Tibetans celebrate 35th anniv of Nobel Prize conferment on Dalai Lama
Tibetan exiles today celebrated the 35th anniversary of the conferment of the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize on the Dalai Lama at McLeodganj today.
In a statement issued on the occasion, Central Tibetan Administration said that it would celebrate the next birth year of the Dalai Lama (July 6, 2025 to July 6, 2026) globally as Year of Compassion to mark his 90th birthday.
The CTA statement said that while the world at large admires the Dalai Lama for all his selfless efforts, unfortunately, the central government in Beijing continues its anti-Dalai Lama campaign and ignores the true aspirations of people of Tibet under its illegal occupation.
About 1.2 million Tibetans have died as a direct result of Chinese occupation and over 6,000 religious and cultural institutions in Tibet have been destroyed. The plot to harm the life of the Dalai Lama is known to all. Despite such heinous acts, the Dalai Lama does not harbour any animosity towards the Chinese leaders and, instead, prays that they gain the wisdom to distinguish right from wrong, the CTA said.
The statement further said that Dalai Lama’s visionary leadership has opened a wide perspective for Tibetans in the freedom struggle and for the restoration and preservation of Tibetan religion, culture and language based on non-violence and dialogue as a means to finding a lasting political solution.
Alarmingly, the Chinese government’s education policy is targeted at producing tools to retain its control over Tibet. It has replaced Tibetan language with Chinese as the medium of instruction and around one million Tibetan children are forcibly enrolled in colonial boarding schools, denying them from growing up with their parents’ linguistic and cultural tradition and forcing them to undergo military training and study communist ideology, the CTA said.
The CTA said that Tibet, known as the ‘Roof of the World’, plays a crucial role in maintaining the earth’s ecological balance, and it is the most sensitive region to global climate change. During the last seven decades of the Chinese occupation, its destructive and exploitative measures like exploitation of minerals, deforestation, destruction of wildlife, forced resettlement of nomads, and large-scale infrastructure development in Tibet, has resulted in desertification of grasslands, rising temperature, landslides and floods.
Today marks the 76th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
