March 29
GERMANY'S MERKEL WILL NOT ATTEND OPENING OF BEIJING OLYMPICS
By Ian Traynor and Jonathan Watts
German chancellor Angela Merkel has become the first world leader to decide not to attend the Olympics in Beijing. The disclosure that Germany is to stay away from the games' opening ceremonies in August could encourage President Nicolas Sarkozy of France to join in a gesture of defiance and complicate Gordon Brown's determination to attend the Olympics.
Donald Tusk, Poland's prime minister, became the first EU head of government to announce a boycott, and he was promptly joined by President Václav Klaus of the Czech Republic, who had previously promised to travel to Beijing. "The presence of politicians at the inauguration of the Olympics seems inappropriate," Tusk said. "I do not intend to take part."
Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany's foreign minister, confirmed that Merkel was staying away. He added that neither he nor Wolfgang Schäuble, the interior minister responsible for sport, would attend the opening ceremony.
Hans-Gert Pöttering, the politician from Merkel's Christian Democratic party who chairs the European parliament, encouraged talk of an Olympic boycott this week and invited the Dalai Lama to address the chamber in Strasbourg, while another senior German Christian Democrat, Ruprecht Polenz, said a boycott should remain on the table.
"I cannot imagine German politicians attending the opening or closing ceremonies [if the Tibetan crackdown continued]," he said. Merkel enraged the Chinese leadership a few months ago by receiving the Dalai Lama in Berlin for private talks.
Brown is to meet the Tibetan spiritual leader when he visits Britain in May, but is determined to be in Beijing. "We are fully engaged in supporting the Olympics," said David Miliband, the foreign secretary. "We want to see it as a success, and I think it's right that the prime minister represents us."
While expressing scepticism about a complete boycott, Steinmeier did not rule one out. "This is not the right moment to talk about a boycott,” he said. “W should watch how the Chinese government deals with the situation in the next weeks and months."
If Merkel and others do not attend the opening ceremony, it is likely to reinforce a growing sense in China that the Olympics is being used to vilify the host.
China had hoped to use the games to highlight its economic development and growing openness. But it is increasingly proving an opportunity for critics to bash China's one-party political system, human rights abuses, treatment of minorities and tightly controlled media.
The Tibet crisis has been pushed on to the agenda of a meeting of European foreign ministers in Slovenia, with the French, who will be presiding over the EU during the Olympics, calling for a team of European officials to be dispatched to China on a fact-finding mission.
British and US diplomats were among a group of outside officials allowed to travel yesterday to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, for the first time since the crisis erupted a fortnight ago.
The EU foreign ministers are to discuss the China quandary at lunch in Slovenia today, with calls being made for a common European position.
"We don't support a boycott and don't intend to boycott the opening of the games," a British Foreign Office spokesman said. "None of the 27 [EU states] are calling for a boycott yet."
The French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, has described the boycott proposal as "interesting", while Sarkozy this week hedged his bets and said his attendance depended on China's conduct. [Guardian Mar 29/08]
March 27
EUROPEAN LEADERS PRESS CHINA OVER TIBET
By Steven Lee Myers and Katrin Bennhold
European leaders sharpened their tone over Tibet, as President Bush telephoned President Hu Jintao of China and urged a resumption of negotiations with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader.
Even as Chinese diplomats sought to defend the crackdown on protesters in Tibet, officials said they were considering sending a fact-finding mission to Beijing, signaling an intensification of international concern over the violent repression in the region.
In London, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France told a joint session of the House of Commons and the House of Lords during a state visit that Britain and France shared a responsibility to urge the Chinese leadership to respect human rights and cultural identity. That goal could only be achieved if there was "true dialogue" between China and the Dalai Lama, he said, a day after hinting that France might boycott the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in Beijing this summer.
French diplomats said they were in talks with other European capitals about dispatching a European Union delegation to China. France, which will take over the European Union's presidency in July, will seek agreement on the issue during an informal foreign ministers' meeting at the end of this week, said an official with knowledge of the draft proposal who would only speak on the condition of anonymity before the meeting.
In Washington, the Bush administration made its most extensive remarks on the turmoil after facing criticism that the president's response had been fairly muted. Mr. Bush has already ruled out an Olympics boycott, which some have called for, indicating that he hoped to maintain a constructive relationship with the Chinese leadership.
In a statement, the White House said that Mr. Bush, in his telephone conversation with Mr. Hu, had urged that diplomats and journalists be allowed access to the region. The statement noted that the two had discussed Tibet as part of a conversation that included Taiwan's recent elections, negotiations with North Korea about its nuclear programs and the situation in Myanmar.
Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, later said that the president had "pushed very hard" on Tibet , urging restraint and a renewed effort to address Tibetan grievances. Neither the statement nor Mr. Hadley explicitly criticized China's government.
"There's an opportunity here," Mr. Hadley said, referring to the possibility of renewed talks with the Dalai Lama's representatives, "and China needs to seize it."
China reacted swiftly to the international criticism, comparing its handling of Tibetan protesters to a recent French police raid after rioting in Villiers-le-Bel, a volatile Paris suburb.
When asked whether China would accept an international fact-finding mission, China's deputy ambassador in Paris, Qu Xing, told the French radio station Europe 1, "Would you allow a United Nations mission to see what happened in Villiers-le-Bel?"
The prospect of the Olympics being held against a backdrop of Chinese military action in Tibet has forced European leaders to walk a narrow line between maintaining their increasingly important economic and political ties to China while protests among their own people against China's actions in Tibet intensify and calls from leading figures in Europe's former communist east grow louder.
The French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, acknowledged the importance of those ties in an interview in the newspaper Libération, saying, "We are constrained by a certain number of economic interests in order not to boost unemployment."
The president of the European Parliament, Hans-Gert Pöttering, invited the Dalai Lama to speak to European Union legislators and questioned whether European leaders should attend the opening. Following the lead of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who met with the Dalai Lama last fall, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain announced last week that he would meet with the Dalai Lama when the spiritual leader visits London in May. Mr. Sarkozy hinted Wednesday that he might do the same, saying through a spokesman that he would decide based on how the situation in Tibet evolved.
An appeal signed by former anti-Communist campaigners like Vaclav Havel, who as Czech president also received the Dalai Lama, called for the Chinese leadership to lift restrictions on foreign journalists, release political prisoners and begin a dialogue with Tibet's exiled leader.
[New York Times Mar 27/08]
March 26
FIRST FOREIGN OBSERVERS INTO TIBETAN CAPITAL FIND CITY SCARRED BY VIOLENCE
By Jonathan Brown
Foreign observers invited into the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, reported a city badly scarred by days of unrest and a heavy Chinese security presence still highly visible on the streets. Operating under strictly controlled conditions, a group of 26 international reporters was driven into the city yesterday by the Chinese government as part of an effort to convince the outside world that life there is returning to normal and that Beijing is back in control after facing its most sustained opposition for 20 years.
It was the first time that foreign observers had been allowed in since fierce rioting in protest at Beijing rule left dozens of people dead in Tibet and neighbouring Chinese provinces.
As President George Bush expressed his concern at the military reaction to the protests in a telephone call to the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, increasing the international pressure over human rights in the approach to this summer's Olympic Games, the observers described a city still under siege with heavily armed police in camouflage uniforms stationed outside government buildings and officers patrolling every intersection.
It is more than two weeks since the height of the violence and the Chinese military crackdown in which anti-government campaigners say up to 140 Tibetans died. The unrest prompted Beijing to deploy thousands of troops to the region and order a news blackout on the country's interior. China puts the death toll at 19.
The journalists were flown to the city and taken on a bus tour. Police questioned by reporters said they were carrying out routine vehicle checks for fake licence plates and people travelling without seatbelts.
There were signs of every day life returning. The Potala Palace, the traditional seat of Tibetan power, was re-opened yesterday for the first time since 14 March, while in nearby Potala Square reporters spoke to locals who said that although security continued to be tight, they were allowed to move around the city.
Lhasa also bore scars from the rioting. Just a few blocks from Potala many shops thought to be owned by ethnic Chinese were burnt out. Others, festooned with white ceremonial scarves to signify their owners were Tibetan, remained untouched. On Qingnian Road, a red banner bearing one of President Hu's favourite slogans - Construct a Harmonious Society - remained intact but a two-storey medical clinic on the same road had been destroyed.
The Dalai Lama, who Chinese authorities blame for orchestrating the protests, described yesterday's visit as a "first step", saying he hoped journalists would be allowed to operate "with complete freedom". He added: "Then you can access the real situation."
The White House said that Mr Bush encouraged Mr Hu to engage in "substantive dialogue" with the exiled opposition leader's representatives and to allow the media and diplomats free access to protest areas.
