China mounts new attack on Dalai Lama

Chinese state media today accused the Dalai Lama of slamming the door on talks over Tibet’s future, an apparent response to rising international calls for Beijing to negotiate with Tibet’s exiled Buddhist leader.

In a lengthy article, the Xinhua News Agency cited past actions and statements attributed to the 72-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner that it said contradicted or undermined his calls for negotiations.

“It was the Dalai Lama clique that closed the door of dialogue,” Xinhua said, using China’s standard term for the Tibetan government-in-exile.

The statement came a day before the arrival in Beijing of the Olympic torch that has become a magnet for Tibetan activists and other groups seeking to use the August Beijing Games to draw attention to their causes.

China has accused the Dalai Lama of orchestrating protests in Tibet’s regional capital Lhasa and other heavily Tibetan areas that started peacefully among Buddhist monks, but turned deadly on March 14. Beijing says 22 people were killed in Lhasa, most of them ethnic Han and Muslim Chinese migrants, while Tibetan exiles put the overall death toll at 140.

The Dalai Lama has condemned the violence and urged an independent investigation into the protests, the most serious anti-Chinese unrest in the region since 1989.

Xinhua said late on Saturday police had found guns and explosives at a monastery in Aba county in western Sichuan province, where state media first acknowledged police had fired at protesters on March 16, wounding four. Xinhua has said 381 people involved in the protests had surrendered to police and 26 suspects have been caught for alleged involvement.

The police found 30 guns, hundreds of bullets, along with explosives and knives at the Geerdeng monastery on Friday, Xinhua said. Flags of Tibet’s government-in-exile and banners with “Tibet Independence” written on them were also found in monks’ rooms, the report said. Police confiscated satellite phones, receivers for overseas TV channels, as well as fax machines and computers, the report said.

While Beijing has imposed a massive military clampdown, a new protest was reported to have broken out on Saturday in Lhasa as diplomats wrapped up a visit organised by Beijing in an effort to blunt criticism of its crackdown on the unrest.

According to the Washington-based International Campaign for Tibet, the demonstration began at about 2pm at Lhasa’s Ramoche monastery and lasted several hours.

Officials with Lhasa’s municipal government described the city as calm today.

A woman who answered the phone at Lhasa government headquarters said the reported protest was merely a rumour.

People also protested at the Jokhang Temple, a major Buddhist site in Lhasa, the Tibetan government-in-exile said on its website. It gave no other details.

Several hundred people took part, the US-based broadcaster Radio Free Asia reported. It cited an unidentified witness as saying there were fistfights.

“People were running in every direction,” another witness was quoted as saying. “It was a huge protest, and people were shouting.”

Diplomats from the US, Japan and European governments returned to Beijing on Saturday after a tightly controlled two-day visit to Lhasa.

The diplomats toured damaged areas of Lhasa and met people selected by Chinese authorities, who accompanied them at all times, the American Embassy said in a brief written statement. It gave no other details but repeated Washington’s appeal to China to show restraint.

The unrest has been a public relations disaster for communist leaders, who want to use the Olympics to showcase China as a prosperous, stable society.

A group of foreign reporters was taken on a similar trip to Lhasa earlier in the week. That effort backfired when about 30 monks burst into a briefing room shouting that there was no religious freedom in Tibet.

The protests, led by monks, began peacefully March 10, on the anniversary of a failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule. Tibet had been effectively independent for decades before Chinese communist troops entered in 1950.

The US and other foreign government’s have urged Beijing to talk with the Dalai Lama, who has repeatedly said he would be willing to meet with Chinese officials.

However, Xinhua on Sunday dismissed such calls, saying his claim not to seek Tibetan independence was insincere.

“The past decades have seen the Dalai Lama clique, a real trouble maker, constantly break its words,” Xinhua said in its commentary.

Meanwhile, officials were tightening up security for the Olympic torch’s Monday arrival in Beijing, requiring journalists covering the event to pick up their accreditation in person.

The torch is due to arrive in Beijing aboard an Air China plane and be displayed at a gala ceremony in Tiananmen Square, the heart of the Chinese capital.