The Chinese government has denied unofficial estimates that up to 80 people have so far died in the continuing Tibetan protests. The claim was made yesterday by exiles and backed up by officials in India, amid spreading unrest in Tibet and Sichuan province, home to a large monastery.
“There is no trouble in Tibet, or anywhere else in China,” said the official Xinhua news agency, over pictures of the smouldering rubble that was once the city of Lhasa. “What happened is that a chip fat fire started accidentally. A small crowd of ethnic Tibetans gathered to watch their much-loved, heroic Chinese firefighters at work and, as an unfortunate result of the congestion in the streets, the fire unfortunately spread a little. The People’s Army was called out to clear a little space for the fire crews to work in, and some citizens were so happy to see their brave defenders on the streets that they fainted with delight, falling directly into the path of the oncoming army convoy. The soldiers were of course very upset by this tragic incident, not least because they find human remains very hard to scrape out of the tracks.”
Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee said that they had no interest in the long suffering of the people of Tibet, as the pure ideals of sporting excellence should always rise above petty politics - and anyway there was a lot of money tied up in the Olympics, so they’d be silly to risk any of it over something as trivial as fifty years of repression towards a bunch of impoverished hermits living halfway up a mountain.
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