China pressed Nepal to target Tibetans-rights group
Posted by barunroy on July 25, 2008
FROM REUTERS
KATHMANDU (Reuters) - China pressured Nepal into cracking down on peaceful Tibetan protesters, violating their human rights with arbitrary arrests, sexual abuse of women and beatings in detention, a global rights group said on Thursday.
Tibetan exiles have regularly protested in Kathmandu, demanding freedom for their homeland and against Chinese action to crack down on demonstrations in Tibet in March.
“Nepal’s government is turning the screws on peaceful Tibetan protesters at the behest of China,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, which said its findings were based on direct observation of Tibetan protests in Nepal.
“How can a government that came to power on a wave of public protests justify crushing peaceful protests by Tibetans?”
China rejected as “groundless accusations” the report by New York-based Human Rights Watch.
More than 20,000 Tibetans live in Nepal. Many of them fled their homes after a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959.
The report said Nepali authorities arrested 8,350 Tibetans, many of them more than once, between March 10 and July 18.
But a Chinese official said his country had no role to play in it.
“Nepal is a friendly neighbor of China, and we don’t use pressure that this report claims against friends or friendly places,” Liu Jianchao, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, said.
“Applying pressure is not an external policy of the Chinese government.”
He said Tibet independence activists in Nepal and other adjacent countries were threatening to harm Chinese interests, seeking to separate Tibet from Chinese territory.
The report said Nepali police were using excessive force in carrying out arbitrary arrests, and threats of detention and deportation to China were being used by the government to gag peaceful protests.
Nepal considers Tibet as part of China, a major economic and trade partner as well as a key donor to development activities.
It says the exiles are free to live there but are not allowed to carry out any anti-China activities.
“Therefore, the recent action against the Tibetan protesters should be viewed in this context,” Nepal’s Foreign Secretary Gyan Chandra Acharya said. “We don’t allow any free Tibet protest as it goes against the one-China policy of the government of Nepal.”
(Reporting by Gopal Sharma; Editing by Krittivas Mukherjee and Paul Tait)
