Exiled Tibetan groups have warned of possible unrest in the region this year to coincide with the 50th anniversaries of an uprising against Chinese rule and the Dalai Lama's exile.

"Our forces are not enough," Qiangba Puncog, chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region, told reporters on the sidelines of China's annual parliamentary session.

"We have asked for increases in the armed police, police, firemen, border forces and public security... incidents incited by the Dalai clique could happen again."

Unrest has simmered in Tibet since anti-Chinese riots erupted a year ago on the 49th anniversary of the failed uprising that led to the exile of the region's highest spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

Although Qiangba said he expected exiled Tibetan forces to try to incite unrest again, he expressed confidence that the riots that began on March 14 last year would not occur again.

"We have taken all kinds of measures," Qiangba said. "Incidents like what happened on March 14 won't happen again, we are fully confident of this."

China has ruled Tibet since 1951, a year after sending in troops to "liberate" the Buddhist region.

On March 28, Tibet will celebrate its first "Serf Emancipation Day," commemorating the day in 1959 that China declared the uprising quelled, Legcoq, Tibet's top legislator, told journalists. Like many other Tibetans, he has just one name.

The day will also mark the 50th anniversary of the end of a centuries-old Tibetan Buddhist theocracy that ruled the Himalayan region and kept ordinary Tibetans in a state of slavery, he said.

"Serf Emancipation Day" also falls nearly 50 years to the day that the Dalai Lama, who remains revered by most Tibetan Buddhists, crossed into India to begin his exile.

Last year's riots erupted in Tibet's capital Lhasa after four days of peaceful protests to mark the 1959 uprising. The unrest quickly spread to neighbouring Tibetan-inhabited provinces.

Tibetan exiles say more than 200 people died as security forces cracked down. Qiangba denied this but refrained from giving the actual number of deaths.

China has accused "rioters" of being responsible for 21 deaths.

Activist groups said Chinese authorities had hugely increased security in Tibetan areas. Several protests have already taken place ahead of this year's anniversary, they said.

But Kang Jinzhong, an official with the Tibet Armed Police Division, told journalists that deployments of armed police were normal and no special forces had been deployed to the region.

He refused to say how many armed police and soldiers were stationed in Tibet.

Qiangba said increased security forces in Tibet would be needed even if last year's unrest had not happened.

"Tibet is a huge region... a lot of our townships do not even have police stations," he said. "An appropriate increase is necessary."

earlier related report
An unlikely journey to Tibetan dissent
From her Beijing apartment adorned with a banned photo of the Dalai Lama, Woeser has emerged as one of Tibet's most famous writers and unlikely critics of Chinese rule in the Himalayan region.

The 43-year-old is the daughter of a Han Chinese army officer and a Tibetan communist cadre, but her loyalties are with the people of Tibet ahead of this week's sensitive 50th anniversary of an uprising against China.

"How is it that in their own land, Tibetans have so little freedom?" Woeser, who describes herself as "three-quarter Tibetan, one-quarter Han Chinese," told AFP over the phone in fluent Mandarin, the language she grew up speaking.

Woeser, who like many Tibetans uses one name, declined to meet for a face-to-face interview, wary of China's communist authorities who have kept a close watch on her in recent years.

She says her phone is tapped and that she is followed when she goes out, but she still criticises Chinese government policies in Tibet on her blog.

Nothing in the first 26 years of Woeser's upbringing, however, set her up for a life of dissent.

Woeser was born in Tibet's capital, Lhasa, then moved to southwest China's Sichuan province when she was four, when her father -- who was half Tibetan, half Han Chinese -- shifted posts in the military.

"The education we received taught us in what ways Tibet was bad, and we were young and believed it," she said of her schooling.

But when Woeser moved back to Lhasa in 1990 after graduating from university, she experienced Chinese rule in Tibet first-hand and decided to devote her life to spreading her version of the truth.

As editor of a magazine on Tibetan literature, Woeser said she and her co-workers were forced to attend "political study" sessions every Thursday.

"These would suddenly announce that you couldn't go to temples, or you couldn't go worship Buddha," said Woeser, a devout Buddhist.

Woeser also came into contact with many Tibetans, including monks who told her of their frequent detentions and other mistreatment.

She says Tibetans suffer constant discrimination, religious and political repression, but China denies this, saying it has implemented better living standards since it "liberated" the Himalayan region in 1951.

For many years, Woeser wove her feelings about Tibet into poetry she wrote, expressing her views under the radar as she continued to live in Lhasa.

But in 2003 she published "Notes on Tibet," a collection of short stories with favourable references to the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader whom Chinese authorities accuse of being a separatist.

Woeser lost her magazine job in Lhasa, and has since had four of her former blogs shut down or hacked into, been placed under house arrest and once detained by police.

But her sacking in Lhasa also led her to Beijing, where she married Wang Lixiong, a Han Chinese intellectual, whom she had first noticed in 1999 after reading a book he wrote that was critical about China's rule of Tibet.

"I remember thinking I had never seen a Han Chinese who could write about Tibet so truthfully," she said, giggling over the phone at the recollection of their blooming relationship.

The two got in contact, Wang came to see her in Lhasa, and they started dating, forming one of the most famous intellectual couples in China.

With the support of Wang, 56, Woeser continues her controversial writing in her Beijing flat, surrounded by Tibetan photos and art, as well as the Dalai Lama's image.

"Woeser's voice is one of the most remarkable ones coming from Tibetans today," said Dibyesh Anand, a Tibet expert at the London-based Westminster University.

"The most important aspect of her.. is that her writings and voice allow exiled Tibetans to argue that a criticism of Chinese government is not the handiwork of a handful of diasporic Tibetans or of traditional monks and nuns."

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