Tibetan lawyer to push for autonomy
Government-in exile re-elects Harvard-educated legal mind to pressure China
TIBETANS in exile have reelected a Harvard-educated lawyer as their political leader to spearhead a campaign to press China to grant Tibet autonomy, a Tibetan government-inexile said yesterday.
Lobsang Sangay, who has led the 150 000-odd Tibetan diaspora since 2011, when religious leader the Dalai Lama gave up political power, won 57 percent of nearly 60 000 votes cast, Tibetan officials said in the Indian hill town of Dharamsala.
“I voted for him because of his educated background,” said Choezin, a 53-year-old crimson-robed monk who fled Tibet in 1985 to settle in Dharamsala, the exiled government’s base.
“His Holiness wants somebody who can continue the work he has done. He has said Sangay is the right man.”
The Dalai Lama, 81, has sought to build a democratic system of government for exiled Tibetans strong enough to hold the community together and negotiate with China after his death.
Question marks over what happens when the Nobel Peace Laureate dies, amid competing assertions over his successor, have reinforced Tibetans’ need for a leader endowed with democratic legitimacy.
Exile groups say they seek genuine autonomy for Tibet, rather than independence. China says Tibet already has genuine autonomy, and that exile groups seek to split the country.
Tibetan Buddhism holds that the soul of a senior lama is reincarnated in the body of a child after he dies. China says it must sign off on the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, who fled to India in 1959 after a failed uprising.
Sangay will head the Central Tibetan Administration for five years. No country recognises the body, and China has declined to talk to it.
Tibetans accuse China of eroding their deeply Buddhist culture by clamping down on religious practice and flooding the region with ethnic Han Chinese.
China says it has brought development to what was a backward region and accuses the Dalai Lama of seeking independence.
The election campaign was marked by bitter rivalry between candidates that drew rebukes from the Dalai Lama.
Sangay, like the Dalai Lama and most Tibetans, backs the so-called middle way demand for autonomy within China. But in his first term he made no headway convincing the Chinese to talk.
Formal negotiations between China and the Dalai Lama’s representatives broke down in 2010, and the stalemate since has cast a pall over Tibetans in exile. – Reuters