(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-04-25 07:24

Diplomats and human rights experts from China and abroad on Wednesday urged foreign countries to stay out of the Tibet issue.

The issue in Tibet is China's internal affair, "so nobody should go and intervene in it", Lovelia Cabrera Laping, special assistant to the undersecretary of the Philippines' Foreign Ministry, told the Xinhua News Agency.

Laping was commenting on an article in the Washington Post by US Under-Secretary of State for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky, in which she said the Tibet issue reflected "China's long-standing repression of religious, cultural and other freedoms".

Dobriansky also had a meeting with the Dalai Lama in Michigan on Monday, despite China's strong opposition.

"My view is more open when I came here," Laping, who was attending the Beijing Forum on Human Rights, which concluded on Wednesday, said.

She said that during the two-day forum, she had watched documentaries about Tibet's history and development and listened to experts' views on the region.

"You know your thinking will be different when you see the opinion of the other side," she said.

Ahmed Saadi, deputy director with the department of the multilateral affairs of the Algerian Foreign Ministry, said that China's sovereignty deserved respect from other countries.

Algeria, like China, abides by the diplomatic principles of equality, mutual respect and non-interference in other nations' affairs, he said.

If one country tries to interfere in another country's affairs according to its own standards, that will only lead to conflict and disruption of international relations, Saadi said.

He was one of 110 representatives from 32 countries and international organizations that attended the forum.

Commenting on Dobriansky's article, Sherab Nyima, vice-president of the Beijing-based Central University for Nationalities, said the slaves in old Tibet, who accounted for 95 percent of the region's population before the peaceful liberation in 1951, had no human rights.

"For a long time, human rights has been a tool exploited by some Westerners to attack China," he said.

Luo Yanhua, professor of international studies at Peking University, said she considered Dobriansky's words "biased and fact-distorting".

"They are only trying to pressure China with the issue so as to force the Chinese government into their arrangements," she said.

Chang Jian, a human rights scholar at Nankai University, said the Western attitude toward the Tibet issue reflected other countries' unwillingness to see China's growth, and also the double standards they apply when it comes to human rights issue.

However, he said, such attitudes represented just a few political forces, and not all the people of the countries in the West.

"China is developing fast and is capable of solving its own problems," Saadi said.

Xinhua

(China Daily 04/25/2008 page7)