Earlier Chinese state media announced the surrender of more than 600 people who took part in the protests in Lhasa and in Aba county in Sichuan province, home to ethnic Tibetans. But Beijing appeared to have failed to quell the insurrection completely, with reports from the western province of Qinghai of hundreds of civilians staging a sit-down protest after police stopped a march. Paramilitary forces dispersed between 200 and 300 protesters and ordered people to stay inside.
One source told Reuters: "They were beating up monks, which will only infuriate ordinary people." [Independent Mar 26/08]
The Truth About Tibet
By Lindsey Hilsum
The last thing China wanted, in the year it is to host the Olympic Games, was the world watching its army brutally suppressing protesters.
Things are not going as planned. The emblematic images of China in 2008 were supposed to be the magnificent "Bird's Nest" sports stadium, and millions of proud Chinese applauding their country's success in hosting the Olympic Games. Instead, the world is seeing gangs of angry Tibetan rioters attacking their Han Chinese neighbours, and Buddhist monks demonstrating against Chinese rule.
Since the 1989 unrest, which centred on Tiananmen Square but spread to Tibet, any protest has been suppressed quickly and effectively. But this time, initially, the Chinese hesitated. The government knew that nothing could be worse for China's reputation in this Olympic year than Tiananmen-type images of the soldiers of the People's Liberation Army firing on Tibetan demonstrators. So it flooded the streets with armour, in the hope that intimidation would do the trick. By Monday, Beijing had moved troops and paramilitary riot police into all sensitive areas, hoping to quash protest with a show of strength.
On Tuesday, the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, accused the Dalai Lama of orchestrating the unrest, saying that the protesters wanted "to incite the sabotage of the Olympic Games in order to achieve their unspeakable goal". That goal is independence for Tibet, but it is the social rather than the political motivation that has disturbed the Chinese authorities.
They have been surprised by the ferocity with which ethnic Tibetans attacked Han Chinese and Hui Muslims. These two groups have settled in Tibet in recent decades, starting up businesses and benefiting more than local people from the upturn in the Tibetan economy. Yet never before has resentment turned to such widespread violence: one eyewitness in Lhasa described the riots as "an orgy of racist violence".
The Huis, who control the meat trade and other essential commercial sectors, have long been the target of Tibetan anger. Last month, fighting broke out in Qinghai, which borders Tibet, during New Year celebrations. The point of contention was, apparently, the price of a balloon that a Hui trader had sold to a Tibetan. After the police arrested several Tibetans, overseas activists said demonstrations were calling for the return of the Dalai Lama. But the spark for the protests was the tension between the two communities.
One of the central myths the Chinese government propagates is the unity of the state and the happiness of the 55 ethnic minorities within it. During the week, at the National People's Congress, the annual gathering of China's rubber-stamp parliament, women in aluminium headdresses and other exotic gear were paraded as the acceptable face of diversity.
"This is a planned, plotted activity that aims at splitting the country, sabotaging the union and damaging the harmony and social stability of Tibet," said Champa Phuntsok, governor of Tibet, an ethnic Tibetan whom many people regard as a collaborator. In an example of the overblown rhetoric that characterises Chinese statements on Tibet, the government proclaimed "a people's war against splittism" - the term used to describe the movement for Tibetan autonomy - and said it would "expose the hideous face of the Dalai Lama's clique."
To the shock of the Chinese authorities, the unrest rapidly spread to the provinces of Gansu, Qinghai and Sichuan, which have significant Tibetan minorities. The Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala claims all these provinces as part of "historical Tibet" - one reason for the failure of talks between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government.
In Xiahe, in Gansu, the main street was lined with shuttered shops whose upstairs windows had been shattered by protesters. Here, Tibetans had targeted the Han Chinese who own most of the businesses. Knots of youths hung about at dusk, while riot police lurked at street corners, banging their riot shields menacingly. Most Tibetans still follow the Dalai Lama, but his entreaties that protest should be peaceful seem to have little resonance among the younger Tibetans. Speaking from Dharamsala, he said he had no power to call off the protests.
Monks from Labrang Monastery marched through the streets of Xiahe waving the banned Tibetan flag. "People in Lhasa and us are the same people. We have the same ideas," said a monk. "Today's young people think more of human rights. We want the Dalai Lama back."
Many westerners, who see justice in the Tibetan cause and nobility in the Dalai Lama's position, regard the Tibetans as a peaceful and oppressed people. That view, however, is not shared by all of the Han Chinese who live there. Many of them believe that China brought the chance of prosperity and modern isation to a backward area.
