International Herald Tribune

Tibetans clash with Chinese police in second city

By Jim Yardley
Sunday, March 16, 2008

BEIJING: Thousands of Buddhist monks and other Tibetans clashed with the
riot police in a second Chinese city on Saturday, while the authorities
said they had regained control of the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, a day
after a rampaging mob ransacked shops and set fire to cars and
storefronts in a deadly riot.

Conflicting reports emerged about the violence in Lhasa on Friday. The
Chinese authorities denied that they had fired on protesters there, but
Tibetan leaders in India told news agencies on Saturday that they had
confirmed that 30 Tibetans had died and that they had unconfirmed
reports that put the number at more than 100.

Demonstrations erupted for the second consecutive day in the city of
Xiahe in Gansu Province, where an estimated 4,000 Tibetans gathered near
the Labrang Monastery. Local monks held a smaller protest on Friday, but
the confrontation escalated Saturday afternoon, according to witnesses
and Tibetans in India who spoke with protesters by telephone.

Residents in Xiahe, reached by telephone, heard loud noises similar to
gunshots or explosions. A waitress described the scene as "chaos" and
said many wounded people had been sent to a local hospital. Large
numbers of security and military police officers fired tear gas while
Tibetans hurled rocks, according to the Tibetans in India.

"Their slogans were, 'The Dalai Lama must return to Tibet' and 'Tibetans
need to have human rights in Tibet,' " said Jamyang, a Tibetan in
Dharamsala, India, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile, who
spoke to protesters.

The violence in Lhasa and Xiahe has created a major political and public
relations challenge for the ruling Communist Party as Beijing prepares
to play host to the Olympic Games in August. The demonstrations are the
largest in Tibet since 1989, when Chinese troops used lethal force to
crush an uprising by thousands of Tibetan protesters.

The outside world is carefully watching China's response to the week's
demonstrations. The European Union and the United States have both
called on China to act with restraint. The White House called on China
to "respect Tibetan culture" and issued a renewed call for dialogue
between Beijing and the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of
Tibetan Buddhism.

The president of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge,
rejected calls for a boycott of the Games to protest the crackdown.

"We believe that the boycott doesn't solve anything," he said Saturday
on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, The Associated Press reported. "On
the contrary. It is penalizing innocent athletes and it is stopping the
organization from something that definitely is worthwhile organizing."

The tumult also undercuts a theme regularly promoted by China's
propaganda officials, that Tibetans are a happy minority group, smoothly
integrated into the country's broader ethnic fabric.

"What we see right now, what is happening in Tibet, blows the whole
propaganda strategy in Tibet wide open," said Lhadon Tethong, an
official with the New York-based advocacy group Students for a Free Tibet.

On Saturday the Chinese authorities defended their response to the
violence in Lhasa. "We fired no gunshots," said Qiangba Puncog, chairman
of the Tibet Autonomous Regional Government, according to the state news
media.

But Tibetan advocacy groups and witnesses in Lhasa offered accounts
contradicting that of the Chinese. The Tibetan government in exile said
at least 30 Tibetans died in the protests, according to Agence
France-Presse. Witnesses told Radio Free Asia, the nonprofit news agency
financed by the United States government, that numerous Tibetans were
dead. A 13-year-old Tibetan boy, reached by telephone, said he watched
the violence from his apartment and saw four or five Tibetans fall to
the ground after military police officers shot at them.

Foreign journalists are being restricted from traveling to Lhasa, and
the precise death toll remains unknown. The state news media reported 10
deaths and characterized most of them as shopkeepers. The government's
official news agency, Xinhua, reported that the victims had been "burned
to death."

The demonstrations in Lhasa began Monday and continued through Wednesday
as peaceful protests by Buddhist monks from three different monasteries.
Some monks protested religious restrictions, while others demanded an
end to Chinese rule and even waved the Tibetan flag. The police arrested
scores of monks and then reportedly tightened security around the three
monasteries so that monks could not leave.

Initially, the protests were largely ignored in the Chinese news media,
which were providing blanket coverage of the annual meeting of the
National People's Congress, the Communist Party-controlled national
legislature.

But with growing international concern about the protests, and reports
that Chinese security forces had attacked monks, the Xinhua news agency
issued a short statement blaming rioters for the violence. By Saturday
morning, China's state television network, CCTV, was broadcasting video
of Tibetans burning buildings as anchors read directly from a Xinhua
report that blamed the Dalai Lama for the violence.

Chinese officials demanded the surrender of the "lawbreakers" in Lhasa
and offered leniency to people who turned themselves into the
authorities by midnight Monday. Senior officials described the unrest as
"sabotage" orchestrated by the Dalai Lama and credited the military
police for rescuing 580 people from banks, schools and hospitals that
were set afire by rioters.

General Yang Deqing of the Chinese Army said soldiers would not be
deployed and the protests were being handled by local police officers
and the country's paramilitary force, the People's Armed Police.

"We'll let the police and the military police handle the disturbance,"
Yang said at the National People's Congress, where he was a delegate.
"We won't be involved."

Witnesses in Lhasa on Saturday reported seeing large numbers of military
police, armored vehicles and, according to a few reports, tanks.

Several residents, reached by telephone, said that an uneasy calm had
settled over the city. Tibetans living in the suburbs said officers were
blocking people from entering the city center. Local television
broadcast instructions. Power and telephone service, suspended in some
neighborhoods on Friday, were being restored Saturday. Traffic was light
on city streets, while most shops were closed.

"It is all under control now," said one resident, who identified himself
as Liu and who lives near the old part of the city where the violence
started. "We were notified to stay at home last night."

It is still uncertain what set off Friday's unrest. Tibetan advocates
say ordinary Tibetans began rioting after military police officers
attacked monks trying to protest outside a monastery in the center of
the city.

The extent of the violence was evident in photographs and video shown on
the Internet: fires raging from rooftops and from charred vehicles,
shattered storefronts and huge crowds trolling city streets.

News agencies reported Saturday that foreign tourists were being
prohibited from entering Tibet. The United States Embassy in Beijing
issued a new warning on Saturday advising American citizens about danger
in Lhasa and other places.

International Herald Tribune Copyright

www.iht.com