China-India visa row escalates

NEW DELHI – Indian politicians complained on Friday after a Chinese airline blocked two Indian archers from a disputed border state from travelling to China, raising territorial tension just days before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visits Beijing.

Despite fast-growing economic ties and cooperation on global issues, the nuclear-armed neighbours have long disagreed about large areas of their 4,000-km border and fought a brief, high-altitude war in 1962 over India-administered Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims as South Tibet.

Two teenage female archers from Arunachal Pradesh, who were due to participate in the World Archery Youth Championships in Wuxi, were barred from boarding a Guangzhou-bound flight late on Thursday. China refuses to stamp visas on Indian passport holders from disputed territories, but staples them instead, a practice that infuriates India. At times, even Chinese companies, like China Southern Airlines involved in Thursday’s incident, reject such visas.

“If this goes on, we must boycott cross-border relations with China. We want to have friendship, better trade relations with China, but that doesn’t mean they have claim over us,” Ninong Ering, Minority Affairs Minister and a lawmaker from Arunachal Pradesh, said.

There have been no reports of cross-border firing in decades, but disputes, visa rows and wars of words do disrupt attempts to improve trade ties between the Asian nations which account for 40 percent of the world’s total population.

“This is another humiliation that we have received. We have been treated as separate people, as if we are stapled citizens. We are not full-fledged citizens of India,” Kiren Rijiju, an opposition lawmaker from the state and the vice president of the Archery Association of India, said.

Meanwhile, China on Friday criticised a lawsuit in Spain against former Chinese president Hu Jintao over allegations of human rights abuses in Tibet. “Tibet is an inseparable part of China,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a regular briefing, adding the region’s affairs are a Chinese “domestic” matter.

“We are firmly opposed to any country or any individuals’ interference in China’s domestic affairs under the pretext of the Tibet-related issue,” she said. Hua’s comments came after a Spanish court agreed to hear a lawsuit against Hu as part of an investigation into whether he carried out genocide in Tibet in the 1980s and 1990s. The court decided to hear the complaint after accepting an appeal against a decision by Judge Ismael Moreno, who in June had rejected it, according to a judicial decree published Thursday.

Since 2006, Moreno has been hearing a lawsuit for alleged genocide against various former Chinese leaders over repression carried out in Tibet in the 1980s and 1990s. The lawsuit, which was filed by the Tibet Support Committee, targeted seven past Chinese leaders, among them former president Jiang Zemin and former prime minister Li Peng. It asked for Hu to be charged once his immunity as head of state expired. He stepped down in March this year.

The court on Thursday accepted the allegations of the plaintiffs against Moreno’s decision to say that Hu “had sufficient organic competency and capacity to lead a series of actions and campaigns tending to harass the Tibetan population”.

Considering that “during the diverse campaigns of repression in Tibet between 1988-1992, he held the post of Chinese communist party secretary in the region of Tibet”, it said.