"Our party and government spend so much every year to support the development of Tibet.
"We don't wish for any reward, but those people controlled by Dalai still continue with separatism. They should go to hell," read one blog on the popular site China.com.
As communism has faded away, the ideological void has been filled by nationalism. The intention behind this year's Olympic extravaganza is to celebrate how great China is as a historical nation and as a modern state. Even those who dislike the government in Beijing may regard Tibetan nationalists as unpatriotic and ungrateful. A chat-room comment on Tianya.com reprimanded them: "We do not have to love the government and the party, but we must love China." Another said: "Those separatist trash should all be killed. It is not a good idea to just talk about it. Even if some day there is democracy, I will support a nationalist party to power."
Racism is usual. One blogger addressed Tibetans, writing: "If you behave well, we'll protect your culture and benefits. But if you behave badly, we'll still take care of your culture ... by putting it in a museum. I believe in the Han people!"
None acknowledged that harsh policies in Tibet have provoked the unrest. It's easier to keep blaming the Dalai Lama.
The Chinese government had hoped to have a display of traditional Tibetan dancing at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. If it now moves to suppress the protests with force, it faces the possibility of an Olympic boycott. But if it lets the protests continue, the world will see how widespread is the unhappiness and resentment of China's Tibetan people. - Lindsey Hilsum is China Correspondent for Channel 4 News. She has previously reported extensively from Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans and Latin America.
[New Stateman Mar 19/08]
Free Countries Must Defy Chinese Blackmail and Greet the Dalai Lama
By Timothy Garton Ash
It would be great to watch the Olympics in Beijing this summer, but not over the dead bodies of Buddhist monks.
Last week, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown promised to meet the Dalai Lama when he comes to Britain in May. So should all other leaders of free countries, whenever the opportunity arises. Anything less would shame us all. And it wouldn't help China either.
We face at least three difficulties in reacting to the unfolding tragedy of the Tibetans. We don't know enough about what's really going on, because the Chinese authorities are determined to prevent us finding out by expelling journalists, ratcheting up their customary censorship of the Internet, and telling lies. We feel impotent to prevent the horror unfolding. And we have to balance our deep sympathy with the Tibetans against our interest in a benign evolution of China. Appeasement of Beijing for short-term political and commercial gains is contemptible; trying to ensure that anything we do to help the Tibetans won't hinder the evolution of China is not. It's statecraft - and moral, too.
Here's the good reason for not reacting to the repression of Buddhist monks in Tibet as we did to the repression of Buddhist monks in Burma. No, we shouldn't impose economic sanctions on the whole of China, as we do on Burma. Nor should we boycott the Beijing Olympics. There is too much at stake. The French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner has suggested that if the repression in China worsens - not only in Tibet, but also with the persecution of Chinese dissidents such as Hu Jia - European leaders might not participate in the opening ceremony of the Olympics. A threat worth making, perhaps, though it won't get far with his fellow EU foreign ministers when they meet next week.
It may be worth calling for United Nations observers to be sent in to Tibet, though China will doubtless veto that. As important is to insist that the Chinese authorities keep the promise they have made - and are now breaking - to allow foreign journalists free movement around the whole of China in the runup to the Olympics. (If they don't let reporters go to Tibet, this can only mean that Tibet is not part of China.)
Yet we know, in our hearts, that none of this will prevent them clamping down, with armed force - the knock on the door at 4am, and all the familiar apparatus of a police state. As it is, Tibetans are arrested simply for possessing an image of the Dalai Lama. And there's the rub: the exiled 72-year-old spiritual and political leader of the Tibetans remains the only visible key to a peaceful solution. On all the anecdotal evidence from travelers in these parts, he still holds the love and loyalty of the majority of his people. At the same time, he offers to China's leaders a negotiated path to Hong Kong-style autonomy for Tibet, short of full independence. If they made a rational calculation of their own long-term interest, down this path they would tread.
But they don't. With the doublethink characteristic of repressive regimes, China's communist leaders say he is an irrelevance, a feudal relic; and yet they talk about him obsessively. They routinely denounce him as a "splittist", that is, one who wishes to split Tibet from the motherland by pursuing independence. This week we had the otherwise sober Chinese premier Wen Jiabao ranting about the "incident" in Tibet being "organised, premeditated, masterminded and incited by the Dalai clique". This, he said, proved that "the claims made by the Dalai clique that they pursue not independence but peaceful dialogue are nothing but lies."
