Tibetans living in exile in Taiwan and officials from several government institutions failed to reach a conclusion yesterday during their first meeting on the group’s status in the country.
Taiwan Tibetan Welfare Association chairman Jamga, secretary-general Lobsang Tenpa — both of whom have obtained Taiwanese citizenship — and a Tibetan introduced as “Abu” who entered the country on a forged Indian passport six years ago, met with officials from the National Immigration Agency (NIA), the Bureau of Consular Affairs and the Mainland Affairs Council at NIA headquarters in Taipei yesterday.
Since last week, more than 100 Tibetans living in Taiwan who entered the country on forged passports have staged a sit-in demonstration at Liberty Square, asking the government for asylum.
Lobsang said he had told the meeting that the demonstrators “have nowhere to go; they don’t have legal residency in Taiwan, they can’t get jobs because of that, but they cannot be sent back to India [or Nepal] since they held forged passports.”
“Something has to be done,” he said.
Lobsang recounted the story of a Tibetan named Shirap who used to live in Taiwan and was only allowed to return to India last year with some difficulty because of his forged travel documents.
“He wanted to see his family in India because he was discovered to have serious cancer, and only had about six months left,” he said. “But as soon as he set foot on Indian soil, he was locked up for using a forged passport and died in prison.”
The Tibetans were invited to present their demands during the first part of the meeting, while the second part was reserved for government officials.
Lobsang said that many Tibetans had come to Taiwan because the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission [MTAC] used to recruit Tibetan refugees in India to come to Taiwan.
“The policy discontinued sometime after 2000, but the word was already out and a lot of us had the misconception that since there’s an MTAC, the government of Taiwan would take good care of us,” he said.
“If we had known this [had changed], we would’ve gone to the US, Canada or some countries in Europe where we could get legal residency as refugees,” he said.
Lobsang said that in some Western countries, Tibetans could be granted asylum as long as they had a document proving their identity issued by the Tibetan government in exile, “even if they had forged passports.”
No conclusion as to the Tibetan’s demands was reached at yesterday’s meeting.
“The main purpose of today’s meeting was only to hear what [the Tibetans] had to say. We couldn’t have made any decision, since none of the officials with the power to make decisions took part in the meeting,” an NIA official said on condition of anonymity.
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