Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Times Online
Jane Macartney in Beijing
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Police will take away more than 100 monks for political re-education today on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan uprising that led to the flight of the Dalai Lama.

The rounding up of 109 monks from Lutsang monastery in Qinghai province, western China, is one of a series of extraordinary security measures being implemented to prevent restive Tibetans from commemorating the anniversary with protests against Chinese rule.

About a quarter of China’s territory, an area the size of Western Europe, has been closed off to foreigners. Thousands of troops and paramilitary police have been deployed in Tibetan-populated regions amid fears of a renewed outburst of the anti-Chinese violence that rocked the region a year ago. Winding mountain roads have been clogged for days with convoys of armoured military trucks and coaches bringing in reinforcements.

Two counties of western Sichuan province, where some of the biggest demonstrations erupted last year, have been virtually cut off already from the outside world. Their internet and mobile phone systems have been blocked. From tomorrow, mobile phone users in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, will find that they are virtually unable to communicate.

A message sent out by the mobile telephone company in the city late last week notified subscribers that the system would be undergoing maintenance from March 10 to April 1. “Please forgive any inconvenience caused,” it said.

The authorities are fearful of a repeat of the unrest last year when Tibetans used text messages to communicate details of new demonstrations against Chinese rule in the vast and sparsely populated Himalayan region. Protests spread swiftly among distant Tibetan communities on a scale unseen since the 1959 uprising.

A Chinese-language website catering for Tibetans closed for repairs on Friday. The popular website featured news from China's state-run media and Government, as well as cultural and Buddhist content.

A military lockdown has been in place across Tibet for several weeks. The authorities clearly do not want to be taken by surprise, as they were on March 14 last year when hundreds of Tibetans rampaged through the streets of Lhasa, setting fire to shops and offices, hurling stones and attacking ethnic Han Chinese and Hui Muslim residents. The Government says that 22 people died before paramilitary police moved in to restore order many hours after the violence had erupted.

The Dalai Lama, from his base in the northern Indian town of Dharamsala where he has lived in exile for half a century, has said that as many as 200 people may have died in the ensuing crackdown. He has warned of a renewed explosion of violence.

So anxious is the Chinese Government that the Communist Party chief of Tibet, Zhang Qingli, has remained in Lhasa rather than attend the annual session of the National People’s Congress, the ceremonial parliament. A photograph of him on the official China Tibet News website showed him inspecting the city’s riot police and urging them to be vigilant in stopping plots by the “Dalai Lama clique” to split China.

Qinghai provincial officials did not say where the monks who took part in the 30-minute candle-light vigil on February 25 would be taken or for how long. It is common for government teams to enter Tibetan monasteries to carry out “patriotic education” in which lamas are required to pledge their allegiance to Beijing and to denounce the Dalai Lama.

The Government has mounted a propaganda campaign to defend Beijing’s administration of Tibet. This year the Government has announced the first “Serf Emancipation Day” for March 28 — the 50th anniversary of Beijing’s declaration of the end of the Dalai Lama’s administration.

50 years in exile

— The uprising began on March 10, when the Dalai Lama had been due to watch a play at the Chinese military barracks in Lhasa but had been told not to bring bodyguards

— Fearing an abduction, a 300,000-strong crowd surrounded their leader’s palace

— The People’s Liberation Army surrounded Lhasa and trained artillery guns on the palace

— On March 17 the Dalai Lama fled the city and crossed the Himalayas into India. The PLA reasserted control over Lhasa within days but took months to crush the uprising

— About 87,000 Tibetans died and a further 80,000 fled to neighbouring countries