© Reuters. Lobsang Sangay, former head of the Tibetan authorities in exile, the Tibetan Central Administration, poses for an image in Taipei, Taiwan January 13, 2024. REUTERS/Ben Blanchard
TAIPEI (Reuters) – The plight of Tibet has develop into much less mentioned internationally however repression continues and China is making use of what it did there to different areas, a former head of the Tibetan government-in-exile stated on Saturday.
China seized management of Tibet in 1950 in what it describes as a “peaceful liberation” from feudalistic serfdom. Worldwide human rights teams and exiles routinely condemn what they name China’s oppressive rule in Tibetan areas.
Chatting with Reuters throughout a go to to Taiwan to look at the island’s elections, Lobsang Sangay, the chief of the India-based Central Tibetan Administration till 2021, stated Tibet had considerably fallen off the worldwide agenda.
“I think Tibet is not current,” stated Sangay, who stays an influential determine within the exile neighborhood and near exiled non secular chief and Nobel laureate the Dalai Lama, who he met with in India simply earlier than arriving in Taipei.
Tibet went by mass protests in 2008 earlier than Beijing held the Olympics, after which a collection of self-immolations by Tibetans in protest towards Chinese language rule, however then what China was doing to Uyghurs in Xinjiang adopted by the safety crackdown in Hong Kong took extra consideration, he added.
“On the one hand, yes, there is less coverage about Tibet. That doesn’t mean the situation in Tibet is less serious,” Sangay stated.
China’s Overseas Ministry didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark. China doesn’t recognise the exiled authorities, and has defended its rule in Tibet as bringing a lot wanted improvement to what was a backward and feudal society.
Sangay stated different ethnic minorities in China had very comparable experiences to the Tibetans.
“I always say, if you close your eyes and listen to a Mongolian speaking, a Uyghur speaking, a Tibetan speaking, the situation is very similar.”
Within the Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s issues in Tibet have been seen as an “isolated, more peripheral issue”, and individuals who visited China thought engagement would make the nation “more like us”, Sangay stated.
“But when it happened to the Uyghurs, to Hong Kong and potentially Taiwan, people thought hey, this is a system you are dealing with. This is an expansionist power.”