Human Rights Watch is demanding an “international investigator” to probe the ongoing violence in Urumqi, as Uighur expatriates held angry protests at the Chinese embassies in Ankara and Oslo.
Over 150 are dead and some 1,000 injured after Chinese security forces attacked a protest march by ethnic Uighurs, sparking widespread clashes in Kashgar, Xinjiang province.
Diplomatic sources say Moscow brokered a long-sought deal granting the US continued access to Manas air base in Kyrgyzstan—apparently fearing Islamist militant incursions into Central Asia.
The trial opened this week in China’s Sichuan province for Phurbu Tsering Rinpoche, a respected Tibetan lama who faces 15 years in prison on a weapons possession charge.
Turkmenistan accused the Russian state energy company Gazprom of causing a pipeline explosion, days after the Ashgabat government broached joining a new pipeline project bypassing Russia.
International protests have greeted the sentencing of two Tibetans to the death penalty for their role in last year’s protests in Lhasa. Thirty-five Tiebtan protesters were arrested in Kathmandu.
In the first major Tibetan protests since last year’s uprising, hundreds of residents in Ragya, Qinghai province, attacked a police station, leading to the arrest of nearly 100 monks.
Opposition parties this week called for protests across Kyrgyzstan on March 27, amid worsening economic conditions and mounting accusations of government repression.
Tibetan protests in China continue to be met with harsh repression, now ignored by the media. But Beijing’s lobbyists were mobilized as US Congress passed a resolution honoring the Dalai Lama.
China claimed declaration of March 28 as “Serfs Emancipation Day” as a “tit-for-tat” against the “Dalai clique,” while in Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama called for “meaningful autonomy” for Tibet.
A young Tibetan monk was shot by Chinese police after he set himself on fire on the third day of the Tibetan New Year, at a market in Sichuan province’s Ngaba prefecture. It is not known if he is alive or dead.
China is widening its crackdown on Tibetan activists, carrying out sweeps across the ethnic Tibetan western regions, as a campaign mounts to boycott Tibetan New Year Feb. 25 in protest of the repression.
