By AUDRA ANG, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 36 minutes ago
March 15, 2008
BEIJING - Soldiers on foot and in armored carriers swarmed Tibet's capital Saturday, enforcing a strict curfew a day after protesters burned shops and cars to vent their anger against Chinese rule. In another western city, police clashed with hundreds of Buddhist monks leading a sympathy demonstration.
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The violence erupted just two weeks before China's Summer Olympic celebrations kick off with the start of the torch relay, which passes through Tibet. China is gambling that its crackdown will not draw an international outcry over human rights violations that could lead to boycotts of the Olympics.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called on China "to exercise restraint in dealing with these protests," while the State Department issued a travel alert for Americans in the region. Her statement also called for China to release monks and others jailed for protesting.
The latest unrest began Monday on the anniversary of a 1959 uprising against Chinese rule. Tibet was effectively independent for decades before communist troops entered in 1950.
Initially, the protests were led by Buddhist monks demanding the release of other detained monks. Their demands spiraled to include cries for Tibet's independence and turned violent Friday when police tried to stop a group of protesting monks. Pent-up grievances against Chinese rule came to the fore, as Tibetans directed their anger against Chinese and their shops, hotels and other businesses.
It was the fiercest challenge to Beijing's authority in nearly two decades.
China's official Xinhua News Agency reported at least 10 civilians were burned to death on Friday. The Dalai Lama's exiled Tibetan government in India said Chinese authorities killed at least 30 Tibetans and possibly as many as 100. The figures could not be independently verified.
In the Tibetan capital Lhasa on Saturday, police manned checkpoints and armored personnel carriers rattled on mostly empty streets as people stayed indoors under a curfew, witnesses said. The show of force imposed a tense quiet.
Several witnesses reported hearing occasional bursts of gunfire. One Westerner who went to a rooftop in Lhasa's old city said he saw troops with automatic rifles moving through the streets firing, though did not see anyone shot.
Foreign tourists in Lhasa were told to leave, a hotel manager and travel guide said, with the guide adding that some were turned back at the airport.
"There are military blockades blocking off whole portions of the city, and the entire city is basically closed down," said a 23-year-old Canadian student who arrived in Lhasa on Saturday and who was making plans to leave. "All the restaurants are closed, all the hotels are closed."
Even as Chinese forces appeared to reassert control in Lhasa, a second day of sympathy protests erupted in an important Tibetan town 750 miles away.
Police fired tear gas to disperse hundreds of Buddhist monks and other Tibetans after they marched from the historic Labrang monastery and smashed windows in the county police headquarters in Xiahe, witnesses said.
Also Saturday, fresh demonstrations by Tibetan exiles and their supporters sprouted up in neighboring Nepal, New York, Switzerland and Australia.
The Chinese government is hoping a successful Olympics will boost its popularity at home as well as its image abroad. But Beijing's hosting of the Olympics has already attracted scrutiny of China's human rights record and its pollution problems.
So far, international criticism of the crackdown in Tibet has been mild. The U.S. and European Union called for Chinese restraint without any threats of an Olympic boycott or other sanctions.
"What is happening in Tibet and Beijing's responses to it will not affect the games very much unless the issue really gets out of control," said Xu Guoqi, a China-born historian at Kalamazoo College in Michigan.
International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge said Saturday he opposed an Olympic boycott over Tibet.
"We believe that the boycott doesn't solve anything," Rogge told reporters on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. "On the contrary, it is penalizing innocent athletes and it is stopping the organization from something that definitely is worthwhile organizing."
China restricts access to Tibet for foreign media, making it difficult to independently verify the casualties and the scale of protests and suppression.
Yet the details emerging from witness accounts and government statements suggested Beijing was preparing a methodical campaign — one that if carefully modulated would minimize bloodshed and avoid wrecking Beijing's grand plans for the Aug. 8-24 Olympics.
