Chinese police pour into Lhasa and outlying areas as China scrambles to control the latest uprisings. Sympathy demonstrations are reported around the world.

    Xiahe, China - The spread of protests from Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, to neighboring communities and now Gansu province represents a crisis for a government eager to project an image of friendly confidence and cultural refinement in advance of the Beijing Olympics.

    On Saturday, a massive police presence could be seen blanketing Xiahe, a holy city outside Tibet that houses the sprawling Labrang Monastery complex, one of the most revered in Tibetan Buddhism.

    By early today, the cordon in Xiahe had tightened further as English-speaking police were stopping all vehicles for miles and forcing foreigners to turn around or, if they were on local transportation, to climb down.

    This followed demonstrations involving an attack on a police station by thousands of people and the raising of a banned national Tibetan flag.

    Twenty people were arrested in the ensuing violence, the London-based Free Tibet Campaign said, and a local official said seven people were injured, as authorities scrambled to quell the worst protests against Chinese dominion over Tibet in two decades.

    The crackdown followed efforts by authorities in Lhasa to contain six days of violence. "They are in the process of restoring order, but it is not complete," a Western aid worker living in Lhasa said.

    The government has reported 10 deaths in Lhasa resulting from the protests, which it blamed on rioters setting fires. The self-proclaimed Tibetan government-in-exile, based in India, said the figure was 30, and other estimates ran higher.

    Lhasa residents reached by phone said the city was under a near state of emergency with people afraid to go out.

    Late Saturday, there were still small signs of rebellion in Xiahe. As undercover police prowled through crowds of pilgrims bedecked in traditional Tibetan clothing, a monk in a bright purple robe looked around to make sure no one was watching. Then he smiled defiantly and raised his fist.

    Although the police presence in Xiahe was designed to intimidate residents, it also suggested how worried and insecure Beijing is at the prospect of losing control, analysts said.

    "The fact that it's now happening at the far reaches of Tibet must be very serious for the authorities," said Robert Barnett, a professor at Columbia University. "It does seem like we're entering a new chapter... . This sounds like a real political challenge to the government."

    The latest unrest was sparked Monday, when 300 monks in Lhasa urged Beijing to release several imprisoned colleagues on the anniversary of a failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule. Protests then spread to other monasteries around Lhasa, then farther afield. On Saturday, sympathy demonstrations were reported in Australia, India and Nepal against Chinese embassies.

    The rolling protests underscore the shortcomings of a ruling strategy based on fear, intimidation and tight control over Tibetan culture and religion, some analysts and rights groups said, which has failed to win the hearts and minds of Tibetans in the half-century since China annexed the region.

    The unrest in Xiahe reportedly started Saturday morning after several hundred monks marched out of the Labrang Monastery, gathering supporters along the way for what was initially a ceremony of chanting and incense-burning.

    By midafternoon, roadblocks were turning back all cars on the main road to the Labrang temple. Convoys of police cars patrolled a smaller road on the edge of town.

    Farther down the steep valley lined with scrubby brown vegetation and small patches of ice, a convoy of military police raced toward Xiahe as two fire engines with water cannons rumbled in their wake followed by 15 large army trucks.

    "There has been great trouble yesterday and today," said the monk in the purple robe, who declined to identify himself for fear of retribution.

    "It's been bad," said a robed colleague, crossing his arms on his chest. "Four people were shot."

    As with many reports in recent days, his claim could not be independently verified. An official at the Xiahe County People's Hospital said Saturday that seven people were injured in the morning rampage, which he blamed on the monks.

    Others blamed authorities. "The police were extreme," said a businessman who shares his time between Xiahe and Lhasa, declining to identify himself for fear of retaliation. "I was on the spot, and it was two hours of chaos."

    The Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy, an activist group, citing sources, said police and paramilitary forces fired tear gas and live ammunition into the air in a bid to disperse the crowd.

    Even as Beijing has tried to block information about the last six days of unrest through telephone taps, Internet filtering and travel restrictions, it is being frustrated by some of the very advances it is promoting.

