Published by: World Tibet Network News Friday, December 12, 1997

TIN News Update / 12 December, 1997 / total no of pages: 3

The Norwegian Government has held "constructive" talks with a senior delegation from the Tibet Autonomous Region. The delegation, which visited Norway from 6th to 9th December, is now travelling round cities in Germany on what the Chinese Embassy has described as an economic mission, and is expected to meet German ministers in Bonn next week.

The Tibetan delegation is led by the Governor of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), Gyaltsen Norbu, and includes his wife, three other Tibetans and three Chinese officials.

"It was extremely useful," Ingvard Havnen, spokesperson for the Norwegian Foreign Ministry said of the visit. "We held constructive dialogue with the delegation on the importance to Tibet of upholding its cultural and religious identity and other issues," he explained.

The visit was in return for Norwegian State Secretary Jan Egeland's trip to Tibet last April, and was intended to maintain dialogue with China on subjects including the situation in Tibet, according to Janne Haaland Matlary, a State Secretary in the Norwegian Foreign Ministry.

"We presented a list of eight to nine political prisoners to the delegation, including details of the eight-year old Panchen Lama who has disappeared," said Matlary. "We wanted to have a dialogue about Tibetan culture, religion, and language - in other words, human rights," explained Matlary. "It seems as though the Chinese see human rights questions as more and more important for their reputation," he added.

"Tibetan-Chinese relations are perfect," Gyaltsen Norbu commented after the meeting, according to the Norwegian paper Aftenposten on 9th December. It was a lie that many Chinese have been moved to Tibet, he told the paper, adding that there had not been recent demonstrations in Lhasa against the Chinese or in favour of the Dalai Lama. "We are willing to talk with the Dalai Lama about absolutely everything except Tibetan independence," the paper quoted him as saying.

A member of the Norwegian Parliament described a meeting between the Tibetan delegation and Parliamentarians as unsatisfactory. "Gyaltsen Norbu said there was complete freedom of speech and that 90% of Tibetans were happy," said Bmrge Brende, a Member of Parliament and the head of its Tibet Parliamentary Committee. "We gave them a list of political prisoners, including Ngawang Sangdrol, Ngawang Choephel, and Chadrel Rinpoche, but they denied that there were any prisoners of conscience in Tibet," he said.

The delegation told the Parliamentarians that negotiations with the Dalai Lama were not possible because he was still seeking full independence. "They said that the problem is the Dalai Lama still indirectly accepts people throwing stones at demonstrations," said Brende. Gyaltsen Norbu also told the MPs that the delegation was not pleased about a group of pro-Tibet demonstrators who chanted slogans as the delegation went into the meeting.

In answer to a question from the Parliamentarians, the TAR Chairman said that the child recognised by the exiled Dalai Lama as the 11th Panchen Lama was "in China with his parents," according to the MP. "They said he was playing football just like any other boy. They couldn't tell us where he was because his parents didn't want others to know," said Brende.

The Chinese Embassy in Oslo had earlier turned down a request by the Norwegian Foreign Ministry for the TAR delegation to meet pro-Tibetan organisations in Oslo. Earlier this month the British Government ruled that a similar delegation from the TAR could visit only if it included meetings with pro-Tibetan organisations.

"A lot of people were very upset with the Minister for not following Britain's stand in insisting upon meetings with pro-Tibetan groups as the condition for a visit," said Brende. The Foreign Ministry denied that a separate meeting had been held for the Tibet Parliamentary Committee, as Brende described, and said that the delegation held a meeting with various Parliamentarians and not specifically for the Committee.

Gyaltsen Norbu was accompanied by his wife Yudon, listed as second in seniority in the delegation, which is believed to be the first political delegation other than cultural and economic missions to be sent from Tibet since the Chinese invasion in 1950. Communist Party officials, except at a very high level, rarely travel with their wives, and this is thought to be the first time that a provincial government leader has been allowed to take his wife abroad on an official visit.

Although Gyaltsen Norbu is officially the head of the delegation, the key official is believed to be Yang Zhikuan, a deputy Director of the Foreign Affairs Department of the TAR. He is accompanied by Dondrub, a Tibetan vice- Chairman of the TAR whose name is usually spelt Toinzhub by the Chinese, and by Wang Jiayu, Deputy Director of the TAR Department of Foreign Trade and Economic Relations, whose presence suggests that the TAR is hoping to increase investment and aid from Europe.

The delegation also includes a religious figure, Chara or Jiare Lobsang Tenzin, who is Deputy Director of the TAR Nationalities and Religious Affairs Commission, but who gave up religious life and training some years ago. Choephel, Vice-Principal of Lhasa University, is also a member of the group.

