South Africa’s Manuel Backs Decision on Dalai Lama

By Mike Cohen

March 26 (Bloomberg) -- South African Finance Minister Trevor Manuel backed the government’s decision to deny the Dalai Lama entry to the country to attend a peace conference.

The reason the Dalai Lama wants to visit South Africa “is to make a big global, political statement about the secession of Tibet from China,” Manuel said in an election debate hosted by the University of Cape Town today. “We shouldn’t allow him to raise a global issue that will impact on the standing of South Africa.”

The peace conference was to be hosted by organizers of the 2010 Soccer World Cup and Nobel Peace laureates from around the world were invited. The conveners said yesterday the March 27 event had been postponed indefinitely as a result of the controversy surrounding the Dalai Lama.

Health Minister Barbara Hogan yesterday said the decision to refuse entry to theDalai Lama was “an example of a government that is dismissive of human rights” and that the South African public was owed an apology.

The Dalai Lama is the spiritual leader of Tibet, where Chinese authorities in March 1959 put down an armed rebellion by his supporters. China alleges that the Dalai Lama, who has visited South Africa several times previously, is bidding to separate Tibet from China.

The Dalai Lama had established a government of Tibet in exile “to counter the reality of a single China,” Manuel said. “To say anything against the Dalai Lama is in many circles equivalent to trying to shoot Bambi.”

South Africa will hold it fourth elections since the end of apartheid rule on April 22.

Tibet’s Dalai Lama marks 50 years of protest

By GAVIN RABINOWITZ
The Associated Press
DHARMSALA, India Somber prayers and hymns remembered the dead. Monks in ornate yellow headdresses blew giant conches and long brass trumpets to announce the coming of the Dalai Lama. A band playing drums, cymbals and bagpipes added to the din.
Then, the soft-spoken man of peace delivered an unusually harsh message — a systematic indictment of the Chinese government that forced him to flee Tibet during a failed uprising in 1959.
“These 50 years have brought untold suffering to the land and people of Tibet,” the 73-year-old Buddhist spiritual leader told about 2,000 Tibetan exiles gathered Tuesday to commemorate the rebellion.
The Nobel Peace laureate, who accused the Chinese government of treating his people “like criminals deserving to be put to death,” highlighted the widening gulf between the two sides since violence engulfed the region and talks broke down last year.
China, which accuses the Dalai Lama of trying to split Tibet from China and fomenting recent violence, denounced his speech as “lies” and underlined the development it brought to the Himalayan plateau.
The Dalai Lama’s 30-minute speech in Dharmsala, a two-street town in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas where he set up his headquarters in exile, warned that Tibet’s unique religion, culture and language are “nearing extinction.”
Decades of China’s communist experiments, particularly the violent xenophobic Cultural Revolution, “thrust Tibetans into such depths of suffering and hardship that they literally experienced hell on earth,” he said, adding that the campaigns led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Tibetans.
The Dalai Lama also charged China with overseeing a “brutal crackdown” since protests shook the region last year.
A 2008 commemoration of the 1959 uprising by monks in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa erupted into anti-Chinese rioting and spread to surrounding provinces — the most sustained and violent demonstrations by Tibetans in decades.
On Tuesday, Lhasa was calm but tense.
There also were protests in Nepal, South Korea, New York, London, Berlin, Vienna, Switzerland, Taiwan, Australia and New York.
While China claims Tibet has been part of its territory for centuries, Tibet was a deeply isolated theocracy until 1951, when Chinese troops invaded Lhasa. Tuesday’s anniversary marked the March 10, 1959, riots against Chinese rule that led to a crackdown and, later that month, the Dalai Lama’s dramatic flight across the Himalayas and into exile.
China long has said it brought modernity to a region where monks and wealthy landowners ruled over huge tracts of land worked by slaves and serfs.

