The Secret Tibet (The Forbidden world)

Wednesday, 01 October 2008 13:05

The Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD) expresses its deepest concern over the fate of former Chanzoe (manager and the treasurer) Sonam Rabgyal and four other monks of Ramoche Temple, whose whereabouts could not be ascertained since their arrest during a midnight raid in monks' residence on 7 April 2008.
Before the major protests that broke out in and around Lhasa city on 10 March Tibetan Uprising anniversary, Sonam Rabgyal, 39 years old, native of Markham County, Chamdo Prefecture, "Tibet Autonomous Region" ('TAR'), Damdul, Rabgyal and two other monks of Ramoche Temple located in Lhasa came under scanner of the Chinese authorities for their involvement in initiating long life prayer offerings to the Dalai Lama - the exile Tibetan leader and for reciting prayer offering (Tib Kyabtho) which made direct reference to the Dalai Lama's long life and for a quick resolution to the Tibet issue during the annual Great Prayer Festival called Monlam Chenmo on the eight day of the Tibetan New Year (which corresponds to 14 February this year).

According to sources, the "work team" under the "Patriotic Re-education" Campaign stationed inside the temple came to know about their action and interrogated them intensely for many days.

On 7 April 2008, around 70 monks of Ramoche Temple were detained after the PSB and PAP forces carried out midnight raid in monks' residences. Although all were released after days of interrogation in the detention centre, the whereabouts and conditions of the five-aforementioned monks still continue to be completely unknown to their family members and affiliated monastery. During the raid, valuables such as ornaments spiritually adorned on the ancient statues of the temple and religious objects made of gold and silver were known to have disappeared. Severe restrictions still continue to be put on the movement of the monks of major monasteries since the major protest broke out in March. Even today major monasteries around Lhasa remain virtually sealed off despite officially declaring them reopened to tourists and pilgrims.

Ramoche Temple, which lies to the north of Lhasa City, and other surrounding areas were epicenters of Tibetan protests in March 2008. Ramoche Temple houses 115 monks, a mandatory limit set by the Chinese authorities.

Following massive clampdown particularly on monastic institutions after protests led by monks in Lhasa city, Ramoche temple was not spared. There were even reports of desperate and helpless monks resorting to extreme step of committing suicide, sustaining injuries or complete disappearance slowly surfacing from Tibet. For instance, Thokmey a.k.a Tsangpa Thokmey (prefix name used of his origin) a monk of Ramoche Temple committed suicide on 22 March 2008 following massive crackdown by the Public Security Bureau (PSB) and People's Armed Police (PAP) forces in Ramoche Temple. Another credible report confirmed by sources reveal that, Ngawang Tenzin, a monk of Ramoche Temple sustained injuries on his hand from the gunshot fired by the Chinese security personnel during the March 14 protest in Lhasa. At the moment, the physical condition of Ngawang Tenzin could not be ascertained and there is no information on whether he receive proper medical attention or not.

The Centre expresses it's deepest concern over the safety of those Tibetans who still continue to be detained since the protest broke out in Tibet in March this year, and fears for the worst particularly of those whom the authorities deemed as the prime instigators or the perpetrators of protests. The cases of missing persons that is slowly filtering out of Tibet is one of the biggest concern at the moment.

The Centre appeals to the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearance (UNWGEID) to assess this pressing issue and seek its intervention on behalf of those disappeared Tibetans.

Tuesday, 30 September 2008 21:21

Geneva: (Tibet Net)-The Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), through its Tibet Bureau based in Geneva, submitted a report on “ the continuing use of torture against the Tibetan people” to “the United Nations Committee Against Torture on Violations by the People’s Republic of China Against The People of Tibet”, on 29 September.

The report details narrative of events from 2000 to 2008, presenting evidence of torture used against Tibetan people under the political and religious repression imposed by the Chinese government in Tibet.

It presents a detailed account of the Chinese government’s violations of the convention against torture by attributing those with ‘evidence of torture in connection with recent protests in Tibet’, ‘torture as a common practice in Tibet even before the March demonstration’, ‘failure of China’s legal system to ban the use of torture’, ‘absence of independent judiciary’ and the ‘Chinese authorities threat of disciplinary action against lawyers’.

The report, which evaluates China’s compliance with the convention against torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment (torture convention) with respect to Tibet, said, “China continues to engage in widespread and systematic violations of the torture conventions against the Tibetan people.”