The China-installed governor of Tibet vowed to deal harshly with the protesters in Lhasa, but said no shots had been fired and promised that "calm will be restored very soon."
"Beating, smashing, looting and burning — we absolutely condemn this sort of behavior," Champa Phuntsok, an ethnic Tibetan, told reporters in Beijing.
In Lhasa, law-enforcement agencies issued a notice offering leniency for demonstrators who surrender before the end of Monday and threatening severe punishment for those who do not.
Neighborhood committees went door-to-door handing out the notices, telling locals defiance would be treated as a criminal act and hinting of rewards if they turned protesters in, said Robbie Barnett, a Tibet specialist at Columbia University, who talked with Lhasa residents by phone.
The calculated mix of threats and inducements underscored the difficulties the communist leadership faces in trying to quell a serious challenge to its 57-year rule in Tibet while saving the Olympics.
Preparing the public for tough measures, state-run television on the evening newscast showed footage of red-robed monks battering bus signs and Tibetans in street clothes hurling rocks and smashing shop windows as smoke billowed across Lhasa.
"The plot by an extremely small number of people to damage Tibet's stability and harmony is unpopular and doomed to failure," a narrator said as the footage played. |
Comments
nice post McJ
I like the images up top - nice work. I guess this is nothing new (unrest in Tibet over Chinese rule) but I think what's new is that China is now part of (the engine of!?) the global economy and hence potentially much more subject to external pressure. Especially with the Olympics, they really need to be on their best behavior lest corporations lose money! (snark)
Anyway thanks for keeping things humming around here,
I really need to get busy and write a post or two myself!
-NJT
Thanks, just a cut & paste
Thanks, just a cut & paste so I thought the pictures would make it look more interesting.
I wonder what atrocities are going on inside that country right now.
I have my doubt any countries would actually boycott the Olympics.
Wouldn't corporations making money be a reason not to actually do anything about it?
"They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings. Steal a little and they put you in jail. Steal a lot and then they make you king" ~~Bob Dylan~~
"Wouldn't corporations
"Wouldn't corporations making money be a reason not to actually do anything about it?"
from the US side, yes.
From the Chinese side, they need to cool it or people will stay away and corporations would then lose money. at least that was my thinking
-NJT
Dalai Lama condemns Chinese
Dalai Lama condemns Chinese 'terror' in Tibet
" DHARAMSHALA, India (AFP) - The Dalai Lama condemned on Sunday what he called China's "rule of terror" and "cultural genocide" in Tibet, calling for an international probe into unrest in his homeland.
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Eighty people have been confirmed dead in the Himalayan region, the Tibetan government-in-exile said at its base in this northern Indian hill town, contradicting the Chinese official report of 10 fatalities in days of unrest.
The dead included 26 people shot near a prison in the Tibetan capital Lhasa, aides to the Dalai Lama said.
"They simply rely on using force in order to simulate peace, a peace brought by force using a rule of terror," the Dalai Lama said in Dharamshala, his home since fleeing Tibet after a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959."
more...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080316/wl_sthasia_afp/chinarightstibetunre...
"They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings. Steal a little and they put you in jail. Steal a lot and then they make you king" ~~Bob Dylan~~
Many More Years in Tibet...
This story made me think of the movie Seven Years in Tibet and the nonviolent nature of the Tibetan people.
Who is there that gives a shit about the Tibetans anyways? Certainly not our governments. This barely makes the news. There must not be any oil there or we'd be hearing lots about it.
Showing my ignorance ...but what is it the Chinese want with Tibet anyways? Does it have some kind of strategic value for them or is it maybe just garden variety 'Empire Building'?
njt:
From the Chinese side, they need to cool it or people will stay away and corporations would then lose money. at least that was my thinking.
I was thinking that governments wouldn't condemn it because it might hurt corporate profits.
"They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings. Steal a little and they put you in jail. Steal a lot and then they make you king" ~~Bob Dylan~~
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