Dharamsala, February 4: In reports coming out of Tibet, three Tibetans have self-immolated on February 3 in the undersieged town of Serthar in eastern Tibet.

A Tibetan in exile with contacts in the region told Phayul that two Tibetans survived the self-immolation but one is feared dead.

“The three Tibetans called for the unity of the Tibetan people and protested against the Chinese government,” the Tibetan who didn’t want to be named said.

The two who have reportedly survived have been identified as Tsering, around 60 years of age and Kyari, around 30. The third Tibetan who is feared dead cannot be identified at the time of reporting.

Serthar has been under an undeclared martial law with a heavy military lockdown since the January 24 mass protests. At least six Tibetans were reportedly shot dead in indiscriminate police firings on unarmed Tibetans.

Preceding the mass demonstrations, Tibetans in rural villages in Serthar had carried out protests on January 18 and 22 while a larger demonstration was also reported on January 23 in Serthar town where a banner reading: “We protest against failed Chinese policies in Tibet” was unfurled.

The same source told Phayul that in the January 18 protests, a large number of ‘wind horse’ prayer scrolls with the Tibetan national flag and slogans calling for the Dalai Lama’s long life and ‘Victory to Tibet’ printed on the backside were spread in the region.

Following the protests, the entire region has been cut off from the outside world with no phone or internet connections. The roads leading into the region remain blocked as earlier shown by a CNN report in which its reporters were detained and sent back while trying to enter the region.

In photos received by Phayul of the January 24 Serthar protests yesterday, Chinese military personnel could be seen severely beating and dragging Tibetans on the road.

Since Tapey’s self-immolation in 2009, 19 Tibetans have set themselves on fire demanding the return of the Dalai Lama and protesting China’s occupation of Tibet.

Amnesty International in a release last week called on China to avoid using excessive force in response to Tibetan protests and expressed fear of “further violence and bloodshed” in Tibet.

By MICHAEL WINES

CHENGDU, China — This regional metropolis is roughly 200 miles from the wave of protest by ethnic Tibetans that is sweeping the towering mountains of western Sichuan Province. But take a stroll through Chengdu’s Tibetan quarter, and the tensions generated by the distant unrest become palpable.

Faced with the largest outbreak of Tibetan unrest since riots in Lhasa and elsewhere in 2008, the government is taking no chances that the turmoil — which has included Chinese forces firing on and killing some demonstrators will spread.

Armed soldiers in dun-colored camouflage trooped up and down Wuhouci Hengjie, a tree-shaded lane that is home to two government offices. Police cars, vans and even tow trucks, their red-and-blue light bars flashing, were stationed every 50 to 100 yards. Bands of police officers patrolled the sidewalks; on one corner, they upbraided an angry Tibetan man as anxious women grabbed his arms, pulling him away.

Asked about the heavy security, one shopkeeper sarcastically suggested the forces were in town to prevent rowdiness during the spring festival, a traditional Chinese holiday.

He added quietly: “I don’t dare talk. The police came to my shop and told me not to spread the word.”

But word of the unrest has spread anyway, despite a crackdown that has sealed off outside access to western Sichuan and, by some reports, disabled telephone and Internet communications in some restricted areas.

The Chinese government says it is only defending loyal citizens from revolutionaries who seek to sever Tibet from Chinese rule. Many outsiders, and perhaps most Tibetans, believe otherwise, casting the latest unrest as a continuing struggle against Chinese repression of political and religious freedoms.

The recent troubles appear to have intensified when four Tibetans set themselves on fire this month, accelerating a campaign of self-immolation that has killed at least 11 Tibetans since March 2011.

Groups favoring more freedom for ethnic Tibetans say the shootings started in the middle of the month, when a crowd of Tibetans tried to take away the body of a Tibetan man who had set himself on fire in Aba, or Ngaba in Tibetan, northwest of Chengdu.

Since then, the groups say, they have received reports of protests and more shootings, with three shooting deaths in the past week. Because of the security cordon, those reports could not be independently confirmed. The clashes have unfolded mostly in areas where Buddhist monasteries or schools have long been centers of opposition to Chinese rule.

