The chief abbot and spiritual leader-in-exile of a Tibetan monastery at the epicenter of a series of self-immolation protests against Chinese rule spoke out forcefully in New York on Wednesday, detailing what he called new and harsh repressive measures taken against the resident monks at the monastery since the immolations started in March.
The abbot, Kirti Rinpoche, 70, said that the Chinese authorities had completely isolated the monastery, Kirti, in a restive area of Sichuan Province’s Ganzi prefecture known as Aba, or Ngaba in Tibetan.
He said that in the last eight months, the Chinese had installed surveillance cameras and deployed as many as 800 security officials inside the monastery as part of an intense “patriotic re-education campaign” meant to prevent any more self-immolations. Although he did not have an exact figure for the number of monks now residing at the monastery, he said it was possible that the security officials outnumber them.
The abbot said that senior monks were removed from the monastery and the other residents were divided into 55 groups, subjected to re-education classes and frequently interrogated about their opinions.
At least 11 Tibetans have set themselves on fire since March in visceral acts of protest over China’s policies in Tibet and adjoining areas populated by ethnic Tibetans; six of them have died, according to documents compiled by Tibetan advocacy groups. Eight of the Tibetans, including the first, were monks or former monks of the Kirti monastery, which was a focal point of a violent uprising against the Chinese authorities in 2008.
The self-immolations, which have been described by human rights groups as troubling new evidence of desperation by aggrieved Tibetans in areas of Chinese control, have become an embarrassment to China. The government has called them a form of terrorism encouraged by the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader-in-exile. The abbot, a contemporary of the Dalai Lama who fled with him into exile in 1959, rejected China’s view.
“The reason why this situation is taking place in Tibet, and particular in Ngaba, is because of the drastic nature of the repression that the Chinese government has been waging all over Tibet and in particular in Ngaba,” the abbot said.
He spoke through a translator at a news conference organized by Human Rights in China, an advocacy group based in New York, and said he was doing so because of what he called the intolerable situation in Tibetan areas and China’s suppression of news about it.
“China is hiding the truth from its own people,” he said.
The abbot gave reporters a list of 40 Tibetans in Ngaba who he said had been killed or had committed suicide since 2008, and a second list of 693 who he said had been arrested or sentenced to prison since then.
Asked about the sources of his information, the abbot said he had a number of “underground channels” who, at great personal risk, conveyed to him the details of the current situation in and around Kirti
The abbot, regarded as the spiritual head of the Kirti monastic community, lives in Dharamsala, India, the home of Tibet’s government-in-exile. He re-established the Kirti Jaepa monastery and has held a number of senior positions in the government-in-exile. He said he was allowed to return to China’s Tibetan-populated areas in 1984 and 1985, but his movements were severely restricted.
Source Credit: NYT
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