Three US citizens and a Tibetan-American were detained on Mount Everest yesterday as they called for independence for Tibet and protested against the Beijing Olympics, an activist group said.
The protest was organized by Students for a Free Tibet, which said three people were taken away after holding up a banner at a base camp on the Tibetan side of the mountain that said "One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008."
The fourth person detained by Chinese authorities was a cameraperson, said the group's executive director Lhadon Tethong. "One World, One Dream" is the slogan of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
PHOTO: AFP
The International Olympic Committee will announce the route for the 2008 Olympic torch relay in Beijing today. Chinese officials have said they want to take it to the top of the world's tallest mountain.
"The Chinese government hopes to use the 2008 Olympic Games to conceal the brutality of its occupation of Tibet," Tethong said from Kathmandu, Nepal.
A woman at the Tibet government office in Lhasa who gave her surname as Li said she was unclear about the protest. People who answered the telephone at the Tibet and Lhasa police offices also said they were not clear about the protest.
Tethong said three of detained people were Americans and one was Tibetan-American. They also held up a symbolic torch.
She said more than 70 Chinese climbers were in the base camp preparing for a trial climb to see if it is possible to take a torch to the top of 8,848m Mount Everest.
"One of the key points for the Chinese in their Olympic propaganda is to show happy Tibetans. They are very much using the Olympics, so we are also using it to call for an independent Tibet," Tethong said.
Meanwhile, a joint report released yesterday by Human Rights in China and Minority Rights Group International said China's ethnic minorities suffer from widespread discrimination and abuse, with laws supposed to protect them either lacking or simply not enforced, sowing the seeds of domestic unrest.
Minorities found it harder to get jobs, were increasingly denied the chance to educate their children in their mother tongue and benefited far less from the country's rapid economic growth, the report added.
"While many laws, regulations, policies and statements address the importance of equality among Chinese ethnic groups, the PRC [People's Republic of China] is not meeting its international obligations on minority rights for Mongols, Tibetans or Uighurs," the report said.
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