Week at risk in Tibet 50 years after the uprising

Beijing acknowledged Sunday that Tibet was subject to a lock-tight security in this sensitive period, which opens Tuesday with the fiftieth anniversary of Tibetan uprising of 1959 and will end Saturday with the anniversary of riots in the last year. An article by Xinhua says that any government must "protect innocent people from violence."

This time, the communist leaders do not want to be taken by surprise. Tibet itself, and areas of neighboring Chinese provinces inhabited by Tibetan people are de facto closed to foreigners. Enforcement officers are deployed massively.

The Dalai Lama said Friday feared "an explosion of violence at any moment" in Tibet, on the website of a German newspaper, Frankfurter Rundschau. Protests have taken place in recent days, especially in Aba, in Sichuan, where a monk tried to immolate himself by fire. Saturday, Chinese Foreign Minister, Yang Jiechi, has accused the Dalai Lama of wanting to create a "Greater Tibet, over a quarter of Chinese territory." He also called on countries "not to allow visits to their land of the Dalai Lama" and not "let him use their territory to engage in separatist activities." Incidentally, he still urged Paris to make gestures to a warming of Franco-Chinese relations, endangered by the meeting between Nicolas Sarkozy and the Tibetan spiritual leader last December.