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Taiwan to shelter Tibetans who fled China

By Ralph Jennings | Reuters

A file photo of Tibetan monks and activists chant prayers during the “Taiwan Campaign for Human Rights at Beijing Olympics” rally at the National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall in Taipei on 7 August 2008. Taiwan will offer residency to 110 Tibetans indefinitely.File photo/Reuters/Nicky Loh/Taiwan

Taiwan will offer residency to 110 ethnic Tibetans, many of whom fled political conflict in China, to resolve a complex cross-border flap involving expired visas and lost passports, the government said on Wednesday.

The ethnic Tibetans, former residents of India and Nepal, refugees from China and their children, may stay in Taiwan indefinitely for lack of any other legal place to go, an official with the local Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission said.

The ethnic Tibetans reached relatively well-off Taiwan on work, travel or religious mission visas issued throughout Asia as early as 2001, then overstayed and said they had lost their passports, said commission secretary general Chien Shi-ying.

“If we wanted to send them back some place, there wouldn’t be anywhere to send them,” Chien said. “They’re illegal but we can’t send them out. There’s nothing we can do.”

Most of the Tibetans work in factories in northern Taiwan.

Thousands of people fled Tibet, a region of southwest China, after a failed uprising in 1959 against what they describe as repressive Chinese rule.

About 20,000 Tibetans live in Nepal and an estimated 150,000, including Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, live in India. China has claimed sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan since 1949, when Mao Zedong’s Communists won the Chinese civil war and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists (KMT) fled to the island. Beijing has vowed to bring Taiwan under its rule, by force if necessary.

Copyright © 2008 Reuters

Published in Reuters website