    Along both sides of the road leading up to Xiahe from the capital city of Lanzhou, the mud walls of impoverished ethnic Tibetan villages are lined with giant hand-painted advertisements for cellphone and Internet services offered by state-owned companies. This proliferation of communication devices has made it far easier for Tibetans to share with the world details of this crackdown than during previous rounds.

    "Protests have taken place in Tibet for years, but they're only now getting reported," said Tsering Tashi, London-based representative of the Dalai Lama with the Office of Tibet. "That's thanks to modern technology."

    As Chinese society becomes more dynamic, this leak-prone environment has also forced the state to disclose negative news in something closer to real time or risk losing credibility with its own citizens.

    The official New China News Agency released its report Saturday that 10 people burned to death during Friday's protests in Lhasa.

    Temples, hospitals and schools are under military control, said the owner of a hotel near the Potala Palace who gave only her last name, Sima. Most of the shops along the city's main Beijing Central Road were damaged, she added, after Tibetans attacked Chinese-owned stores.

    Lawbreakers involved in Friday's Lhasa rampage who turn themselves in by Tuesday and inform on other wrongdoers will be treated lightly, the official New China News Agency reported Saturday.

    China has been quick to blame the exiled Dalai Lama, Tibetan Buddhism's spiritual leader, whom it has labeled a "splittist." Champa Phuntsok, chairman of the Tibetan government, told reporters Saturday in Beijing that the Dalai Lama, 72, orchestrated the unrest from abroad. "This plot is doomed to failure," he said.

    Since 1709, the Labrang Monastery complex here has housed generations of living Buddhas, the third most important figure in Tibetan Buddhism after the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama.

    The city saw its last crackdown in October, when police were called in to quell a celebration after the Dalai Lama was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal in Washington.

    China has tried to wrest spiritual control from Dalai Lama loyalists by naming its own Panchen Lama after the Dalai Lama's choice went missing. Beijing has denied placing him under house arrest.

    It also issued an order in August that any so-called living Buddha who tries to reincarnate "without government approval" is illegal and invalid.

    "All these games are not going to help them in the long run," Tashi said. "China is not able to win over the hearts and minds of the Tibetan people."

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    Times staff writer Barbara Demick in the Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.

 

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    Go to Original

    Heavy Presence of Chinese Police Quells Rioting in Tibet's Capital

    By Jill Drew and Edward Cody

    The Washington Post

    Sunday 16 March 2008

    Beijing - Chinese police flooded into the streets of the Tibetan capital of Lhasa on Saturday to smother riots that have destroyed scores of Chinese-owned businesses and left at least 10 people dead. Officials demanded that the rioters surrender by midnight Monday, and shopkeepers cowered in their stores as tourists fled the city.

    Lhasa, a renowned tourist destination high on a Himalayan plateau, was generally quiet a day after the protests against Chinese rule became violent, according to official reports and tourists and residents contacted by telephone. Armed patrols tightly controlled traffic in the middle of town and sealed off the Buddhist monasteries that have traditionally been centers of anti-Chinese sentiment, they said.

    "They have closed Lhasa down," said David McGhie, 49, a British tourist who arrived in the city by train at the height of the rioting Friday afternoon and planned to leave as soon as possible. "Clearly, we're not going to see Lhasa."

    Patrick Conaghan, a tourist from St. Louis, said he had just stepped off a bus Friday afternoon when "all at once, black smoke. Police were blocking off streets and people running. It was just chaotic."

    The protesters "were shaking hands with us and telling us to get the message out," Conaghan said in an interview as he arrived Saturday in Beijing on a flight from Lhasa. "You know if I was Chinese, I would have felt like I was in a race riot in America. I would have been in ... trouble."

    With travel and reporting tightly restricted by Chinese authorities, it was impossible to verify reports of sporadic violence Saturday that were ricocheting around the Internet and through phone calls, particularly among thousands of Tibetans who are in exile to escape Chinese rule.

