Reuters

THE Dalai Lama accused Beijing of using a new railway link to flood
Tibet with beggars, prostitutes and the unemployed, destroying its
culture and traditions.

“The railway link is a real danger,” said the spiritual leader, who
fled to India from Tibet after a failed uprising against Chinese rule
in 1959.

“Beggars, handicapped people are coming. Their number is huge. Also
jobless people facing difficulty in Chinese mainland are coming to
Lhasa,” he told a religious gathering in the Indian city of Mumbai.

The 1,142km rail link opened last July. The world's highest, it passes
through spectacular icy peaks on the Tibetan highlands, touching
altitudes of 5,000m.

Beijing says the 13-hour connection from China's far-western province
of Qinghai to Tibet's capital, Lhasa, will bring economic and social
development to the long-isolated region.

But Tibetan exiles - about 80,000 of them live in India - have dubbed
the rail link to the “second invasion of Tibet”.

They say it will only increase Chinese migration, dilute Tibetan
culture and militarise the region.

The Dalai Lama said Beijing was forcing poor villagers to relocate to
Tibet and was also sending uneducated young girls from the countryside
to be “inducted as prostitutes” in Lhasa.

“Therefore, that is increasing the danger of AIDS,” he said.

The Dalai Lama said that besides destroying the cultural identity of
Tibet, the railway was an “environmental menace” because it was
helping China mine at very high altitudes.

“We are very concerned about the environmental impact of the railway
link,” he said.

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China's Olympics may destroy New Guinea's rainforests
mongabay.com
May 1, 2006


Construction for the 2008 Olympics in China may fuel deforestation in
New Guinea according to an article published last week in the Jakarta
Post.

The article reports that a Chinese company has asked the Indonesian
government for permission to establish a timber processing factory in
Indonesia's Papua province to produce 800,000 cubic meters of merbau
timber in time for the Olympic games to be held in Bejing. Merbau -- a
dark hardwood found in the rainforests of New Guinea -- is used for
hardwood floors and currently commands prices of up to US$138 per
square meter, making the proposal potentially worth more than a
billion dollars.

Environmental groups are concerned that a new timber processing
factory would hasten the destruction of the island's highly biodiverse
ecosystems.

"An investment of this size will only serve to legitimize and further
fuel illegal, highly unsustainable, and ecologically devastating
logging," said Glenn Barry, a forest activist who has launched a
campaign to block the project. "It is against the Olympic ideals of
bringing 'people together in peace to respect universal moral
principles' when the events are housed in facilities constructed with
ancient rainforest timbers of questionable legality and morality."

The Olympics has only added to the building frenzy currently occurring
across China's cities. According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF),
China’s demand for imported industrial wood -- timber, paper and pulp
-- will grow by at least 33 percent within the next five years, from
the current 94 million cubic meters to 125 million cubic meters. Green
groups allege that much of this wood -- including "almost all of the
estimated 300,000 cubic meters of merbau smuggled out of Papua every
month" according to the Post article -- comes from illegal sources.
Environmentalists say that American consumers are even unwittingly
involved in the illegal trafficking of Papuan timber by purchasing
mislabeled merbau flooring products distributed by large retailers
across the United States.