A throwback to the worst Stalinist demagogy, this statement is not merely at odds with, but the diametric opposite of, the truth, making black out of white. The Dalai Lama keeps repeating that he does not seek full independence. There is no human being in the world today who is more publicly, consistently and unequivocally committed to the path of non-violence. In accepting the Nobel peace prize in 1989, he mentioned "the man who founded the modern tradition of nonviolent action for change, Mahatma Gandhi" even before his own long-suffering Tibetan people. This week, he threatened to resign as political leader of the Tibetan government in exile if his followers resorted to violence. There is not a shred of evidence that he instigated the rising in Tibet. On the contrary, the fact that popular anger has boiled over into street protest - including, it seems, some violence against innocent Han Chinese and local Muslims - suggests that at least some Tibetans are becoming fed up with the course of non-violence on which he has kept them for so long.
So China's leaders misread, or at least misrepresent, the Dalai Lama's intentions. (How much is genuine incomprehension and how much deliberate lying is an interesting question.) Probably they also underestimate his power. As Stalin asked, "How many divisions has the Pope?", so they may ask, "How many divisions has the Dalai Lama?" If so, they are being just as shortsighted as Stalin was. Like Pope John Paul II, the 14th Dalai Lama possesses, in the affection not just of his own people but of millions across the world, one of the purest forms of soft power.
We, for our part, tend to underestimate the political importance of symbolic acts, such as meeting an exiled or dissident leader. Self-styled realists deride this as tokenism, thereby demonstrating their own lack of realism. For anyone who has experienced a repressive regime - be it South Africa under apartheid, Czechoslovakia under Soviet-type communism, or Burma under the generals today - knows just how important to the oppressed people are those acts of symbolic recognition, whether of a Nelson Mandela, a Vaclav Havel or an Aung San Suu Kyi. It's no accident that the website of the Tibetan government in exile lovingly lists all the "World Leaders His Holiness the Dalai Lama has met", including in recent years the prime ministers of Canada, Australia, Hungary and Belgium, the president of the United States, and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel.
The Chinese authorities know these meetings matter too; otherwise they wouldn't expend so much effort trying to prevent them. Yesterday they declared themselves "seriously concerned" by Brown's decision. They are the real "splittists" here, trying to divide and rule between free countries competing for their economic favours. I have no doubt that this - not any broader moral or strategic concern - was the reason the British prime minister hesitated before committing, under pressure, to meet the Tibetan leader. So one thing EU foreign ministers definitely should agree in their informal meeting next week is that all European heads of government will receive the Dalai Lama, as a matter of course, whenever he comes calling. And the same should go for every other free country.
In establishing this principle, we would send three messages to Beijing: that democracies are not so easily divided; that the Dalai Lama truly represents - dare I say, incarnates - the path of non-violence and negotiation; and that we do wish to engage fully with a modernizing China and celebrate a wonderful Olympics this summer, but not over the dead bodies of Buddhist monks. [Comment Is Free Mar 25/08]
Unrest at Shuttered Gateway to Tibet
By Jake Hooker
Chengdu, China - In the back room of a Tibetan teahouse, three robed monks spoke in whispers.
One monk said his home in Luhuo County had been littered with fliers calling on Tibetans to protest. A second monk said soldiers had surrounded his monastery in Aba County. The third dialed home. After folding shut his cellphone, he said the police had killed one Tibetan protester and injured nine others in Serta County.
"Tibetans are dying for no reason," said the Luhuo monk, as the whine of a police siren drifted through an open window. "But this is happening in remote places, and nobody knows."
From this city of 10 million people in the middle of China, all roads leading west have been closed - except to convoys carrying soldiers and riot police officers to subdue Tibetan antigovernment protests. Chengdu has always been a gateway to the remote Tibetan plateau, but now it feels like a border outpost, tense and anxious, at the eastern edge of what several Tibetans here described as a war.
If it is a war, it is one the outside world cannot see. Police roadblocks have closed off a mountainous region about the size of France, spanning parts of the provinces of Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai. Foreign journalists trying to investigate reports of bloodshed are turned away or detained. Even in big cities like Chengdu, Tibetans say they are wary of police retaliation. They pass along secondhand accounts of clashes mostly on condition that their names will not appear in print.
What seems clear is that in the isolated region west of Chengdu, the sometimes violent protests, already the broadest and most sustained agitation against Chinese rule in two decades, have continued despite the influx of armed security forces. Lhasa itself is now under heel. But a vast area of highlands and placid villages, where Tibetan life usually centers on temples and monasteries built of wood and earth, remains a battle zone.
