World Tibet Network News Friday, February 27, 1998

BEIJING, Feb 26 (AFP) - The Dalai Lama's government-in-exile Thursday refuted China's White Paper on improving human rights in Tibet saying it was an unabashed distortion of facts.

"It says that China has respected Tibetan religious rights from the time of the "liberation" of Tibet, but it conveniently ignores the destruction of 6,000 monasteries and nunneries," said T.C. Tethong, the Minister for Information and International Relations in a fax received in Beijing.

"This paper is remarkable for its unabashed distortion of facts," he added.

China released a White Paper entitled "New Progress in Human Rights in the Tibet Autonomous Region" on Tuesday in which it detailed the progress made in political, economic and cultural rights.

"It ignores the fact that China is carrying out a major campaign of repression against the Tibetan religion whereby monks and nuns have been imprisoned or expelled from their monasteries and nunneries for refusing to

criticise His Holiness the Dalai Lama," Tethong said.

Chinese troops marched into Tibet in 1951 and its spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled to India in 1959 after an abortive uprising against Beijing.

During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) thousands of religious sites were destroyed to rid the region of its "backward" religious belief and continued opposition to Chinese rule prompted Beijing to launch a major campaign against the Dalai Lama in the early nineties.

This campaign was reflected in the White Paper, which accused him of attempting to "befuddle" world opinion to support his cause and "vilify the present human rights situation in Tibet."

"Ironically, under his rule in old Tibet, human rights were wantonly trampled on in wide areas -- a crime stemming from the dark, savage and cruel system of merging politics with religion and the feudal serfdom," the paper said.

The White Paper said 95 percent of Tibet's population comprised ethnic Tibetans, and claimed the figures refuted accusations by the Dalai Lama and Western groups that China was conducting a "genocide" against Tibetan people and culture.

But Tethong said from the Central Tibetan Administration in Dharamsala, India that the Tibetan language had been sidelined in the region, with 80 percent of television programming in Chinese, and even university courses on the history of Tibet being taught in Chinese

"The fact that thousands of Tibetans escape every year to India shows that something is very seriously wrong in Tibet," he added.