(TibetanReview.net, Aug09’26) – Cancelled by the government of Nepal under sustained backdoor pressure from China, organizers of the 17th International Association for Tibetan Studies (IATS) seminar have decided to go ahead with the event by holding it online.
”We are proceeding with the conference, but it will take place online,” IATS acting president Francoise Robin, a Tibetan-studies professor at France’s National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations, has told AFP Aug 8.
She has called the cancellation of the event, which has been in the work over the past four years, a “very regrettable and worrying development”.
The event was scheduled to be held in Kathmandu over Aug 23-29, with the local co-organisers being Kathmandu University’s Himalayan Centre for Asian Studies and the Centre for Buddhist Studies of the Rangjung Yeshe Institute.
The event was cancelled despite the fact that, as in the past, around 100 Chinese scholars and experts — including from the China Tibetology Research Centre — had also registered to attend the seminar, which was set to bring together over 720 scholars of Tibetan history, language, culture, art, philosophy and religion from 39 countries. The kathmandupost.com Aug 5 cited the Nepali co-organizers as saying they had already agreed to Beijing’s core conditions.
”We had been planning this conference for a long time, but we received a request from the government not to hold it, so we are not doing it,” AFP quotedconference co-convener Sagar Raj Sharma, a professor at Kathmandu University, as saying.
”The government told us that this is not an appropriate time to conduct this conference.”
However, the government has denied having ordered the event’s cancellation.
“Nepal’s government has not given any instructions to cancel it,” the report quoted Hem Raj Aryal, spokesperson at the prime minister’s office, as saying.
”Neither have we sent a letter nor given verbal instructions to stop it. They postponed it on their own.”
Regarding this, the kathmandupost.com earlier reported Aug 5, citing multiple government officials. that Nepal’s Chief Secretary Govinda Bahadur Karkee, after consultations with Foreign Secretary Amrit Bahadur Rai, had personally called senior Kathmandu University officials and instructed them to stop the event.
However, the decision was never brought before Cabinet, despite what one minister described seeing it as having significant foreign policy implications, the report cited officials as saying, speaking on condition of anonymity to be able to discuss sensitive decisions without fear of retribution.
The IATS, established at Britain’s University of Oxford in 1979, is an entirely apolitical body and even includes a board members from China. Its flagship international conferences are held after a gap of three-four years.
Seminars like this directly contradict the Communist Party of China-state’s ideological mandate, especially in light of its recently enacted Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law, that any discussion of anything Tibetan must be based on the presupposition – no matter how glaringly ridiculous – that the Tibetan civilization is just an offshoot of Chinese civilization.