Tibetan exiles and supporters staged a 'die-in' protest in northern India and Canada, protests wrapped themselves in Tibetan flags and played dead. The protest is a part of a global campaign against Hunter Dickinson's subsidiary Continental Minerals, which holds its shareholders' meeting Wednesday, to press the company to pull out of a planned mine in Tibet.
"They have no right to be in Tibet," said one of the organizers, Students for a Free Tibet Canada director Tsering Lama. "As long as Tibetans have no voice, the company has no right to take what is not theirs."
Continental told the reporter from CTV British Columbia, it is building schools and roads and training local people to work. It says it's following the Canadian government's lead in recognizing that the Chinese government has a claim to the area. "We're operating in the People's Republic of China in a Tibetan ethnic area," said Dickson Hall. "We want to employ as many local Tibetans as possible and work to enhance their lives and we think we can do this in form of the development of the mine."
"They felt it was not different than B.C. or Mexico, which I thought was incredible because in B.C. people don't get arrested and killed for calling for free speech," said Tsering Lama.
In separate news, Tibetan exile sources report that Tibetans clashed with Han Chinese miners in a village near Lhasa as the tour was under way.
The India-based Tibetan government in exile and other Tibetan exile sources say at least three Tibetans were injured in the clash on Saturday.
The reports say Tibetans in Gyama township were demonstrating against attempts to divert a river to the mining site.
Members of farming communities that rely on the Gyama River for irrigation also reportedly held a protest on Monday.
Some information for this report was provided by CTCBC.
གཟའ་ལྷག་པ། ༢༠༢༥/༠༡/༡༥