Transcript
JAMES MILES: I find myself heading into what was already a huge story. The biggest protest in 20 years, and the only foreign journalist there on the ground. I was received by the Tibet government’s foreign affairs office, on the following day, and welcomed to Tibet. I was told, “Mr. Miles, you’re here at a very special time. You’re the envy of correspondents, here in Lhasa. He wasn’t referring, obviously, to what was about to happen, but to what had already happened earlier that week.
So there I was on March the 14th, out at the Lhasa Economic and Technological Development Zone, in the late morning. One of the most bizarre development zones I’ve seen in many years in Xining, and I’ve seen quite a few development zones. This one, a huge expanse of nothingness, with a couple of state-owned enterprises. Officials there who have no idea of how much foreign investment there was or what their plans were for the coming years. It was an excruciating ordeal.
And what I only really began to piece together after leaving Lhasa, was that just around the time I was sitting down for that interview, at around eleven o’clock in the morning, the unrest was already beginning, in the center of Lhasa. If you go back to the story that I wrote at the end of my trip there for The Economist, I wrote a three-page thing on what had happened. In it, I had a formulation which said something to the effect that the rioting spread out across the city a short while after a fracas, between monks and the members of the security forces, outside the Ramoche Temple. Perhaps I should indicate what we’re talking about here.
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