> 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-60...
> 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.