Protesters and the police clashed in Garze, a prefecture of Sichuan, state media and a Tibetan rights group said. Some 200 monks and nuns began a march earlier in the day that turned violent when the police sought to suppress the crowd, the India-based Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy said.
China's Xinhua news agency said the police opened fire in self-defense after the demonstrators attacked them with knives and stones. The rights group said one 18-year-old monk was killed and another was critically injured, while Xinhua said protesters killed one policeman.
In Chengdu, Tibetans gravitate to a neighborhood that is beside an ancient Chinese temple called Wuhouci. The area is known for a teeming marketplace that sells Tibetan Buddhist ceremonial objects, clothing and art. Usually, Tibetan monks and traders pass through the market, buying crimson robes or printed scriptures, but the police lockdown has left many people stranded and desperate for news from home.
"Do you know how many died in Aba?" asked Nyima, 28, a monk from the Garong monastery in Nyagrong County. He has lived in Chengdu for three months, sleeping above his shop.
After the unrest in Lhasa, violent clashes between Tibetans and security forces erupted in Aba. Officials later said the police fired in self-defense on a crowd of Tibetans that had attacked the local police station and set it on fire. Tibetans who have called relatives in Aba say the death toll may be more than 20; that could not be independently confirmed.
A young Tibetan woman from Aba who sells Buddhist statues and jewelry at a local shop said her family was safe but had also warned her that the conflict in Aba had not yet ended. "They are fighting a war," said the woman, whose name is Haijiang.
A Tibetan college student from Aba had also made a worried call home. His relatives described a confrontation that began at the local Kirti monastery. The student's family said a huge contingent of soldiers arrived with weapons. "People got very nervous," the student said. In recent years, authorities tightened religious restrictions, including closing down a religious school.
On March 16, protests began at Aba after a monk at Kirti declared that Tibetans should not have to live under Chinese rule. Protesters holding images of the Dalai Lama marched through the streets, the student said.
The police initially did not stop them. But when protesters burned a police station, soldiers with machine guns fired into crowds, killing at least 13 Tibetans, the student said. He said several Chinese soldiers had been killed.
"The next day, the town looked green with the soldiers," he said. "Every day, helicopters hover over the city."
The police said Chengdu itself is secure. But the Wuhouci neighborhood is enduring its own lockdown. Armed police officers now surround the neighborhood. White patrol cars cruise the streets, flashing their lights as officers bark through megaphones at vehicles to keep them moving.
Last week, the local police called a news conference to dispel rumors of a bomb threat. Chinese shopkeepers gossiped about reports that a Tibetan man from Aba had stabbed and killed two Han Chinese in the city. The police confirmed that a stabbing had occurred but said a single victim had only minor injuries.
Monks and other Tibetans are meeting in quiet corners. In the back room of the Tibetan teahouse, the three monks compared notes. One, age 40, told news of Serta County, where he said Tibetans had taken over a government compound and raised the Tibetan national flag.
Another monk had come to Chengdu from Aba to purchase printed Buddhist scriptures. Now, he gathered information by telephone. Armed police officers had circled six monasteries in Aba and arrested "many, many" monks, he said. He was told that 23 people had died so far, even though China's state-run media has reported only four injuries.
Two days later, one of the three monks again called his hometown of Luhuo. "The sound of gunfire can be heard in Luhuo," the monk said. "A lama died. A soldier died. They are fighting a war now." -Jimmy Wang contributed reporting from Chengdu, and Jim Yardley from Beijing [New York Times Mar 26/08]
Lahsa - Reuters
Tibet Protest at Olympic Ceremony
By Anthee Carassava
[New York Times Mar 31/08
Athens - Greek officials handed over the Olympic flame to organizers of the Beijing Summer Games on Sunday, but demonstrators angered by China's clampdown in Tibet sought to disrupt the ceremony, evading heavy security to unfurl protest banners.
Shouting "Free Tibet" and flashing red banners blaring "Stop Genocie in Tibet," the demonstrators charged into a police cordon, trying to block the torch runner carrying the Olympic flame from making the final 100-meter run into an Athens stadium.
Backed by riot squads, scores of police officers detained 10 of an estimated 15 demonstrators, taking them to Greece's national police headquarters minutes after the ceremony began.
