The San Francisco leg of the Olympic torch relay descended into a farce on Wednesday after the authorities cut the route in half and hustled the torch away from waiting protesters and supporters of the Beijing Games by driving it over a kilometre inland. A closing ceremony for the torch rally was also suddenly relocated.
The Dalai Lama said on Tuesday he will stand down if violence in Tibet spirals out of control, after the Chinese accused him of masterminding the unrest. ”If things become out of control then my only option is to completely resign,” the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, told a news conference.
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.
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.
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/ 17 October 2007
President George Bush hosted the Dalai Lama on Tuesday despite China’s warning that US plans to honour the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader could damage relations between Beijing and Washington. Beijing has bitterly denounced plans for the Dalai Lama to receive the Congressional Gold Medal on Wednesday.