Tibet: A Forgotten Country?

For decades, no one in the West had heard of the Uighurs and few knew who they really were. Tibetans, on the other hand, benefited from the aura of the Dalai Lama who travelled widely and met with heads of state and government. Tibet and its people continued to be the stuff of dreams, and the old clichés attached to the country continued to live on. Then, just after the 2008 Tibetan uprisings, the inter-ethnic clashes in Urumqi occurred in 2009. They were followed by the Tiananmen Square incident in 2013 and the knife attack at Kunming railway station in Yunnan in 2014, all of which were attributed to Uighurs and brought them out of the shadows into the international spotlight. The rise of China, the increasingly authoritarian rule of Xi Jinping, the hyper-sensitivity of the Chinese authorities with regard to the Dalai Lama, and the timidity, not to say weakness, of Western countries faced with a now economically powerful China, have led numerous governments to stop receiving the Tibetan hierarch. On top of all this, complicated, difficult, and often worrisome, national and international political situation have contributed to the media losing interest in Tibet and Tibetans little by little…