4/15/2015

Chinas Crackdowns in Tibet | The Diplomat

Chinas Crackdowns in Tibet

Rights groups are pushing for international action on the
serial use of lethal force to crush Buddhist dissent.
By Kevin Holden
April 14, 2015

The United Nations is set to receive evidence that Chinese Peoples

Armed Police troops have repeatedly opened fire on unarmed Tibetan
protesters calling for religious freedom over the past seven years.
Evidence of deadly attacks by the Chinese paramilitary on Buddhist
demonstrators across the Tibetan Plateau provided by witnesses,
whistleblowers, and a secret government document smuggled out of
Tibet will be presented to the UNs Committee against Torture later
this year.

Image Credit: Tibet protest via zeber /

Shutterstock.com
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International human rights groups, working with figures inside Tibet who aim to expose these killings internationally, will
gather in Geneva in November for the UN hearing.
The usage of live ammunition against peaceful Tibetan protestors does exist and it is also disproportionate, Prime Minister
Lobsang Sangay, the head of Tibets government-in-exile, told The Diplomat. This is clearly in violation of international law,
said the prime minister, a former research fellow at prestigious Harvard Law School who wrote his graduate thesis on
Buddhism and Human Rights.
Tsering Tsomo, executive director of the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy, described the serial shootings of
Tibetan protesters as crimes against humanity. She said the rights center has amassed powerful evidence that Chinese
armed police consistently use overwhelming force to crush pacifist dissent in the former Buddhist kingdom.
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In one assault on August 12 of last year, witnesses reported that troops fired into an assembly of protesters who were calling
for the release of a detained religious and cultural leader in the village of Kardze; four of the 10 demonstrators who were shot
were also arrested.
Denied medical treatment for their bullet wounds, each of these captured protesters died over the course of the next five days,
Tsomo said.
She added that witnesses to armed crackdowns on Tibetan demonstrators face immense risks in reporting the incidents to the
outside world.
Intense government surveillance of communication channels, she explained, has caused Tibetans to get disappeared,
tortured, detained and imprisoned on charges of violating Chinas state secrets law when all they did was share information
about human rights violations.
The Tibetan Center for Human Rights that Tsomo heads is based in Dharamsala, the ever-expanding sanctuary provided by
Indias government to host the Dalai Lama and a continuous stream of Tibetans who have fled into exile since the Peoples
Liberation Army marched into their Himalayan homeland in the 1950s.
The center, situated near the western edge of the Tibetan Plateau, has also acquired a classified report issued by the Lhasa
Public Security Bureau revealing that Chinese security forces used machine guns to quell initially peaceful protests in March
2008, Tsomo said.
The rights group has published the signed document on its website, and intends to submit it to the 10 international legal
experts who lead the UN Committee against Torture.
Grim Details
The government report, secreted out of the Tibetan capital, provides grim details on victims of the Peoples Armed Police
attack on Buddhist monks, nuns and pilgrims in the Place of the Gods, as Lhasa was traditionally known. Compiled for the
Chinese leadership, the document notes that the body of one young Tibetan woman was riddled with 15 bullet holes. A
compatriot felled by automatic weapons fire near the Ramoche Temple, in the ancient quarter of Lhasa, was shot 17 times.
This official chronicle of the massive attack on Buddhist demonstrators in central Lhasa in mid-March of 2008 also
demonstrates the massive fabrication of facts that Communist Party leaders in Tibet and in Beijing presented to the world
about how they handled the protests and the cause of deaths linked to the demonstrations, Tsomo pointed out.
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Chinas Crackdowns in Tibet | The Diplomat

