BEIJING, March 11 (Reuters) - Chinese officials reacted with anger to a speech by exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama in which he said Buddhists were living in prison-like conditions and expressed sympathy with the people of Xinjiang.
The Dalai Lama has long been a focus of Chinese ire, and even more so after he met U.S. President Barack Obama last month, drawing condemnation from Beijing, which calls the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader a dangerous separatist.
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| An Indian policeman (R) grabs the bandana of a fleeing Tibetan in-exile demonstrating outside the Chinese embassy in New Delhi on March 12. AFP |
In an address on Wednesday marking 51 years since he fled Tibet after a failed uprising against Chinese rule, the Dalai Lama referred to Xinjiang as “East Turkestan”, the name given to it by pro-independence exiles.
The region is populated by the ethnic minority Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking largely Muslim people. “This exposes and proves his intent on splitting up China and wrecking ethnic unity,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a regular news conference on Thursday, responding to a question about the Dalai Lama's comments.
“The Dalai distorts the true situation in Tibet, and attacks and insults the central government's policies in Tibet, to trumpet his separatist claims of independence or semi-independence,” Qin said. The Dalai Lama also said Beijing had put monks and nuns “in prison-like conditions”, making “monasteries function more like museums ... to deliberately annihilate Buddhism”.
Protests led by Buddhist monks against Chinese rule in March 2008 gave way to torrid violence, with rioters torching shops in Tibet's regional capital, Lhasa, and turning on residents, including Han Chinese and Hui Muslims. |
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