Tibetan stability group travels to border region

A stability maintenance supervision group has visited Ngari prefecture in Tibet on the China India border.

Three senior officials of the Southwest China autonomous region – Penpa Tashi, Tenzin Namgyal and Wang Yalin – visited police and armed police in the prefecture.

They received reports from police officers about the security situation and emergency preparedness, local newspaper Tibet Daily reported on Monday.

“Ngari is an undeveloped prefecture in a highaltitude area with tough living conditions, and it’s really close to the border with India,” Xiong Kunxin, a professor at Tibet University in Lhasa told the Global Times on Monday.

“This lends foreign forces and Dalai Lama secessionist criminal gangs the opportunity to permeate into the region and conduct illegal and violent activities,” he said.

The group stressed that maintaining stability is really tough and the anti-secession and counterterrorism struggles are “intense and complex.”

The group encouraged law-enforcement forces to safeguard the sustainable stability and security of the prefecture, Tibet Daily reported.

The tough local topography makes it hard for the local government to boost economic development in the region, but promoting development is still the main goal for the local government to maintain stability, Xiong said. Ngari is a main battleground of the 1962 Sino-Indian border conflict.

The population of the prefecture was 95,803 in 2010, according to the website of the Nagri government. By 2015, the low-income population had been reduced to 12 percent of the total.

The group visited a gas station and a security inspection station in the town of Shiquanhe where regular safety checks are conducted. The group ordered police to maintain stability and “prevent any security-related incident from happening,” Tibet Daily reported.