Nepal: Tibetan protests resume after Maoist Victory

April 18, 2008



Yesterday around 500 Tibetan demonstrators were rounded up outside the Chinese embassy in Kathmandu. Today, armed police detained another 100 Tibetans as they attempted to repeat yesterday’s protest.

The 20,000 Tibetan refugees who call Nepal home, beginning with their exodus from Tibet after the Dalai Lama fled Lhasa in 1959, have once again stepped up their public agitation after a hiatus during last week’s national elections in Nepal. The fact that the Maoists enjoyed an overwhelming victory in the elections and that the Maoists have made it clear that they will not tolerate political dissension directed against China has not seemed to cower the refugees.

For years the Tibetans have had to be extremely careful what they say and do in Nepal. Before King Gyanendra was ousted in 2006, he bowed to Chinese pressure by closing the offices of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Kathmandu. But as one refugee protester put it to me, in light of the ascension of the Maoists, as well as in regards to the recent communist clampdown in Tibet: "Do we really have anything else to lose?"







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