China - Dalai Lama - India - olympics

Olympic torch in India, Tibetan refuge country

Thursday 17 April 2008

The Olympic torch continues its relay Thursday in the Indian capital of New Delhi. India is home to the largest Tibetan community outside China and tight security has been deployed to keep anti-Chinese protesters at bay. (Report: L. Kammourieh)

Thursday 17 April 2008

By AFP

Thousands of police were deployed in the Indian capital Thursday to protect the Olympic torch as Tibetan activists geared up for protests during the latest leg of its world tour, officials said.

The relay in New Delhi is one of the most sensitive on the torch's extensive tour, as the country is home to more than 100,000 exiled Tibetans, the largest population outside of the Chinese-ruled territory.

Officials have shortened the relay route in the capital, after Tibetan activists in India staged a wave of protests against China's crackdown on unrest in Tibet, and ahead of the Beijing Games in August.

Secrecy surrounded the arrival of the flame into New Delhi early Thursday, with riot police backed by paramilitary officers ringing a military base as a plane carrying the flame landed from Islamabad.

"We have taken every precaution to ensure the event remains peaceful," junior home minister Shakeel Ahmed told reporters on Thursday.

A group of Tibetan activists staged a brief protest outside the airport as it landed, but they were quickly taken away by soldiers, witnesses said.

The start of the relay is also being kept under wraps for fearing of tipping off the several thousand people expected to take part in protests, some of whom have vowed to disrupt the event.

"It's in the afternoon," Suresh Kalmadi, head of the Indian Olympic Association, told reporters Wednesday at a ceremony to announce the names of 70 sports figures, entertainers and others taking part in the official run.

Bollywood actors Aamir Khan and Saif Ali Khan, tennis player Leander Paes and officials from China's embassy in India will run in the relay.

Around 16,000 police, paramilitary forces, and an elite anti-terror unit will guard the route running from the presidential palace to India Gate, the monument to slain Indian soldiers, and its end point, officials said.

Traffic will be banned around the route, which has been cut from nine kilometres (six miles) to three, trains will be halted and government offices will close during the run, effectively paralysing the city centre.

But Kalmadi insisted that authorities had only taken "normal security measures" and the Indian public was welcome to watch from beyond police barricades.

"We are not afraid of any movement but we want the torch relay to be safe," he said.

Some 3,000 protesters will be on the streets of New Delhi, according to members of Tibet's parliament-in-exile, who have vowed to stage a peaceful and alternative run and a sit-in near India's parliament.

"We will have a parallel peace run," Youdon Aukatsang, a Tibetan parliament member, told AFP. "Our torch will be a symbol of our nonviolent peaceful struggle. It is not our plan to disrupt the Olympic torch."

But other Tibet protest groups said they will try to breach the ring of security surrounding the torch.

"Chinese armed guards will be guarding the torch. We will go as close as possible and ask them to shoot us down," said Dhondup Dorjee, vice-president of the pro-independence Tibetan Youth Congress.

India is home to the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader who fled to the country after a failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule in his homeland, as well as to the Tibetan government-in-exile.

He has urged protesters to be "non-violent and peaceful."

The early stages of the relay in London and Paris were overshadowed by demonstrations over Tibet and China's human rights record, and the stage in San Francisco was also drastically curtailed and seen by relatively few people.

Other legs, including a ceremony and relay around a stadium in the Pakistani capital on Wednesday, passed without incident.