After a four-month voting process that saw 83,000 Tibetan refugees around the world cast their ballots, 54-year-old Penpa Tsering, a former speaker of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile, was declared the community’s new political leader.
Tsering’s election as the new head of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) – as the parliamentary government based in Dharamshala, India, is known – comes at a time when Tibetans have grown increasingly vocal in their opposition to China, from joining calls from US lawmakers and activists for a boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics next year because of alleged human rights violations, to asking New Delhi to boycott goods and services from mainland China.
This has coincided with greater support from Washington for the Tibetan refugee community, who number an estimated 130,000 worldwide, though about half of them live in India.
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