国内英语新闻:Top Tibet official: Lhasa stable, troops in normal state

BEIJING, March 10 (Xinhua) -- Lhasa is stable, and troops there are in normal state, said Qiangba Puncog, chairman of the Tibet regional government, on Tuesday.

    "I was told in a phone talk with Lhasa in the noon that the whole city is stable and troops are in normal state as usual," he said in Beijing after a plenary meeting of the National People's Congress.

    He told Xinhua that he absolutely agrees with President Hu Jintao's remarks on Monday when Hu called for a "Great Wall of stability in Tibet."

    "It (Hu's call) is a good and long-term consideration," said Qiangba Puncog.

    On March 10, 1959, an armed rebellion was staged by the upper ruling class in Tibet in an attempt to preserve the old serfdom. The rebellion was quickly foiled by the People's Liberation Army, and the central government then decided to begin a democratic reform which put an end to serfdom and the theocratic regime.

    Qiangba Puncog said that the ** Lama and his secessionists clique have kept on smearing the central government and the Tibetan regional government over the past 50 years, but time and facts would prove what they said are nothing but purely lies.

    "They always lie that more than 1 million Tibetans had been killed in the past 50 years, but the truth is that the population in Tibet increased from 1.2 million in 1959 to 2.87 million in 2008," he said, adding Tibetans and people from other ethnic minorities now account for more than 95 percent of the population in the autonomous region.

    "The fabrication of the so-called 'genocide' in Tibet has become a stock-in-trade for them to cheat the world," he said.