Rev. Danny Fisher

“The Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India on Monday. He says the Tibetan way of life faces ‘something like a death sentence’ under China’s leadership.” Photo by Shiho Fukada for The New York Times.
Edward Wong interviews His Holiness the Dalai Lama for the New York Times about the solution for Tibet.

The influx of Han Chinese and the growing restrictions on religious practice have become the biggest threats to Tibet, which faces “something like a death sentence” under Chinese rule, said the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader.

The only solution is to allow genuine autonomy for the six million Tibetans, he said. The regional authority would make policy on education, religious practice and the use of natural resources, while Beijing would retain the right to keep military forces in the region and oversee foreign affairs, he added.

An autonomous Tibetan government would not force out Han Chinese who had already settled in the vast Tibetan plateau in China’s west, but would place limits on any future migration. “Autonomous regions should be the native peoples’ majority,” the Dalai Lama said during an hourlong interview this week.

The Dalai Lama sought to rebut assertions by Chinese officials that the Tibetan government-in-exile’s proposal for autonomy advocated “ethnic cleansing.” The proposal was presented last October to the Chinese government, which strongly rejected it. Tibetan leaders here say they plan to finish another document by June that will clarify the proposal but not veer from its premise.

Read the full article here. (There’s also a video report that you can watch at the Times‘ website–as soon as it is uploaded to YouTube, I will post it.)