China has also failed to make genuine progress in the areas of concern noted by this committee in its ‘1996 and 2000 Concluding Observations’, which is supported by the recent findings of the Special Rapporteur on Torture, following his mission to China, noted the report.

The report asked the committee to examine China’s compliance with the Torture Convention taking into consideration the significant events in Tibet since 2000.

It said significant measures were implemented to curtail and repress the free practice of religion in Tibet, to deny the Tibetan people any meaningful right of free expression, and to marginalize Tibetans through a concerted effort to support the influx of Chinese settlers.

These measures have been enforced through police intimidation, arbitrary arrest and detention, and torture used to punish and terrorise the Tibetan communities. Indeed, across a broad array of economic, social and political rights, the Chinese government has failed the Tibetan people, the report added.

The report is critical of the increasing repression and economic marginalisation of Tibetans, which culminated in a sustained and widespread series of protests – almost all peaceful – throughout Tibet beginning on 10 March 2008.

Chinese authorities responded by detaining thousands of Tibetans, many of whom were treated with extreme brutality both while being detained and during their detention, shooting and killing unarmed protesters, locking monks and nuns inside their monasteries, imposing a heavy police and military presence in all cities and most towns of any significant size as well as remote nomad encampments, severely restricting travel within Tibet, and instituting “patriotic education” campaigns within the monasteries, the reported noted.

The Central Tibetan Administration urges the United Nations Committee Against Torture to scrutinize China’s compliance with the Torture Convention with particular attention to Tibet.

It also requests the committee to address the continuing use of torture against the Tibetan people and submit recommendations for its consideration in order to end the use of torture in Tibet.

Tuesday, 30 September 2008 21:15

A Taiwanese mother and her baby attends the 5 days teaching by The Dalai Lama at Dharamshala, India 30 September 2008. Photo: Potala Post Dharamshala: (Tibet Net)-After concluding a three-day teaching for the people from Southeast Asia, His Holiness the Dalai Lama on Tuesday morning began a new teaching series for the Chinese Buddhists from Taiwan. Some 3, 500 devotees from around the world, including some 600 Chinese Buddhists from Taiwan, have thronged the Tsuglagkhang, the main temple, in Dharamshala, to attend a five-day teaching series by His Holiness. Buddhists from Korea, Japan and Vietnam are also attending the teachings. The five-day teaching is on "Arya Nagarjuna's Commentary on Bodhicitta (jangchup semdrel)" and "Kamalashila's The Middling Stages of Meditation (gomrim barpa)". In his brief introductory address, His Holiness said as a Buddhist monk, his life-long commitment is to offer service of teaching the traditions of Buddhism to the people all over the world, especially to benefit the Chinese Buddhists in Mainland China. More than 600 Taiwanese attends the 5 days teaching of the Dalai Lama Appreciating the Taiwanese people's commitment to attend the teachings despite their busy working schedules, His Holiness said he will pray and hope for a visit to Taiwan to give the teachings. His Holiness asked the Taiwanese Buddhists to pray and hope for the same. His Holiness said while following any religion, including Buddhism, the practitioners should have a full understanding of the methods and concepts about that tradition, with a clear objective. So, giving an introduction on the Buddhism is very important, His Holiness added. While talking to some Christians who are also attending the teachings, His Holiness said, Christian devotees' interest and devotion in Buddhism is "genuine" and are "borne out of investigation". The five-day teaching will go on till 4 October.

Wednesday, 01 October 2008 13:26

Dan Southerland, Executive Editor-30 September 208-(RFA)-Tibet's best-known female writer has evolved from a member of China's privileged elite into a forceful critic. Despite the loss of her job, the closure of her blogs, and constant police surveillance, Woeser reveals through her poems the courage to speak out.

WASHINGTON—“Most of all I wish you courage,” the American poet Pam Brown wrote to her daughter decades ago. “That usually takes care of everything else.”

Courage is a defining trait in the life and work of the contemporary Tibetan poet Woeser.

A banned author inside China, Woeser—the name means Rays of Light in Tibetan—continues to write from her small apartment in Beijing not only poems, but also essays and reports on the current situation in Tibet.

She is under constant Chinese police surveillance.

Chinese authorities locked down Tibet following a major uprising against their rule that began in early March. Paramilitary police have now silenced the voices of protest in Tibet.

But Woeser, 42, still speaks out, publishing essays and poems on a blog hosted abroad.

