Tibet will reopen to foreign tourists on April 5

BEIJING (AP) - Tibet will reopen to foreign tourists on April 5, Chinese state media reported, after several sensitive anniversaries passed without any apparent disturbances.

The remote Himalayan region was closed to foreigners earlier this year as authorities stepped up security, wary of potential unrest. Ethnically Tibetan areas in Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan provinces of western China were also ordered off-limits to foreigners in February.

Tibet would resume receiving foreign tourists as early as next week, Bachug, head of the Tibetan regional government’s tourism administration, was quoted as saying by the Xinhua News Agency in a report late Sunday.

Visits from foreign tourists were suspended “for the sake of travelers’ safety,” said Bachug, who like many Tibetans uses only one name. “Tibet is harmonious and safe now.”

China requires foreigners to obtain special permission to visit Tibet and routinely bars them from all Tibetan areas of the country during sensitive periods to keep news of unrest from leaking out.

In recent weeks, security forces placed the Himalayan region under de facto martial law, with armored vehicles, sandbagged sentry posts and paramilitary patrols giving it the appearance of an armed camp.

March 28 marked the date when Beijing ended a 1959 Tibetan uprising, sending the Dalai Lama over the Himalayas into exile and placing Tibet under its direct rule for the first time and demolishing the region’s traditional Buddhist-based social system.

Beijing sought to commemorate the imposition of direct rule this year with a newly manufactured holiday crowned “Serf Liberation Day,” held on Saturday.

A peaceful commemoration of the 1959 uprising last year by monks in Lhasa, Tibet’s regional capital, erupted into anti-Chinese rioting four days later and spread to surrounding provinces _ leading to the most sustained and violent demonstrations by Tibetans in decades.

Tibetan exile groups had called on Tibetans to mark the anniversary of the protests by boycotting traditional celebrations of the Tibetan new year that fell earlier in March this year.

The ban on outside observers and China’s stranglehold on information about Tibet made it impossible to know whether the boycott had been widely observed.