More than 2 mn Tibetans forced to relocate: Report

BEIJING: More than two million Tibetans in China have been forced to change homes or relocate in a government-sponsored programme that is damaging their traditional culture and rural lifestyle, a human rights monitoring group said.

“The scale and speed at which the Tibetan rural population is being remodelled by mass rehousing and relocation policies are unprecedented in the post- Mao era,” Sophie Richardson, China director for Human Rights Watch, said.

“Tibetans have no say in the design of policies that are radically altering their way of life, and in an already highly repressive context, no ways to challenge them,” she added.

Citing Chinese official figures, the report, entitled They Say We Should Be Grateful: Mass Rehousing and Relocation in Tibetan Areas of China, said two million people “were moved into new houses or rebuilt their own houses between 2006 and 2012”.

The number of people affected accounted for “more than two- thirds of the entire population” of the Tibetan Autonomous Region ( TAR), the report said.

Additionally, “hundreds of thousands of nomadic herders” in Tibetan regions outside the TAR, such as in Qinghai province, which lies in the eastern portion of the massive Tibetan plateau were “relocated or resettled”, the report highlighted.

Citing China’s 2010 census, it said there were about 6.2 million ethnic Tibetans living in China, with 2.7 million of them in the TAR, the group said.