Beijing - Armed police in a Tibetan area of south-western
China opened fire on protestors who opposed resettlement for a new
dam, seriously wounding at least six Tibetan women, the Tibetan
government-in-exile said Tuesday.
The police 'indiscriminately fired at Tibetan residents of Tawu
and Nyagchu counties' during the protest Sunday in Sichuan province's
Kardze prefecture, which is called Ganzi in Chinese, said the report
posted on the government-in-exile's website, www.tibet.net.
The protestors were 'venting their anger against China's forceful
relocation of tens of thousands of local Tibetans' to make way for a
dam and hydroeclectric plant between the two counties, it quoted
local sources as saying.
Police took away the injured protestors, six of whom were named,
and it was unclear if any of them had died of their injuries, the
report said.
Sunday's clash followed about 18 months of conflict over the plans
to build the dam.
Tensions grew after the local government sent a large detachment
of paramilitary police to the area on May 5 and began demolishing
some homes, the report said.
The Tibetan government-in-exile is based in Dharamsala, India,
which is also the seat of the exiled Dalai Lama.
Matt Whitticase of the London-based Free Tibet Campaign last month
said Kardze prefecture was 'probably the most inflamed of any Tibetan
area' of China.
In a statement on Tuesday on the recent shooting of Tibetan
protestors, Whitticase said Tibetans are often resettled on the
pretext of environmental protection but their land is sometimes used
for other projects.
'As Free Tibet has reported in the past, despite official Chinese
claims that nomads are resettled to ease environmental problems,
large and often pollutive infrastructure projects often spring up in
areas from which the nomads have been resettled,' Whitticase said.
US-based Radio Free Asia on Sunday said armed police had
surrounded hundreds of Tibetan protestors at the site of a planned
gold mine near a sacred mountain in Markham county in China's Tibet
Autonomous Region.
Many Tibetan areas of China have remained tense since widespread
protests against Chinese rule last spring.
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