Two envoys of the Tibet government-in-exile in India will head for China on Friday for a sixth round of talks on greater autonomy for the Himalayan region, the exiles' foreign minister said Thursday.
"They'll be in China for about a week," Kalong Tempa Tsering, minister in the Tibet Central Administration, based in the Indian hill town of Dharamsala, told AFP Thursday.
"They are going with an open heart and mind." Envoys Lodi Gyaltsen Gari and Kelsang Gyaltsen were briefed by Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama Tuesday, a statement released by the Dalai Lama's office Thursday said.
"We are not demanding independence but we want genuine autonomy for the entire Tibetan region," said Tsering.
The Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet after a failed uprising against Beijing in 1959, has dropped calls for independence for the mountainous region occupied by China in 1951 and has adopted a "middle way" strategy.
The Tibetan spiritual leader expressed optimism after the fifth round of talks that took place in February 2006. But reports of violence by Chinese forces against Tibetans have continued.
Camera footage by mountaineers showed Chinese soldiers shooting monks, nuns and children fleeing across the mountainous border to Nepal in September, leaving one teenage nun dead.
Young Tibetans in exile have expressed increasing frustration with the attempts by the Dalai Lama to campaign for more rights for the six million Tibetans under Chinese rule.
"It is not successful. The dialogue today is almost finished," said Tenzin Tsundue, general secretary of the Friends of Tibet exile group at a conference in New Delhi over the weekend. "No one doubts his sincerity. But sincerity is not enough to get a solution."
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