Last Monday, the London-based advocacy group Free Tibet said, Chinese forces killed at least one person and wounded at least 34 in Luhuo, or Draggo, a monastery town west of Chengdu.

On Tuesday, another man is said to have died in Sertar, or Seda, a town that had been a center of Buddhist teachings, hosting nearly 9,000 students, until Chinese authorities ordered most of the Larung Gar religious academy vacated in the last decade.

And last Thursday, a man in Rangtang township, or Dzamtang, was fatally shot as Tibetans tried to stop the authorities from detaining another man accused of distributing leaflets about the self-immolations.

The government has acknowledged the shootings in Sertar, but it said its forces fired on protesters after demonstrators fired on them, wounding 14 officers.

It is likely that protests have also occurred elsewhere, both Tibetans and officials of advocacy groups said last week. “We heard from people coming from our hometown that people of our ethnic group have clashed with the People’s Liberation Army,” said one woman from Ganzi Prefecture. “We can’t fight them. There are too many.”

A reporter who sought on Thursday to drive to Ganzi was halted at a police checkpoint halfway to his goal and, after inspection of his journalist’s visa, politely but firmly turned away.

“There is thick ice ahead,” the police said. “It is not suitable for foreign guests.”

Two backpackers were also ordered to turn around, but were told that the area was unsafe because “the Tibetans are in revolt.”

By week’s end, a full-scale lockdown of the restive area appeared to be in effect, with milder restrictions from Chengdu to Lhasa, Tibet’s capital and the scene of the worst riots in 2008.

The Chinese government has said 18 civilians and a policeman died during violence that was directed at Han Chinese migrants, whose growing presence angered many native Tibetans. Tibetan groups say the violence left scores of Tibetans dead at the hands of Han Chinese residents and government security forces.

Security patrols have been significantly beefed up in Lhasa, and the authorities are conducting house-to-house searches to document the identities of residents, said Stephanie Brigden, the director of Free Tibet.

She said officials were letting residents know that they knew who had relatives outside the country, and that they expected the residents not to tell those relatives what was happening.

“They say that they know if they are making international telephone calls, and if they are, they shouldn’t discuss anything political,” Ms. Brigden said. “They’re really using intimidating tactics to make sure information isn’t disseminated.”

But some inside the locked-down area are getting their information out in other ways. Posts on Twitter and Chinese microblogs documented some of the local reaction to the strife before being deleted from Chinese sites.

“A cold morning in Danba County town,” one post stated. “It’s all very chaotic over here, with the police searching all nonlocal vehicles and all the hotels aren’t being allowed to accept Tibetans or foreigners.”

Tibetan Youth Association in Europe based in Zürich, Swiss organized peaceful demonstration in solitary for Tibetans in Tibet. At around 1400hr demonstrators walk through Zurich city and reached Chinese Embassy at 1500hr.  Organized this demonstration in solidarity with those Tibetans who offered their life for the cause of Tibet.  Around 200  Tibetans and supporters are participated for 3 hours demonstration. Organizers appeal to the participants to join forthcoming 10th March, 2012 which likely to organize somewhere in European capital Brussels . Demonstration concluded in front of Chinese Embassy, Zurich with Tibetan Notional Anthem.

BEIJING—Security forces in a restive Tibetan region of China killed a second person in as many days, according to state-run media, amid intensifying riots and growing international criticism that threatens to cast a shadow over a landmark visit to the U.S. next month by Vice President Xi Jinping.

The state-run Xinhua news agency reported on Wednesday that police opened fire on rioters in Seda county in China’s western Sichuan province on Tuesday. The county is in the Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, which has become a hot spot of Tibetan political activism and the site of protests and multiple self-immolations by ethnic Tibetans in recent months.

Xinhua quoted local police on Wednesday as saying rioters attacked a police station with stones, knives and gasoline bottles Tuesday afternoon, and that 14 police were injured. The London-based advocacy group Free Tibet said at least two Tibetans were killed in the incident and others were injured.

The accounts couldn’t be verified with residents in Seda on Wednesday. Officials from the Foreign Ministry in Beijing couldn’t be reached to comment. Government offices were closed for the weeklong Lunar New Year holiday.

