Attempts to sabotage Olympics 'will fail'

CAMBRIDGE, England: A handful of "Tibetan independence"-seeking separatists are trying to undermine stability in China and sabotage the upcoming Beijing Olympic Games, but their goals are unacceptable and doomed to failure, Li Zhaoxing, honorary president of the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs, said on Tuesday.

Li, who is also a former Chinese foreign minister, delivered a keynote speech at a two-day international conference on China's three decades of economic reform at Cambridge University, England.

He told the 200 attendees there was sufficient evidence to prove the March 14 riot in Lhasa, capital of the Tibet autonomous region, was a political event planned and organized by violent criminals and had nothing to do with human rights or ethnicity.