Tibets party-appointed governor, Qiangba Puncog, told reporters at the time that despite escalating protests, Security forces
did not carry or use any destructive weapons, but tear gas and water cannons were employed.
The only deaths stemming from the protests, he claimed, were brought about by Tibetan rioters who had torched government
buildings and shops across Lhasa. Thirteen innocent civilians were killed, he told the world.
The governments officially published list of these victims of violent arson attacks included 30-year-old Lhakpa Tsering and
24-year-old Wangdu Dargay, both of Lhasa.
But the newly uncovered Lhasa security report tells a different story: Both of these residents of the Tibetan capital were listed
in this secret chronicle as having been killed by automatic weapons during the paramilitarys assault on protesters calling for
an end to communist controls on Tibets monasteries and people.
This leaked document and contemporaneous witness accounts all show that paramilitary troops deployed battle-strength
firepower to wipe out civil protests while hiding their actions from the rest of the world, Tsomo explained. (Foreign reporters
are routinely barred from traveling inside Tibet, and Lhasa, surrounded by super-high mountains and a heavy military
presence, is easy to seal off.
The Chinese paramilitary, backed by armored personnel carriers, killed more than 100 protesters during this assault; more
than 5000 Tibetan Buddhists were arrested in a crackdown mounted across the ancient Tibetan capital, she added.
The leaders of Chinas Ministry of National Defense states on its official website that: The Peoples Armed Police Force is the
states shock force in handling public emergencies.
This component of the Chinese armed forces is deployed to disperse illegal assemblies, it adds, and the PAPF joined
operations to handle the 3.14 [March 14, 2008] Lhasa riots.
The Peoples Armed Police Force is assigned such missions by the Communist Party of Chinas Central Committee, the State
Council, the Central Military Commission or local Party committees, the defense ministry leadership states.
The paramilitarys repeated assaults on protesters are part of a wider, systematic attack on the leaders, symbols and followers
of Tibetan Buddhism, said John Gaudette, legal research officer at the Tibetan Center in Dharamsala. In this decades-long
battle, he explained, the Communist Party of China has imprisoned Buddhists for possessing images or teachings of the Dalai
Lama, orchestrated the enforced disappearance of the Panchen Lama for the last 19 years, destroyed religious symbols
including brass prayer wheels and stone shrines across Tibet, and tortured sometimes until death clerics who dare to call
for the Dalais return to Lhasa.
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Meanwhile, the president of the Washington, D.C.-based International Campaign for Tibet, Matteo Mecacci, said the four
Kardze demonstrators who were shot and held captive until they died last August represent just a fraction of Tibetan political
and religious prisoners who have died in detention. Torture pervades Chinas web of prisons across Tibet, he claimed, and
security agents who cause the death of Tibetans ranging from Buddhist scholars to young lamas are never punished.
China signed the International Convention against Torture in 1988, and its violations of that treaty will be reviewed this year,
said Mecacci, a Florentine legal scholar and former member of the Italian parliament who has been a leading advocate of
stronger rights protections in the United Nations. He said he will present the International Campaign for Tibets evidence on
Chinas treaty violations gathered in part from Tibetan political detainees who have escaped into exile to the UNs antitorture group.
In a communiqu to the Chinese government issued in 2008 just months following the Peoples Armed Police mass assault
on lama-led dissent the committees legal experts stated they were alarmed about The failure to investigate the deaths
resulting from indiscriminate firing by the police into crowds of reportedly largely peaceful demonstrators in Kardze county,
Ngaba county and Lhasa.
The UN jurists also called on China to allow independent inquiries into these casualties, and into reports of widespread torture
of Tibetans detained since the crackdown. Those found responsible for the shooting or torture of peaceful activists, they
added, should be prosecuted.
But as Matteo Mecacci and other scholars on human rights point out, the UNs monitors can only pinpoint violations of the
anti-torture agreement and instruct the treaty-breaking state in this case China which remedial steps to take to comply
with the convention. The UN group so far has no power to compel Beijing to follow its instructions, or even to prevent
Chinese security forces from shooting or torturing government critics again in the future.
Anti-Rights Model
Chinas routine flouting of UN rights standards and conventions, through the ongoing deployment of armed troops against
Buddhist dissidents and those seeking to escape into exile, creates an anti-rights model that can be followed by authoritarian
governments around the world. For a country that is now the second biggest economy in the world to continue to despise
international cooperation on human rights issues is embarrassing and dangerous, added Mecacci.
But the impunity that Chinese party and paramilitary leaders now enjoy inside Tibet and worldwide could soon come to an end
if the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act now being debated in the U.S. Congress becomes law.
Passage of this legislation would press President Barack Obama to impose targeted sanctions for Chinese officials responsible
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for extrajudicial killings, torture, and other human rights abuses in Tibet, said Tsering Tsomo.
Matteo Mecacci said the International Campaign for Tibet and its human rights allies aim to work with American legislators
for rapid passage of the law, which will bar the worlds biggest rights abusers from entering the U.S. and freeze any assets they
have inside the U.S.
The legislation would also function as the first effective deterrent to violating internationally recognized basic rights in Tibet,
Mecacci said. Lawmakers across the continents should follow the U.S. lead to draft similar laws aimed at strengthening this
deterrent, he added. His group is already pressing for Europe-wide sanctions on rights offenders via ICTs offices in
Amsterdam, Berlin and Brussels.
Kaydor Aukatsang, representative of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to the Americas, said that the introduction of the new
American rights bill sends a powerful message to Chinese officials that human rights abusers will face consequences.
Aukatsang, a member of the Tibetan government-in-exile, added that crafting a deterrent to Chinas human rights crimes in
Tibet is so urgent that the U.S. president and State Department should act immediately to begin screening Chinese
government and military leaders seeking to enter the U.S. for complicity in attacks on Tibetans and their religion.
Chinese Communist Party and Peoples Liberation Army officials responsible for shooting unarmed protesters should face
consequences for their actions, said the Dalai Lamas envoy, who is based in Washington.
Mecacci agreed, and said one potential legal basis is already in place for tracking and banning those orchestrating assaults in
Tibet from crossing American borders. Four years ago, Obama, a former constitutional law professor himself, signed an
Executive Order that blocks visas for perpetrators of serious human rights abuses or humanitarian law, Mecacci said. This
rights-based travel ban, he added, should be expanded across the free world.
Kevin Holden is a freelance journalist based in Asia.

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