Nepal bans protests around Chinese Embassy

The Associated Press
Published: March 2, 2009
KATMANDU, Nepal: Nepal said Monday that it will arrest and jail anyone protesting near the Chinese Embassy and its visa office in Katmandu, a bid to keep Tibetan refugees from marking a key anniversary.
The embassy and the visa office last year were the sites of near daily demonstrations by Tibetans protesting Chinese rule in their homeland. The demonstrations often led to violent clashes with riot police.
Home Ministry spokesman Navin Ghimire said Monday that government had declared the two sites protest-free zones as a precaution against possible rallies marking the 50th anniversary of the failed Tibetan uprising against China on March 10. He did not say when the ban would be lifted.
There are thousands of Tibetan refugees living in Nepal. Thousands more are allowed to pass through Nepal on their way to Dharmasala, India where their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, lives in exile.
Many Tibetans insist they were an independent nation before communist troops invaded in 1950, while Beijing says the Himalayan region has been part of its territory for centuries.

China advisory body defends Tibet crackdown

BEIJING (AP) — China was right to crack down hard on rioters in Tibet last year, but needs to better explain its policies to the rest of the world, the country's main government advisory body said Tuesday.
Also Tuesday, a group of 20 activists who took part in the 1989 pro-democracy protests around Tiananmen Square sent an open letter to legislators gathering in the capital this week, calling on them to reinvestigate the military crackdown that quashed the student-led movement.
In opening the advisory body's annual session, Jia Qinglin reinforced the government's hard-line approach to dissent among Tibetans, just days ahead of the anniversary of a deadly March 14 riot in Tibet's capital, Lhasa, that sparked the biggest anti-government protests in decades.
"We unequivocally supported the party and government in dealing with the destructive and disruptive, violent and illegal incidents in Lhasa, Tibet and other areas in accordance with the law," Jia, the body's chairman, said in a nationally televised speech from the Great Hall of the People in central Beijing.
The riots in Lhasa left at least 22 dead and resulted in the government clamping down on ethnic Tibetan areas throughout the country. Tibetan activists say Chinese security forces have killed dozens in their crackdown.
China claims that Tibet has always been part of its territory, but many Tibetans say the Himalayan region was virtually independent for centuries. Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, heads a self-proclaimed government-in-exile in northern India but says he is only seeking autonomy, not independence, for the region.
Jia said in 2009, China would have more exchanges with world religious and peace organizations.
"We will improve our external publicity work to help the international community acquire a better understanding of our country's political system and system of political parties," he said.
However, Tibet advocates say the inherent problem lies not in China's presentation of its message, but with its failed policies in the Himalayan region.
"The crisis in Tibet has been ongoing for a year ... and it has only deepened. This is not a matter of presentation. There needs to be a complete overhaul of the failed policies by the Chinese Communist Party," said Matt Whitticase with the London-based Free Tibet group.
The open letter from the Tiananmen activists called on officials to launch a new investigation into the role of then-supreme leader Deng Xiaoping and former Premier Li Peng in ordering a military crackdown that used "the weapons of war to massacre peaceful citizens."
China has never offered a full accounting of the crackdown, which government leaders refer to as a "political disturbance." An official silence has been maintained around the incident, with nothing written in school textbooks and public discussion virtually taboo.
Jia's body, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, is tasked with submitting nonbinding suggestions to the legislature, the National People's Congress, which begins its annual session on Thursday.
The annual meeting of the conference, which runs until March 12, and the NPC's nine-day session, are the first for China since the worldwide financial meltdown started last year.
Both are widely expected to yield further measures to stimulate the economy. Jia said the meeting would focus "on hot and thorny issues," such as employment, the social safety net, education and environmental protection.
Although China is one of the few major economies still growing, growth fell to a seven-year low of 6.8 percent in the final quarter of 2008 compared with the same period a year earlier. The slip has hit export industries hard, causing more than 20 million migrant workers to lose their jobs in recent months.
China announced a 4 trillion yuan ($586 billion) stimulus plan in November aimed at boosting domestic consumption to help cushion the impact of the global slowdown, though the effects of massive spending will take time to show. The plan calls for pumping money into the economy through spending on public works. Such construction projects have been magnets for corruption in the past.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.