    A group of Tibetan exiles led by the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader, said it had confirmed that at least 30 Tibetans had been killed by Chinese forces. The Chinese government put the death toll at 10.

    Local authorities pledged a harsh crackdown, risking China's attempt to shine as host of the Olympic Games in August. After days of silence about the escalating protests, the state-controlled media launched extensive coverage. Chinese television broadcast video of the riots and identified protesters as violent saboteurs. Local officials offered rewards for informers and warned residents that anyone caught sheltering a protester would be punished.

    The violence not only muddied China's "one world, one dream" Olympic image but also overshadowed what China had hoped to be the big news of the day - President Hu Jintao's official reelection and the ascension of his likely successor, Xi Jinping, who was named vice president by the Communist Party-controlled legislature.

    Xi's first job is overseeing management of the Games.

    Although the rioting in Lhasa subsided, a struggle ensued over public perceptions of what caused the protests that began Monday and their significance for China's role as Olympic host.

    A regional government official defended police actions Friday. He said officers had not fired their weapons but rather had rescued more than 580 people, including three Japanese tourists, from burning buildings. He said many of the 10 dead were business owners who burned to death when their shops were set ablaze. He also said Lhasa was not under martial law.

    Chinese leaders urged Lhasa residents to "support the government's crackdown on all forms of criminal activity." A spokesman for the Games organizing committee said the violence would not deter plans for the Olympic torch to be carried over the crest of Mount Everest and into Tibet.

    Activists and Tibetan exiles were scrambling to confirm accounts of dead and wounded monks and supporters and were seeking information on dozens, perhaps hundreds, of protesters who had been arrested.

    Exiles in India said 49 Tibetans who tried to organize a march in Xigaze, Tibet's second-largest city, were arrested Saturday morning. A group of 44 exiles in India set off on a protest march to Tibet, after a 102 marchers were detained by Indian authorities Friday.

    Tibetan activists predicted that whatever happens in Lhasa, protests against China's rule over Tibet would continue to pressure China to change its hard-line policies. "For Tibetans outside, it's like the top has blown off the pot," said Lhadon Tethong, a spokesman for Students for a Free Tibet in Dharmsala, India. "There's been a small crack in the window, and now we must push for change."

    The Chinese government depicted the violence as the result of a plot by supporters of the Dalai Lama, who has been in exile in India since 1959 after leading a failed uprising against Chinese rule. According to Tibetans, the protests are a reaction to China's increasingly repressive policies, which they say are undermining Tibetan culture and religion while exploiting its people and land.

    "Tibetans are experiencing severe economic marginalization," said Kate Saunders, communications director for the Washington-based International Campaign for Tibet. Nomads, who once grazed livestock on grasslands that make up 80 percent of the vast region, are being resettled into farming communities while their land is "literally taken from under their feet."

    In the cities, the situation is particularly acute, as Chinese set up business operations and hire other Chinese as employees. Even in the square outside the 1,400-year-old Jokhang Temple, traditional Tibetan scarves are sold by Chinese traders, she said.

    Tibet has 2.8 million people, 95 percent of whom are Tibetan and other non-Chinese ethnic groups.

    Tensions in Tibet had been rising during the past two years, after Beijing built a railroad line to Lhasa and thousands of Chinese migrants and business people streamed into Tibet.

    Meanwhile, local Chinese officials severely restrict traditional Buddhist practices, and their virulent attacks on the Dalai Lama fuel widespread resentment among Buddhists, Saunders said.

    Without the Dalai Lama's involvement, Saunders said, she sees no end to the conflict. "The hardest thing for the Chinese to do is to accept that these concerns are genuine and are not going to go away," Saunders said.

    "The Dalai Lama has a pretty good image in the West," said a Chinese researcher in Beijing who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic. "The Chinese government has been made to look evil on the Tibet issue, so it is pointless for the government to try to explain anything to the international community."

    

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    Correspondent Rama Lakshmi in New Delhi and correspondent Maureen Fan and researcher Zhang Jie in Beijing contributed to this report.

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