Athens mounted a major security operation for the event, deploying more than 1,000 police officers and changing the flame's route at least three times to prevent activists from upstaging Sunday's ceremony. Yet even before the hand-over began, three supporters of the Falun Gong spiritual movement were detained outside the sprawling all-marble Panathinaiko Stadium for distributing leaflets on the movement, which is outlawed in China.
China's Communist leadership has come under heavy criticism since a series of demonstrations turned violent in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa on March 10, the 49th anniversary of a failed uprising against Communist rule. Beijing says 22 people have died in the clashes but the toll has since then varied and been impossible to confirm because of a news blackout imposed by China on the country's interior.
The Olympic Games in Beijing are expected to attract 500,000 tourists and four billion television viewers. The Olympic flame, the iconic symbol of the Games, will arrive in Beijing on March 31 before taking off on the longest, most ambitious round-the-world torch relay in Olympic history: a 130-day trip that will cross all five continents and climb up the summit of Mount Everest before finally arriving at the National Stadium in Beijing for the Aug. 8 opening ceremony.
April 4-7
CHINESE POLICE KILL EIGHT AFTER OPENING FIRE ON MONKS AND TIBETAN
By Jane Macartney
Chinese paramilitary police have killed eight people after opening fire on several hundred Tibetan monks and villagers in bloody violence that will fuel human rights protests as London prepares to host its leg of the Olympic torch relay this weekend.
The clash - in which dozens were wounded - erupted late last night after a government inspection team entered a monastery in the Chinese province of Sichuan trying to confiscate pictures of the Dalai Lama. Officials searched the room of every monk in the Donggu monastery, a sprawling 15th century edifice in Ganzi, southwestern Sichuan, confiscating all mobile phones as well as the pictures.
When the inspectors tore up the photographs and threw them on the floor, a 74-year-old monk, identified as Cicheng Danzeng, tried to stop an act seen as a desecration by Tibetans who revere the Dalai Lama as their god king. A young man working in the monastery, Cicheng Pingcuo, 25, also made a stand and both were arrested.
The team then demanded that all the monks denounce the Dalai Lama, who fled China after a failed uprising in 1959. One monk, Yixi Lima, stood up and voiced his opposition, prompting the other monks to add their voices.
At about 6.30 p.m., the entire monastic body marched down to a nearby river where paramilitary police were encamped and demanded the release of the two men. They were joined by several hundred local villagers, many of them enraged at the detention of the 74-year-old monk Cicheng Danzeng, who locals say is well respected in the area for his learning and piety.
Shouting "Long Live the Dalai Lama," "Let the Dalai Lama come back" and "We want freedom," the crowd demonstrated until about nine in the evening.
Around that time, as many as 1,000 paramilitary police used force to try to end the protest and opened fire on the crowd. In the gunfire, eight people died. These included a 27-year-old monk identified as Cangdan and two women named as Zhulongcuo and Danluo.
A 30-year-old villager, Pupu Deley, was killed, along with the son of a villager named Cangdan, and the daughter of villager Cuogu. Two other people, whose identities were not available, were also killed and dozens were wounded, the witnesses said. About ten people were still missing today, including another monk, Ciwang Renzhen.
The issue of unrest has become a magnet for activists around the world who are criticising China's human rights record as it prepares to host the Olympic Games in Beijing in August. The incidenth will cast a shadow of Beijing plans to reopen the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, to tourists by May 1.
In Lhasa, police issued their Number 13 most wanted list, bringing to 79 the number of people still sought for their roles in a deadly riot on March 14 when angry Tibetans rampaged through the streets of the Tibetan capital, stabbing and stoning ethnic Han Chinese and setting fire to hundreds of shops and offices. At least 18 people died in the violence.
Lhasa authorities today sent out a message by mobile phone to residents, offering a reward of 20,000 yuan (£1,300) to anyone who could offer information leading to the arrest of those wanted for the violence.
Two monks in the mountainous Sichuan province have committed suicide.
[Times Apr 4/08]
OLYMPIC TORCH FACES MORE PROTESTS ON PARIS VISIT
by Patrick Vignal
Amid fears that the Olympic torch marathon relay during its Paris run could be disrupted by demonstrators. France has deployed more than 3,000 police officers for the 28-km Paris leg of the torch relay, from the Eiffel Tower to the Charlety stadium, on the southern edge of town. Asked if he hoped there would be a large protest in Paris, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told LCI television: "Yes. I would like people to be informed. For that to happen, we need to know better what is happening in Tibet."
Former world 400 metres hurdles champion Stephane Diagana will set off first for the torch's Parisian journey, Diagana is one of several personalities among the 80 torch bearers to have agreed to wear a badge reading "For a better world" - an initiative decided by the athletes' commission of the French Olympic committee.
