By DPA
Beijing : Chinese police detained six Tibetan independence activists Tuesday after they abseiled from the Great Wall near Beijing to hang a giant banner promoting their cause, groups representing the activists said.
The six activists hung a 42-square-metre banner bearing the message “One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008” in English and Chinese, the Free Tibet Campaign and Students for a Free Tibet said in a statement issued from Hong Kong.
The groups said the stunt was a protest against China “attempting to use the 2008 Games as a tool to legitimise its illegal occupation of Tibet”.
The six activists were residents of the US, Canada and Britain, they said.
“The Chinese government is exploiting the Olympics to gain acceptance as a world leader,” Tenzin Dorjee, deputy director of New York-based Students for a Free Tibet, said in the statement.
“By protesting at the Great Wall, the most recognizable symbol of Chinese nationhood, we’re sending a clear message that China’s dream of international leadership cannot be realized as long as it continues its brutal occupation of Tibet,” Tenzin Dorjee said.
The protest was also directed at the International Olympic Committee for “failing to fulfil its commitment to hold the Chinese government accountable with regards to its human rights record”, the statement said.
“The IOC assured the global community that China’s human rights record would improve as a result of staging the games,” said Matt Whitticase of the London-based Free Tibet Campaign.
“Instead, we have seen the opposite with a hardening of China’s position in Tibet, a sustained government-sponsored resettlement programme of Tibetan nomads, increased social and economic marginalization of Tibetans following the launch of the China-Tibet railway and the closing off of Tibet to journalists and media scrutiny,” Whitticase said.
“To stop the Chinese government from acting with impunity in Tibet, the IOC must publicly demand that journalists have unrestricted access to Tibet,” he said.
Lhadon Tethong, executive director of Students for Free Tibet, said she had requested a meeting with IOC President Jacques Rogge, who is in Beijing for celebrations marking the one-year countdown to the start of the 2008 Olympics.
Despite the controls on travel to Tibet, Lhadon Tethong Tuesday urged foreign reporters to visit the disputed region.
Foreign journalists in Tibet “need to see the thinly veiled reality that exists there” by trying to find out as much as possible independently of their Chinese government chaperones, she said here Tuesday.
“For Tibetans the key is that journalists do everything they can to get the real story out,” she said.
She said the special rules show that China believes it needs to “control the image of Tibet that the world sees”.
“What the special rules for Tibet show is that the Chinese rule there is not stable,” she said.