“Look at the walls of our temple, they have all gone grimy with the smoke that pollutes our air,” said Caidan, who, like many Tibetans, goes by a single name.
Asked if Tibetans in this part of Qinghai Province in China’s rugged west had benefited from jobs at the factory, a man sitting nearby shook his head and launched into a litany about preferential treatment that he said was systematically given to members of the country’s Han Chinese majority.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20
Tibetan Students Rise Up In Tibet & China
Dozens of Tibetan students in Beijing held a candle light vigil at the Central University for Nationalities. Around 500 Tibetan students in Lanzhou, eastern Tibet, undertook a 24-hour hunger strike to protest China’s violent crackdown on Tibetans. Click here to read more. Everyone at Students for a Free Tibet feels a great sense of solidarity and pride with young Tibetans inside Tibet and China. We are with you.
http://www.studentsforafreetibet.org/
The Dalai Lama’s Dilemma
Before the intervention of the Dalai Lama, India-based Tibetan activists believed they had the momentum. “The scale of the uprising, its spread, is wider than 1959,” Tenzin Tsundue, a charismatic Tibetan writer-activist, told TIME from Indian police detention in Jwalamukhi. “We’ve achieved in three days what we were hoping to achieve in three months.” Tsundue had been among the first batch of 101 marchers held on Thursday by Indian authorities. Organizers were also hoping the protests within Tibet and China would gather steam. “Much as we are sad for our brothers and sisters in Tibet, we want the protests to continue,” said B. Tsering, president of the Tibetan Women’s Association. But since the passing of the Chinese deadline for the protestors to surrender at midnight Monday, the organizers of the protests in India have been treading a thin line between hope and despair — protests seem to have calmed down in Tibet and China, but every news of new protests and arrests brings a tiny blip of hope. They’re far from ready to give up the protest altogether. Asked if they’d stop the march if asked to do so by the Dalai Lama, Tsewang Rigzin, president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, answered with an emphatic: “No.” The schism within Tibetan ranks is set to widen.
Tibet to stay on Olympic torch route despite riots
BEIJING (Reuters) – China vowed on Wednesday to take the Olympic torch to Tibet despite deadly riots there and said it was in a “life or death struggle” over the Himalayan region with “the Dalai Lama clique”…
Jiang Xiaoyu, executive vice president of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, told a news conference the relay would proceed as scheduled because the situation in Tibet has stabilized. …
The torch relay, which starts when it is lit in Ancient Olympia, Greece, next Monday, is scheduled to visit Tibet twice…
When the flame arrives in Beijing on March 31 before embarking on its journey around the world, a second torch will be lit and taken to Tibet, where Chinese climbers will attempt to take it to the top of Mount Everest. The attempt will take place in early May whenever the weather conditions on the world’s tallest mountain are most suitable.
Tibet is also on the domestic leg of the relay in June.
(Additional reporting by Chris Buckley and Benjamin Kang Lim in Beijing, John Ruwitch in Sichuan province and by Tan Ee Lyn in Hong Kong; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Alex Richardson)
