The Chinese are convinced that the disturbances were not spontaneous, butpre-meditated and well organised. In his customary press conference after theconclusion of the session of the National People's Congress (NPC) held at Bejingon March 18,2008, the Prime Minister, Mr Wen Jiabo, linked the disturbances tothe Olympic Games and described them as "organized, premeditated,masterminded and instigated by the Dalai Lama clique".
The campaign against the Dalai Lama and his set-up in Dharamsala has beenstepped up by the Chinese authorities as well as the government-controlled mediain Beijing and Lhasa. He has been accused of telling lies when he talked of acultural genocide in Tibet in his press conference of March 16. He has beenprojected as insincere and deceitful. In this connection, reference is beingmade to his protestations of his belief in non-violent methods and the actualviolence in Tibet and Sichuan.
Even while condemning the Dalai Lama in strong language, the Chinese have keptopen the possibility of a dialogue with him. Mr Wen said at his pressconference: "The door of dialogue is still open to Dalai, so long as hegives up the position for "Tibet Independence", so long as herecognizes Tibet and Taiwan as inalienable parts of the Chinese territory."But he remained silent on the Dalai Lama's assertion that he was advocatinggenuine autonomy for Tibet and not independence.
This is an intriguing part of the entire revolt in Tibet. While the Dalai Lamahad been repeatedly saying even in the past that his aim is genuine autonomy andnot independence, the monks and the youth, who participated in the uprisingbetween March 10 and 14, 2008, were calling for independence. The Tibetan YouthCongress elements in India and the West do not seem to agree with the Dalai Lamathat the Tibetans would be satisfied with genuine autonomy. It is apparent thatthe Tibetan Youth Congress played an active role in organising the world-widedemonstrations on March 10, 2008, which in Tibet and Sichuan took a violentanti-Han turn.
The questions arising from this are: Was the Dalai Lama aware of the plans ofthe Tibetan Youth Congress? If so, why did he not try to stop them? If not, ishe really in effective control of the Youth Congress? Was the violent uprisingin Lhasa pre-meditated by the Youth Congress? If not, who was behind it? Noconvincing answers to these questions are available. The Chinese authorities seethe entire thing as deliberately planned and organised by the Youth Congresswith the knowledge of the Dalai Lama.
In a strongly-worded commentary based on a report from the Lhasa Bureau of thegovernment-owned Hsinhua news agency published on March 18, 2008, thegovernment-owned People's Daily wrote as follows: