China: Sovereignity the issue in Tibet
Chinese president Hu Jintao says the recent unrest in Tibet is purely an internal affair that directly concerns the sovereignty of the world’s most populous nation.
Mr Hu’s comments to visiting Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd were his first since unrest broke out in Tibet’s capital Lhasa last month.
“Our conflict with the Dalai clique is not an ethnic problem, not a religious problem, nor a human rights problem,” the official Xinhua News Agency quoted Mr Hu as saying, referring to supporters of Tibet’s exiled Buddhist leader, the Dalai Lama, who Beijing blames for fomenting the unrest.
It is a problem concerning one “either to safeguard national unification or to split the motherland,” Mr Hu told Mr Rudd at a meeting on the sidelines of a regional economic forum in China’s southern province of Hainan.