Thousands of protesters waving Tibetan flags and shouting "Shame on China" tried to disrupt the torch's run through London on Sunday, the British leg of the international relay billed by Beijing as the "harmonious journey".
More of the same looked likely in France.
"Free the Olympics", read the front-page headline of Monday's Liberation newspaper over a picture showing handcuffs replacing the Olympic rings. A banner saying "Paris supports human rights everywhere in the world" was to be deployed on the front of the town hall at the request of the city's mayor. [Reuters Apr 7/08]
April 7
Protest Disrupts Torch Relay in Paris
By Katrin Bennhold and John F. Burns
The torch was extinguished at least twice amid the melee, andsaid officials were forced to extinguish the flame three times amid security concerns.
Despite massive security, at least two activists got within almost an arm's length of the flame before they were grabbed by police officers. It was the second time in two days that the torch relay had been disrupted in a European capital.
Some 3,000 police - on foot, horseback, roller blades, motorbikes and even boats in the river Seine - tried to prevent a repeat of the scenes in London on Sunday, when the torch's progression through the streets turned into a tumult of scuffles. One man broke through a tight security cordon in the London protests and made a failed grab for the torch, and 35 people were arrested.
China's official Xinhua news agency condemned the "vile misdeeds" of protesters in London. In Beijing, a spokeswoman for the city's Olympic organizing committee saidthe relay would continue on its international route of protests.
Jacques Rogge, the chairman of the International Olympic Committee, used a meeting in Beijing both to criticize the London protests, but also to call for a rapid and peaceful solution to confrontations in Tibet.
Officers with machine guns guarded sensitive Metro exits along the 17 mile route. "One would almost think oneself in Lhasa," said Jean-Paul Ribes, leader of the Support Committee of the Tibetan People in France, who was among the thousands massed on the Trocadero square, across the Seine from the Eiffel tower, where the flame began its passage through Paris. "It snowed last night, now the sky is blue - and police are everywhere."
Many protesters - demonstrating against China's human rights policies in general, or for a free Tibet, or simply for a boycott of the Olympics in Beijing - echoed a headline emblazoned across the front page of the left-wing daily Liberation, under a picture of the Olympic rings restyled as handcuffs: "Liberate The Olympic Games!"
Protesters came from all around Europe, including four busloads from Belgium. Lobsang Dechen, a 29-year-old Tibetan refugee living in Belgium for 4 ½ years, said Europeans should help the cause of Tibet by boycotting the Games. "China does not deserve to be the host," she said. "They have to first learn to respect human rights in Tibet.'
In London on Sunday, the torch was relayed on a seven-hour journey from the new Wembley soccer stadium in the city's northwest to the principal site for the 2012 Summer Olympics in Stratford in the east.
Along the way, numerous protesters seeking to reach the torch were wrestled to the ground by police officers. One man carrying a fire extinguisher narrowly failed to reach the person carrying the torch, but he set off the extinguisher anyway, dousing police officers with foam.
The torch's London relay was the fourth stop of a global itinerary that began last month in Greece, where pro-Tibetan demonstrators briefly interrupted the torch's lighting and its subsequent progress through Athens.
Tibetan organizations plan protests at every stop on the torch's 21-nation tour. After Paris, it moves to San Francisco, its only American stop, on Wednesday. The monthlong tour is scheduled to end in Vietnam; it is to be
followed by a six-week
Both Britain and France sought to protect delicate trade and diplomatic relations with China while supporting the Games and yet to also placate those who oppose holding the Olympics in a country with a harsh record for punishing dissent. like President Bush, has said he plans to attend the Games' opening ceremonies in Beijing in August. That stand has drawn contrasts with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who has hinted he may not attend if China's recent crackdown on Tibetans does not relent.
In London, more than 2,000 police officers were deployed; the security cordon around the torch was so dense that the flame and those carrying it were often barely visible to crowds. For one long stretch, the torch was placed in the back of a single-decker bus and driven past the crowds until the police judged it safe for the runners to resume.
One protester who broke through the police cordon, David Allen, said his anger flared at the sight of British sports stars being guarded in London by Chinese security men. "It makes us complicit in the regime's repression," Allen said. "You have to ask: Where were these security men last week? Beating up people in the villages of China, no doubt." [New York Times Apr 7/08]
NEWS FROM TIBET
News Reports edited by William Thomas
