Dalai Lama Blasts 'Brutal Crackdown' in Tibet

By GAVIN RABINOWITZ / AP WRITER

DHARMSALA, India — China has launched a "brutal crackdown" in Tibet since protests shook the Himalayan region last year, the Dalai Lama said Tuesday in transcripts of a speech to mark the 50th anniversary of the failed uprising that sent him into exile.

Tibetan culture and identity are "nearing extinction," he said, according to an advance copy released by his aides shortly before he was to begin speaking in this Indian hill town, where he and the Tibetan government-in-exile are based. "The Tibetan people are regarded like criminals, deserving to be put to death."

"Even today, Tibetans in Tibet live in constant fear and the Chinese authorities remain constantly suspicious of them," he said.

While his comments were unusually strong for a man known for his deeply pacifist beliefs, he also urged that any change come peacefully.

"I have no doubt that the justice of Tibetan cause will prevail if we continue to tread a path of truth and nonviolence," he said.

Last year, a peaceful commemoration of the 1959 uprising by monks in Lhasa, Tibet's regional capital, erupted into anti-Chinese rioting four days later and spread to surrounding provinces—the most sustained and violent demonstrations by Tibetans in decades.

This year, China has largely sealed off Tibet to the outside world.

Recent visitors to Lhasa have described armed police posted on rooftops. Local governments in Tibetan areas have ordered foreign tourists out, and foreign journalists have been detained and told to leave. Internet and text-messaging services, which helped spread word of last year's protests, have been unplugged in parts of the region.

Following the protests, China has stepped up its campaign to vilify the Dalai Lama, accusing him of leading a campaign to split the region from the rest of the country.

The Dalai Lama has denied the allegations, saying he is only seeking greater autonomy for the region to protect its unique Buddhist culture.

Meanwhile the head of China's rubber-stamp parliament cited Western democracy no less than nine times in a single speech—to illustrate what the country would not become.

China will never be a multiparty state with separation of powers, he said. It will not have an independent judiciary. Elections will still have mostly government-approved candidates on the ballot.

The hard line taken by National People's Congress Chairman Wu Bangguo on Monday was an apparent response to renewed calls for political reform from inside and outside the country.

Observers are taking Wu's speech as a sign of just how reform-shy the system has become with the global economic crisis beating at China's door and a series of sensitive anniversaries approaching—including that of the bloody 1989 suppression of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests. Many say the supremely conservative trend is likely to long outlive the current crisis.

"I don't see any progress or breakthroughs in the Chinese political system for a long time to come," said Yu Jie, a social and political critic whose writings have been banned for the past five years.

Addressing the congress' annual nine-day meeting, Wu defended China's one-party communist system and drew clear distinctions with multiparty political systems in the West.

China, he said, would never introduce a system of "multiple parties holding office in rotation," nor would it allow a separation of powers among the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, or a legislature made up of lower and upper houses.

Though hardly new, his arguments were notably more extensive than in the past. Last year, Wu, the Communist Party's No. 2 leader, made only a passing reference to the separation of powers and a bicameral parliament.

Wu also appeared to rule out moves toward greater judicial independence, saying the all-powerful Communist Party would continue to dictate standards and priorities that it expected courts and prosecutors to adhere to.

"The Western model of a legal system cannot be copied mechanically in establishing our own," Wu said.

Wu's remarks appeared to be a deliberate rebuttal to critics calling for greater liberalization, including legalizing opposition parties and direct elections for legislative bodies.

The boldest such call, known as "Charter '08," began circulating on the Internet in December and won endorsements from hundreds of intellectuals and pro-democracy activists both inside China and overseas. It declares authoritarian rule on the wane and calls for a new Chinese constitution, separation of powers, competitive elections and other hallmarks of Western democracy.

Authorities have suppressed all mention of the document in Chinese media while harassing or detaining its drafters and signatories.