The Chinese Saga of Olympic Shame Continues -- Tibetans in India Enraged
by Details of Crackdown

The New York Times

March 18, 2008

Tibetans in India Enraged by Details of Crackdown

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/03/18/world/18exiles-span-600.jpg
Exiles chanted anti-China slogans Monday at a protest in Dharamsala,
India, where news of the Tibetan uprising has spread.

DHARAMSALA, India ― As Tibet erupted in protests against Chinese rule,
this small, normally placid town in the foothills of the Himalayas
became a nerve center and soapbox for Tibetan exiles and a vital channel
through which news from Tibet seeped out into the world.

Tibetans at home telephoned Tibetans here with snippets of what they saw
and heard of the Chinese crackdown last week. Photographs of gory
killings, which Buddhist monks said they had received by e-mail from
across the border, were displayed in monasteries. Human rights workers
played a tape-recorded conversation with a caller who said he had
witnessed a massacre.

Dharamsala, long the seat of the Tibetan government in exile and a
popular destination for spiritual tourism, has been elevated into the
high-energy hub of the Tibetan uprising.

Throughout the day on Monday, hundreds of protesters gathered near the
gates of the temple of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan
Buddhism, chanting, “We want freedom!”

Their faces painted the blue, red and yellow of the Tibetan flag, they
shouted praise for the Dalai Lama and furiously condemned President Hu
Jintao of China. “Out, out, out,” they roared, demanding full secession
for Tibet, a sharp departure from the Dalai Lama’s calls for autonomy
but not independence.

By mid-morning, a group of high school students in forest-green school
sweaters had gathered near the temple gates holding a flag of Tibet. One
of them, Tsering Dolma, 17, said they had cut class, flouting the
principal’s orders and riding a bus 90 minutes through the hills to join
the protests here.

“It was the pain in our hearts,” she said in halting English. “We needed
to escape.”

Many of the students, including Ms. Dolma, had made an earlier escape,
crossing the mountains on foot from Tibet and leaving their parents behind.

One student, Choedak, 18, said he had spoken to his mother, in Lhasa, on
Saturday night. “All the streets are smoke and tears,” she told him. “We
cannot open our eyes. Every street is like empty.”

Posters for hatha yoga and Tibetan massage (as seen in Lonely Planet
tour guides, they boasted) competed for wall space with angry calls for
freedom. “The Game’s Over. Free Tibet,” read one ubiquitous sticker,
alluding to China’s role as host of the Olympic Games. A banner said,
“Stop the Killings in Tibet.”

Down the hill, at the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy,
calls poured in with accounts of events across the border. Urgen Tenzin,
the center’s executive director, recorded a call he received Sunday. The
caller described seeing seven people shot dead at a demonstration in
front of a Tibetan monastery in Sichuan Province. Callers from Lhasa,
Tibet’s capital, reported police officers making house-to-house searches
on Sunday evening, and a number of arrests.

Mr. Tenzin’s cellphone trilled and he grabbed his notebook. The call was
a secondhand report of a protest breaking out Monday at a medical
college in a province outside the Tibet Autonomous Region.

“We are quite helpless,” Mr. Tenzin said. “What we can do except
disseminate information?”

In the late afternoon, monks at the Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies
monastery disseminated a half-dozen chilling photographs that they said
were from Aba in Sichuan Province, a city Tibetans call Ngaba. One
photograph showed a tank in the middle of a street, and another showed
bodies in the road and a child crouching to get a closer look. The monks
said a source in Aba sent the image Monday afternoon by e-mail, somehow
circumventing the Chinese government’s latest Internet restrictions.

What followed was a most unusual news conference. The monks telephoned a
man who said he was in Aba and let reporters listen as he described
soldiers filling the streets of the city and people vowing to resist
Beijing’s midnight deadline to end their demonstrations.

The monks would not identify the caller, except to show reporters that
they had indeed dialed a number inside China.

By evening, the photographs were plastered across town.

Not all the reports painted a portrait of peaceful protests. On
Saturday, Kunchok Jigmey, the secretary of this monastery, received a
call from an affiliated monastery, Kirti, in Zoige County, Sichuan,
describing how 400 people, including monks, who poured into the streets,
shouted, “Long live his holiness, the Dalai Lama,” burned Chinese flags
and broke the windows of Chinese-owned shops and restaurants.

Like the other reports, this one could not be independently verified.

Many of the protesters, including young people and members of radical
exile groups, openly broke with the Dalai Lama’s advocacy of a “middle
way” of freedom but not independence from China. They raised a chorus of
stridently anti-Chinese slogans and, before the Dalai Lama spoke to
reporters on Sunday, laid Chinese flags on the road, inviting cars and
pedestrians to trample on them.

The Dalai Lama, 72, has held talks with Beijing since 2002 and continues
to endorse the Olympic Games this summer in China. On Sunday, he said he
would not tell his followers to surrender by midnight on Monday, even
though he feared that continued protests would prompt further crackdowns
by Chinese authorities.

“We, the young people, feel independence is our birthright,” said Dolma
Choephel, 34, a social worker active with the Tibetan Youth Congress.
“We understand the limitations of the Dalai Lama’s approach.”

The president of the group, Tsewang Rigzin, went further. “There is
growing frustration among the younger generation,” he said. “I certainly
hope the middle way approach would be reviewed.”

Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama’s government in exile called for an
independent international inquiry into the crackdown and urgent
assistance for Tibet. It said that at least 80 people had been killed,
and that some 400 had been wounded in Lhasa alone. On Monday night, as
the deadline approached, hundreds of Tibetans, young and old, gathered
in the courtyard of the Dalai Lama’s temple to recite prayers for the dead.

Tenzin Gelek, 25, sat with a candle in hand and said bloodshed was
inevitable back home. “I’m sure they will kill many more after midnight
tonight,” he said bitterly of the Chinese forces. “We are helpless here.”

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.