Tibet issue key to India-China border dispute, Tibetan leader says

Dec 16, 2010, 13:53 GMT

New Delhi - The issue of Tibet has to be settled before India and China can hope to find a lasting solution to their border dispute, a post on a website run by the region's government-in-exile said Thursday as the premiers of India and China met.

'In fact, there is no Sino-India border,' Tibetan premier-in-exile Samdhong Rinpoche was quoted as saying on the Tibetan Central Administration website.

'Tibet is intertwined with the boundary problem between these two countries. There needs to be a political will in both India and China to resolve the boundary dispute.'

The Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader, fled to India in 1959 and has lived in exile since then in Dharamsala.

Dharamsala is also the headquarters of the Tibetan government-in-exile which is not recognised by any state.

India is home to an estimated 100,000 Tibetan refugees.

Tibetan freedom campaigners protested outside meeting venues of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in New Delhi, but they were soon detained or dispersed by the police.

Wen is on a three-day visit to India.

India shares a 4,000-kilometre border with China in the Himalayan region and they fought a brief war in 1962.

Much of the border is undemarcated but the main differences are over India's north-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh and the Aksai Chin area of China.

China claims Arunachal Pradesh and calls it southern Tibet, while India wants China to pull out of the Aksai Chin area west of Tibet which it claims China occupied during the 1962 war.

India and China have held 14 rounds of talks since the 1980s to resolve their border issues.

Samdhong said the issue of Tibet was centrally linked to the long-standing border dispute.

Unless the countries' leaders seriously weigh the question of Tibet, 'it is wishful thinking to hope for a lasting peace in the region,' Samdhong said.

He added, however, that the Tibetan government-in-exile wanted a stable relationship between the two Asian giants as that would bring durable peace to the region.

India and China agreed Thursday to continue to try and resolve their boundary differences through peaceful negotiations.

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