Gyaltsen Norbu, who joined the Communist Party in 1956, is a former head of the Public Security Bureau in Chamdo, and later became head of Intelligence and of the Procuracy or Prosecution Service in the TAR. Besides being the highest government official in the region, he is the second of the three executive deputy secretaries of the TAR Communist Party and an alternate member of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee.

"We should educate the broad masses of the people to further see through the Dalai's reactionary features and to enhance their consciousness in fighting separatism", Gyaltsen said in his most recently monitored speech, which appeared in Tibet Daily on 19th November. "We should take a clear-cut stance in waging a tit-for-tat struggle, continuing to penetratingly expose and criticise the Dalai, stripping off his various marks, laying bare his reactionary nature and the darkness of feudal serfdom," he continued.

- Norway Sponsors Cultural Projects -

The delegation also met in Oslo with the Network for University Cooperation Tibet-Norway, an project that supports academic and cultural activity in Tibet. The Network incorporates the Lhasa City Atlas programme, which involves mapping the city of Lhasa, and the Cultural Heritage project, which documents old building in Lhasa and the surrounding area and works towards their preservation.

The Network was established in October 1994 following an agreement signed by the four universities of Norway with the Tibet Academy of Social Science, Tibet University, and the Science and Technology Committee of the TAR and also organises exchanges for Tibetan and Norwegian students in Oslo and Lhasa.

Two other organisations took part in the meeting which run projects as part of the Network programme, the Institute of Human Rights, a research organisation, and the Peace Research Institute, which has started a project of mapping Tibetan cultural civilisation in conjunction with the Beijing- based Chinese Association for External Relations.

In 1996 the Norwegian Foreign Ministry allocated 6 million Norwegian Kroner (500,000) to the university Network for projects including the Lhasa City Atlas, a seminar on the Bon religion, various research projects, and scholarships for Tibetans to study in Norway. An additional 1 million Kroner (83,333) was allocated to the Peace Research Institute project, and a total of 11 million Norwegian Kroner (91,6666) was allocated to aid projects within Tibet including those of the Swiss Red Cross and Medecins Sans Frontieres.

Norway has a long-standing interest in international mediation and in April 1998 is sending its Foreign Minister Knut Vollebaek to lead a round table conference on human rights in Beijing. "The Foreign Ministry likes to see itself as pioneering new types of conflict resolution, but as with the Middle East, this is often done very quietly," commented Andrew Preston of the Norwegian Tibet Committee. The Norwegian Government also allows Tibetan exiles to broadcast a radio service in Tibetan from Oslo.

- Argentina expresses support for Chinese policy on Tibet -

A cultural delegation of "experts on Tibet studies" is currently visiting South American and the United States.

The delegation met the Argentina's Secretary in charge of Religious Affairs this week in Buenos Aires and was told that the Argentine government "respects China's principled position regarding Tibet and absolutely will not support the Dalai Lama politically," reported Xinhua on 6th December, according to the BBC Monitoring Service.

The delegation told the Argentinian government that human rights are fully respected and protected in Tibet and that "those who ignore this fact are people who either do not understand the real situation in Tibet or have ulterior motives," said Xinhua.

The delegation arrived in Argentina on 3rd December, and held meetings at the University of La Plata and Matansa University with Argentine experts and scholars in the fields of international relations and China, according to the Chinese news agency. The mission had already visited Chile and on 6th December continued to Brazil and the United States, where it will visit Los Angeles, New York, Boston and other cities.

The spokesman for the delegation was named in Chinese as Qunjie, a Tibetan described as vice-chairman of the Association for Cultural Exchanges with Foreign Countries in Tibet, possibly the same person as Choenjor, a member of the Discipline Inspection Commission of the TAR Communist Party, or as Choegyal, the deputy secretary of that Commission and until last year head of the TAR Foreign Affairs Department.

It was led by Du Tai, a Tibetan who is the head of the TAR Communist Party's External Propaganda Department, but the three scholars in the team were Chinese. Wang Hao, a Researcher at the Tibet Academy of Social Sciences and an expert on "relations between the Chinese Central Government and Tibet"; Ren Yinong, a Professor at the Central Institute of Nationalities in Beijing, an expert on "Tibetan history and the serf system", and Li Guoying, a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Tibetology in Beijing, who is an expert on nationalities and religions in Tibet.

Ren Yinong was the spokesman for the State Nationalities Affairs Commission in Beijing in 1990, and achieved notoriety at the time for refuting press reports in March of that year that tanks had been deployed in the streets of Lhasa, at that time under martial law.

The distinguished Tibetan physician Khenpo Truru Tsenam was said to be travelling with the delegation for part of the journey but is currently on a brief private teaching visit to the UK.