China poured scorn on the Dalai Lama on Sunday and hailed protesters against Tibetan self-rule as patriotic heroes, suggesting the government is not prepared to give ground in talks proposed for coming days. China has blamed the exiled Buddhist leader’s ”clique” for unrest across Lhasa and other Tibetan areas.
China said it was outraged by a resolution by United States lawmakers urging an end to a crackdown in Tibet as a Beijing-run newspaper linked al-Qaeda to claimed plots to attack the Beijing Olympics. The condemnation came in response to a US House of Representatives resolution urging China to open dialogue with the Dalai Lama.
Tibet authorities said on Thursday they had arrested dozens of people involved in a wave of anti-Chinese violence and prompted Beijing to pour in troops to crush further unrest. China’s response to last week’s violence has sparked international criticism and has clouded preparations for the Beijing Olympics.
China’s premier accused Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, of orchestrating riots in which dozens may have died and said his followers were trying to ”incite sabotage” of Beijing’s August Olympic Games. The Dalai Lama called at the weekend for an investigation into what he called cultural genocide in Tibet.
China insisted on Monday that it had shown massive restraint in the face of violent protests by Tibetans, which it said were orchestrated by followers of the Dalai Lama to wreck Beijing’s Olympic Games in August. Exiled representatives of Tibet in Dharamsala, India, on Sunday put the death toll from last week’s protests in Lhasa, capital of the Himalayan region of Tibet, at 80.
Rioting erupted in a province neighbouring Tibet on Sunday, two days after ugly street protests by Tibetans against Chinese rule in Lhasa that the contested region’s government-in-exile said had killed 80 people. A police officer said that about 200 Tibetan protesters had hurled petrol bombs and burnt down a police station.
China set a ”surrender deadline”, listed deaths and showed the first extensive television footage of rioting in Lhasa on Saturday, signalling a crackdown after the worst unrest in Tibet for two decades. Sources suggested China’s official death toll of 10, just months before the Beijing Olympics, may not tell the full story.
Protesters in Tibet’s capital, Lhasa, burnt shops and vehicles and yelled for independence on Friday as the region was hit by its biggest protests for nearly two decades, testing China’s grip months before the Olympics. Peaceful street marches by Tibetan Buddhist monks over previous days gave way to bigger scenes of violence and resentment in the remote, mountainous region.
China has urged Sudan to do more to stop fighting in Darfur and speed up the arrival of more peacekeepers, Beijing’s envoy on the crisis said of Friday, defending his country as a diplomatic bridge to help end the bloodshed. China has faced widespread criticism that it has not used its stakes in Sudan to press for an end to deadly havoc in the Darfur region.
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/ 5 February 2008
Millions of Chinese are likely to spend the biggest holiday of the year without power and water after more than a week of wild winter weather that shut down transport links. Railways and highways were returning to normal across China on Tuesday but millions are still trying to catch trains, planes and buses.