| |
WASHINGTON : China must respect Tibetan culture, the White House said Friday in a tough statement after Chinese security forces reportedly used gunfire to end protests by Buddhist monks in Lhasa.
"Beijing needs to respect Tibetan culture. It needs to respect multi-ethnicity in their society," White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said, amid reports that at least a dozen people had been injured in the violence.
"We regret the tensions between the ethnic groups and Beijing. The president has said consistently that Beijing needs to have a dialogue with the Dalai Lama."
President George W Bush triggered angry Chinese reaction when he met the Dalai Lama in public in October during a ceremony at the US Congress.
At the time, Bush praised the Tibetan spiritual leader for keeping the "flame" of Tibet's people alive, and called on Beijing to open political talks with him about the future of the region which China has ruled since 1951.
The Tibetan capital of Lhasa erupted in violence Friday as security forces used gunfire to quell the biggest protests against Chinese rule in two decades, witnesses and rights groups said.
The violence comes amid an ever-growing international campaign by Tibetans to challenge China's rule of the Himalayan region ahead of the Beijing Olympics in August.
And it followed three days of protests by hundreds of monks in Lhasa, India and elsewhere around the world marking the anniversary of a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959.
The Dalai Lama fled the region after the uprising was brutally suppressed and lives in exile in northern India.
The US State Department this week removed China from its list of the world's worst human rights abusers, classifying it instead as an authoritarian country undergoing economic reform and rapid social change that has "not undertaken democratic political reform." - AFP/ms
|
