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![]() ![]() Chinese Dissidents Challenge Beijing to grant Tibetans the right of self-determination By JOHN LEICESTER
BEIJING Sep 30 (AP) -- Two Chinese dissidents dared the government
Monday to grant Tibetans the right of self-determination and to
talk to Tibet's exiled leader, the Dalai Lama.
The appeal from Liu Xiaobo and Wang Xizhe was likely to anger
China's Communist leadership, which keeps a tight grip over the
Himalayan region it claims has been part of China for 700 years.
Liu and Wang, both of whom have spent time in jail for their political
activism, made their appeals in a sometimes caustically worded
petition faxed to The Associated Press by a Hong Kong-based human
rights group. In telephone interviews, Wang and Liu confirmed
the petition's authenticity.
"The Chinese government has made mistakes in Tibet, especially
since the Cultural Revolution," Wang said, referring to the
1966-76 radical political movement when Chinese youths destroyed
thousands of Tibetan temples.
In the petition addressed to the Communist Party's Central Committee,
Liu and Wang accused the Communists of going back on pledges made
before they came to power in 1949 that China's ethnic minorities
should have the right to self-determination and even "the
right to set up an independent country."
"This way of doing things and style of work has continued
to the present day. It is wrong and is a major reason why the
Communist Party has ultimately lost popular support," said
the petition released by the Information Center of Human Rights
and Democratic Movement in China.
China routinely suppresses Tibetan calls for independence and
greater freedoms. It also accuses the Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet
after a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959, of destabilizing
the region by appealing for greater autonomy.
While they did not want to see China divided, Wang and Liu said
the Han Chinese majority should not "deny the right to self-determination
of each ethnic minority."
Wang is one of China's earliest democracy campaigners, having
been in and out of jail since putting up a poster in southern
Canton city in 1974. Liu, a former history lecturer at Beijing's Teachers College, helped lead a hunger strike during Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989. He served two years in jail and has been detained several times since then.
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