Chinese officials blame Dalai Lama for string of self-immolation in Tibet

BEIJING — Chinese officials lashed out against exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama on Wednesday, accusing him and his allies of orchestrating a string of self-immolations in ethnic Tibetan areas of China that have gained international attention and renewed criticisms of the nation's authoritarian governance.

"The Dalai Lama clique and overseas separatist forces are leading Tibetan Buddhism onto the track of extremism," said Wu Zegang, an ethnic Tibetan and the government head for Aba Prefecture in the southwestern province of Sichuan, where most of the fiery protests have taken place.

Speaking at a panel of local officials during the annual meeting of China’s National People’s Congress, a mostly rubber stamp body, Wu and others described the self-immolations as a coordinated plot. In the past year, Tibetan rights groups estimate that at least 25 people have set themselves on fire, an unprecedented act in modern Tibetan history. Of those 25, mostly current and former clergy, 18 have died, according to rights groups.

There have reportedly been three self-immolations since last Saturday alone, including one by a mother in her early-30s said to have shouted “Return his holiness” – the Dalai Lama – “to Tibet” and “We need freedom.”

“Photos revealing the daily lives of most of the self-immolaters had been sent in advance to separatist forces abroad,” Wu said at an event open to the press, according to a translation by the state Xinhua news service. “These photos, contrasted by pictures depicting the self-immolation sites, were immediately dispersed by separatist forces to play up the situation.”

Wu also charged that, “To encourage self-immolations, they even offer a price of compensation for the dead. All these prove that self-immolations are pre-mediated political moves.”

Chinese authorities go to great lengths to prevent foreign journalists from entering ethnic Tibetan areas in Sichuan to check such claims, often detaining reporters at roadblocks and questioning them before escorting their vehicles out of the area. The province abuts Tibet, which the Chinese government officially administers as an autonomous region but is controlled by a strict security regime.

The remarks by Chinese officials on Wednesday conflicted with interviews conducted by McClatchy and others who’ve slipped into villages near the town of Aba, the epicenter of tensions in the prefecture of the same name, and across Sichuan Province. Local ethnic Tibetans have said the self-immolations are a reaction to a repressive Chinese government that curbs their culture, language and religion. That combined with a sense of desperation over the seeming impossibility of the Dalai Lama ever returning to the country, which he fled in 1959, has led to a deep sense of hopelessness, they say.

Nonetheless, the Communist Party secretary of Sichuan, Liu Qibao, said at the panel meeting that, “public complaints about cultural repression do not exist. On the contrary, Tibetan culture is flourishing.”

At the beginning of the month, a senior Chinese official made plain that the government will brook no dissent on the issue.

Jia Qinglin, a member of the nation’s ruling politburo standing committee, said that authorities should, “resolutely crush the Dalai Lama clique's conspiracy of making Tibetan-inhabited areas unstable, thus making the masses able to live and work there comfortably.”

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