The exiled Dalai Lama yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of an anti-Chinese uprising in Tibet with an impassioned plea for dialogue with Chinese leaders, but his words fell on deaf ears in Beijing.
Pro-Tibet demonstrations were held in several world cities to commemorate the abortive rising, and China reinforced security along the 1,414 km Nepal-Tibet border to forestall possible protests.
In the Chinese capital the anniversary was marked by the opening of a major exhibition of Tibetan culture and styles emphasising the benefits of modernisation under China. Officials were unanimous in their denunciation of the Dalai Lama, labelling him a "splittist".
"Sometimes he says he is willing to negotiate, sometimes he says he is not willing," a senior pro-Beijing Tibet official, Raidi, told reporters. "He has two faces."
Tibet experts believe that despite brief hopes last year of dialogue, Beijing is now simply waiting for the death of the Dalai Lama, who is 64, to remove the sole unifying figure for Tibetans at home and abroad.
"Late last autumn, without any obvious reason, there was a noticeable hardening of the Chinese position on dialogue and their attitude towards me," the Dalai Lama said in a statement from Dharamshala, the northern Indian hill station to which he and thousands of Buddhist followers fled four decades ago.
The 1989 Nobel Peace Prize winner claimed this was accompanied by a new round of intensified repression in Tibet. "The atmosphere of deep distrust between Tibetans and Chinese must be overcome," he said. "It will dissipate only through face-to-face meetings and sincere dialogues."
The Dalai Lama stressed that he was not seeking independence for Tibet but a "middle-way approach" of autonomy under Chinese rule which could preserve and promote the Tibetan people's cultural, religious and linguistic integrity, as well as their socio-economic development.
He also promised that with a "just and fair solution" he would use his moral authority "to persuade the Tibetans not to seek separation".
The uprising on March 10th, 1959, ended with the flight of the Dalai Lama and about 80,000 followers to India. In the next 20 years hundreds of monasteries were systematically destroyed, though many were rebuilt in the 1980s and 1990s.
China's official media have featured dozens of articles in recent days about progress in Tibet, where it has built roads and factories. It claimed that life expectancy had risen from 35 to 66 years. No mention was made of the influx of majority Han Chinese which has turned Lhasa into a Chinese-looking city and could make Tibetans a minority in their own land in the next century, or of continuing unrest among Buddhist monks loyal to the Dalai Lama.
Beijing claims that the territory has been part of China since the 13th century and that it was still a de facto part of the country from the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 until communist troops entered in 1950, a period when it ruled itself and sent ambassadors abroad.
The Dalai Lama recalled in his statement the claim of the ninth Panchen Lama, who remained in China until his death in 1989, that progress under China could not match the amount of destruction and suffering inflicted on the Tibetan people.
One of the organisers of the exhibition in Beijing, a State Council official, Mr Li Xiangping, said the Panchen Lama's words may hold true only for the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution period. "It was a disaster for all the people of China," he said, and Han Chinese had eaten equal parts of "bitterness" with the country's minorities.
Reuters adds: A Western businessman who visited Lhasa a week ago said there were "security police everywhere" scouring the city from rooftops and sidewalks for potential agitators.
Another traveller who was in Lhasa on Monday night described patrols of soldiers dressed in riot gear and said security officials visited western tourists in their hotel rooms.
In Paris two French mountain climbers raised a Tibetan flag yesterday over Notre Dame Cathedral, one of the capital's best-known landmarks, in protest against Chinese rule of Tibet.
The Association France-Tibet pressure group said in a statement: "This people, this culture and this land are seriously threatened with disappearance because of the policy of occupation, oppression and colonisation practised by the Beijing regime."
Switzerland's Tibetan community, the largest in Europe, prepared to mark the 40th anniversary of the uprising with demonstrations.
The protests will be a dress rehearsal for the March 25th-27th visit to Switzerland by the Chinese President, Mr Jiang Zemin.
The Tibetan community has the sympathy of Switzerland's socialist President Ruth Dreifuss, who is also federal interior minister.
Berne is seeking clemency in particular for Tanak Jigme Sangpo, who has been in prison for more than 30 years.
Eleven US students were arrested yesterday after breaking away from a crowd of 500 demonstrators to sit on the pavement outside China's UN mission in New York.