China steps up verbal attacks on Dalai Lama over Tibet
Some Tibetan activists rally around Buddhism's supreme spiritual leader, who has threatened to quit as head of the government-in-exile if his followers continue acts of violence.
BEIJING — China cranked up its attack on the Dalai Lama today, with one official calling him "a wolf in a monk's robe" and "a devil with a human face."
Beijing's vilification of Buddhism's supreme spiritual leader came as some Tibetan activists rallied around the 72-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner, who threatened Tuesday to quit as leader of his government-in-exile if followers did not stop acts of violence that have marked the region's largest anti-China protests in two decades.
Several activists, perhaps wary of showing divisions at a time their movement is seeking international support, today called the Dalai Lama an irreplaceable figure and the only person capable of uniting his people.
"As long as the Dalai Lama is alive, he will be the central political figure in the Tibetan movement for political and human rights," Lhadon Tethong, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet, said from India. "He is the heart and soul of Tibet. He stands for our identity and spiritual survival."
Tibet has been convulsed over the last week by often-violent protests against nearly five decades of Chinese rule, leaving scores of people dead by some estimates. While protesters have chanted "Free Tibet" and clashed with Chinese security forces, the Dalai Lama has preached nonviolence and promoted a more limited goal of greater autonomy for Tibetans.
Chinese officials, however, have directed much of their rhetorical fire at the Tibetan leader.
"We are now engaged in a fierce blood-and-fire battle with the Dalai clique, a life-and-death battle between us and the enemy," Tibet's Communist Party chief Zhang Qingli was quoted as saying by the state-run Tibetan Daily today.
Zhang called the Dalai Lama "a wolf in monk's robe, a devil with a human face but the heart of a beast."
In a separate interview in the official New China News Agency, he trumpeted what he suggested was China's success in bringing progress and prosperity to the once-backward Tibet and called the Communist Party "the real living Buddha of the people."
Such rhetoric has left some Tibetan activists fuming and calling for more aggressive action, despite the Dalai Lama's prestige and pleas for nonviolence.
