- Monday, May 06, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
HUNDREDS of Tibetans took part in protests outside the Chinese embassy in New Delhi on Friday (4) and organised a protest rally to denounce the Winter Olympics that kicked off in the Chinese capital the same day.
The protesters sought freedom for their region.
They waved Tibetan flags and held placards reading massages such as “No Rights, No Games” and “Say No To Genocide Games”. They demanded China to leave Tibet and implored the international community to raise voice against the Chinese authorities. They also burned the Chinese national flag.
“The Olympic Games symbolize the spirit of love and peace but this time they are being hosted by Beijing, which is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Tibetans and human rights violations of millions of people,” Sonam Tsering, the general secretary of the Tibetan Youth Congress, who was among the protesters, told The Independent, the UK.
Some of the protesters were detained by the local police after they breached the security barricades and tried to run towards the Chinese embassy.
Several Tibetans have been living in exile in India since their spiritual leader – the Dalai Lama – fled Tibet after a failed uprising in the late 1950s.
Beijing doesn’t recognise the self-declared Tibetan government-in-exile and accuses the Dalai Lama of encouraging Tibet’s separatism from China.
Meanwhile in Himachal Pradesh where the Tibetan government-in-exile is based, five major Tibetan NGOs — Students for Free Tibet (SFT), Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC), Tibetan Women’s Association (TWA), National Democratic Party of Tibet (NDPT), and Gu Chu Sum Association of former political prisoners of Tibet staged a hunger strike jointly as a mark of protest against the “flagrant human rights violations of Tibetans in Tibet”, the Press Trust of India reported.
Around 10 Tibetan activists of these organisations observed the fast in Mcleodganj, where the government-in-exile (Central Tibetan Administration) is headquartered.
Rinzin, the president of SFT, said, “As we all know it is the commencement of the Beijing Winter Olympics 2022 and since the day when China was awarded the prestigious Olympic games, we made sure that the decision of IOC was wrong and we made it clear to the international community as well.
“Since then we have been organizing a number of campaigns and events and we have been calling for a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics. We believe that China does not deserve to host the prestigious games and that’s why we are organizing this one-day hunger strike and lots of people are joining us today.”
While human rights groups have dubbed the Beijing Winter Olympics as the “genocide games”, the US and many other countries have cited rights abuses to boycott the event diplomatically.
India has also decided against sending its top diplomat in Beijing to the Olympics after the honour of carrying the event’s torch went to a Chinese commander who was involved in the Galwan Valley clashes in eastern Ladakh in 2020.
India has sent a small contingent to the Winter Olympics led by skier Arif Khan and it took part in the opening ceremony in Beijing on Friday.
China denied any human rights abuses, calling them the “lie of the century.”