Forceful critic

Many of Woeser’s poems, written in Chinese, are now available in English in a book titled Tibet’s True Heart, from Ragged Banner Press.

Ably translated into English by A. E. Clark, the poems trace Woeser’s evolution from a member of China’s privileged elite into a forceful critic. Her poems provide an emotional counterpart to the dispassionate reason of her prose.

Four years ago, Woeser left her job editing a literary magazine in Lhasa and moved to Beijing when she faced “re-education” for “political errors.” Formal dismissal followed.

Her book Tibet Journal had mentioned Tibetans’ abiding reverence for the Dalai Lama, whom the authorities revile as a “splittist” seeking Tibetan independence.

In 2006, after she posted a photo of the Tibetan spiritual leader with a poem wishing him long life, her blogs were shut down.

Woeser is now suing the Chinese government for denying her a passport. She doesn’t expect to win. But, as she told the Associated Press, she is using the issue as “an opportunity to talk about the unfair treatment of Tibetans over the years.”

In Lhasa during the Olympics, police questioned Woeser for eight hours, accusing her of taking pictures of police and army posts. She was forced to delete her photographs.

‘My faith …led me to write’

Barely five feet tall and soft-spoken, Woeser said in a 2006 interview with Radio Free Asia that she will never stop writing.

“Though my blogs are shut down,” she said, “they cannot stop my speech and my writing.”

“My faith in religion and love for Buddhism largely led me to write. While I was working in an office in Lhasa, I was paid well. But I never felt free, and it bothered me… When I was fired from the job, the incident led me to freedom to express myself in writing.”

Envisioning the past in her poems, Woeser evokes a lost Tibet of undisturbed mountains and monasteries. Then she brings us up to date with images that clash with China’s official depiction of Tibetans as singing, dancing natives hungering for consumer goods.

In her poem “The Past,” Woeser yearns for a Tibet of snow-clad mountains and fluttering prayer flags under divine protection:

The past, the past… such a past!
A host of divinities sheltered our homeland
As a lama keeps watch over souls,
As a mastiff stands guard by the tent.
But the host of divinities is long gone, now,
The host of divinities is long gone.

Understanding the poems

Readers unversed in Tibetan Buddhism will find some of Woeser’s poems challenging.

Fortunately, translator A. E. Clark provides 45 pages of notes at the end of the book. One learns when an eagle symbolizes the Dalai Lama, or when a sarcastic remark alludes to Chinese genre movies.

But sometimes the poems are amazingly direct.

In “Tibet’s Secret,” Woeser likens reading the memoir of Palden Gyatso, a monk who served 33 years in prison, to “watching the creatures of the Land of Snow trampled to dust by foreign jackboots.”

In this long poem, Woeser describes the ordeals of a number of political prisoners, including 14 “singing nuns” who composed songs about prison life and recorded them with a smuggled tape recorder.

Of these nuns, one jailed at age 12, she writes: “I am only wondering why the nuns in that prison, mere teenagers, are not afraid.”

Rediscovering Tibet

The poem “Of Mixed Race” sums up Woeser’s journey from a daughter of the elite to a critic who has rediscovered her roots.

She describes a “a night of rebellion at the close of her youth” in which “hot tears” annul her earlier stance.

In the preface to Tibet’s True Heart, A. E. Clark provides the reader with useful background.

As the daughter of a senior Chinese army commander, Woeser had been taught that “the old Tibet was dark and backward,” and that when the People’s Liberation Army invaded Tibet in 1950, it brought a better life.

But as she explored Tibetan culture, Woeser found herself attracted to Buddhism, “of which she had known virtually nothing in childhood.” She then discovered that China’s Cultural Revolution, which exploded in the year of her birth, had done much to destroy that culture.

Woeser also discovered that her father, the PLA commander, was a closet Buddhist. She remembers her astonishment one day at her parents’ home in the 1980s at seeing him in full military dress go “down on one knee before the Panchen Lama,” the most revered spiritual leader then remaining in Tibet.

Later, Clark notes, Woeser “realized that trips on which her father had taken her mother, ostensibly for her health, had all been pilgrimages.”

When Woeser was forced to leave the Tibetan capital last month, she wrote a chilling poem about the intimidating presence of troops and police there, “The Fear in Lhasa.”

When she posted the poem on her blog, she added a parting shot:

“You have the guns. I have a pen.”