BEIJING: A human rights group appealed to China yesterday to end what it called forced “mass rehousing and relocation” of ethnic Tibetans that it said had uprooted more than two million people in the past seven years.
The report, by New York-based Human Rights Watch, said Chinese authorities threw lives into disarray by denying rights to forcibly relocated ethnic Tibetans with insufficient compensation, sub-par housing and lack of help in finding jobs.
“The scale and speed at which the Tibetan rural population is being remodelled by mass rehousing and relocation policies are unprecedented in the post-Mao era,” said Human Rights Watch China Director Sophie Richardson. “Tibetans have no say in the design of policies that are radically altering their way of life, and — in an already highly repressive context — no ways to challenge them.”
More than two million Tibetans had been relocated in Tibet since 2006, as have hundreds of thousands of nomadic herders in the eastern part of the Tibetan plateau such as in Qinghai province, the report said.
The programme’s aim, it added, was to help economically, but also to combat separatist sentiment “and is designed to strengthen political control over the Tibetan rural population”.
Phone calls to the Tibet autonomous region government office seeking comment were not answered.
Foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said she hoped those issuing the report could “remove their coloured glasses” in terms of China’s achievements in development policy.
Those examining Chinese policy, she told a news briefing, “should have a correct understanding of China’s ethnic and religious policies and respect for the Chinese people’s chosen path of development”.
Violence has flared in Tibet since 1950, when Beijing says it “peacefully liberated” the region. Many Tibetans say Chinese rule has eroded their culture and religion and agitate for the return of their spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who fled into exile in 1959 after an abortive uprising against Chinese rule. Reuters
