tibetan side at the eighth round of talks in October last year was met with Beijing’s derision.
“Last year Chinese side rejected our proposal calling the memorandum a demand for ‘half-independence’ and ‘disguised independence’ or ‘covert independence’,” Thupten Samphel, a spokesperson in the Tibetan Government-in-Exile, told a Tibetan radio service on Monday.
“So we have come up with a clarification to refute such accusations (from the Chinese side) and to inform that the contents of the memorandum do not carry any hidden separatist agenda and are fully in conformity with the related provisions enshrined in the Chinese constitution,” Samphel told Voice of Tibet.
“So one of the main agendas of this meeting is to further discuss on these clarifications,” Samphel, the secretary for information at the Department of Information and International Relations (DIIR) of the exile government, said.
Tibetan side maintains that the articles of the proposed memorandum were prepared in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution of the PRC and its laws on National Regional Autonomy, and claims China has rejected the proposal without providing any “legal and rational explanations”.
“China says that doors for talks are open but they are not ready to discuss our memorandum which is in compliance with the regional ethnic autonomy law of the Chinese constitution,” Sonam Norbu Dagpo, a member of the Task Force who accompanied the Tibetan envoys for talks with China, told Phayul.com at the end of the 18th task force meeting in New Delhi.
“If China is ready to discuss the issue of Tibet we are always ready,” Dagpo said.
Following the eighth round of talks, the Tibetan Prime Minister Prof Samdhong Rinpoche, who also heads the Task Force, said that the “Tibetan side had already made all the required clarifications and brought a process of dialogue that began in September 2002 to its logical conclusion.”
Rinpoche recently said the Tibetan side was ready to continue contact with the Chinese government to hold talks on the proposed memorandum. “We will provide clarification on the Memorandum whenever required by the Chinese side,” he said.
“We will continue our efforts towards achieving a meaningful national regional autonomy for all the Tibetans,” Rinpoche added.
However, the Tibetan PM maintained that the continuation of contact solely depends upon the action of China. “They should assume full responsibility for it,” Rinpoche said.