The clash followed a similar incident on Monday in Luhuo county, also in the Ganzi prefecture. In that case, officials confirmed one person was killed after a mob stormed local shops and a bank and damaged police vehicles, though they didn’t say how the person died. Free Tibet said two protesters were shot and killed in Monday’s incident, among at least 36 people shot by security forces.

The violent clashes with police come as a wave of self-immolations by Tibetans puts the region on edge. At least 16 people have set themselves on fire since March 2011 in what Tibetans have described as a response to heightened government repression of Tibetan Buddhist monastic activities and an expression of growing desperation over Tibetan political and cultural autonomy. The self-immolations and clashes with security forces represent the region’s worst violence since deadly riots rocked a number of locations, including the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, in 2008.

In Washington on Tuesday, the U.S. State Department’s special coordinator for Tibet issues, Maria Otero, criticized what she called Beijing’s “counterproductive policies” in the region. “I am gravely concerned by reports of violence and continuing heightened tensions in Tibetan areas of China,” Ms. Otero said in a statement. “We call on the Chinese government to resume substantive, results-oriented dialogue with the Dalai Lama or his representatives to address the underlying grievances of China’s Tibetan population.”

Separately, a State Department spokeswoman said Tuesday that the U.S. would raise the issue of human rights in Tibet and elsewhere in China during the visit next month by Mr. Xi, the Chinese vice president. Mr. Xi is expected to succeed Hu Jintao as president in a leadership change beginning late this year, and his visit to Washington will be a rare opportunity for U.S. officials to learn more about him.

While Beijing may expect some prodding on the Tibet issue during the visit, the fear among Chinese leaders likely centers on the possibility that Tibet-focused demonstrations in Washington will greet Mr. Xi, which would ruin the decorum around the important visit that China is aiming for.

China has long deflected U.S. criticism on Tibet, its sovereignty of which it considers one of its “core interests.” Mr. Hu is widely seen as a Tibet hard-liner; in 1989, as party chief of the Tibet Autonomous Region, he imposed martial law to suppress rioting.

It’s unclear how forcefully U.S. officials will press Beijing’s presumed future leader. In a speech last summer, Mr. Xi reiterated the party’s longstanding view that Tibet provides China a critical “national-security screen”—its mountains serving as a buffer between China and regional rival India—and stressed the importance of economic development as a means of maintaining stability in the region.

Lobsang Sangay, head of the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India, called for greater international attention on religious and cultural restrictions in the Tibetan-populated regions of China’s west.

“It is high time for [the international community] to intervene to prevent further bloodshed,” Mr. Sangay said in a statement. “As a nation aspiring to become a world economic and political power, the People’s Republic of China cannot be permitted to behave in such [an] immoral and violent manner.”

China says that Tibet has been part of its territory for centuries and that living standards there have improved drastically since Communist forces took control of the region in 1951. But Beijing has struggled to suppress calls for greater cultural and religious freedom, or loyalty to the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, who fled to India in 1959.

Mr. Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, was a revolutionary hero who went on to serve as vice premier and is widely believed to have had good relations with the 10th Panchen Lama, who died in 1989 and at times was considered close to Beijing. Panchen Lamas are the second-highest figures in Tibetan Buddhism.

“The Chinese government should work toward creating a political environment that will relax the tensions in the Tibetan region,” Löning said last week.

The German Human Rights Commissioner was speaking to representatives of the Tibet Initiative Deutschland (TID) in Berlin.

Löning said that the recent wave of self-immolations in Tibet “is an expression of the sustained discontent and desperation of the Tibetan people in China.”

In the past 11 months, 16 Tibetans have set their bodies on fire demanding the return of the Tibetan spiritual leader His Holiness the Dalai Lama from exile and protesting China’s continued occupation of Tibet.

The most recent case of self-immolation that occurred on January 14 in the besieged Ngaba region of eastern Tibet, which alone has seen 11 Tibetans set themselves ablaze, sparked an impromptu demonstration by over 700 Tibetans. Chinese security forces fired live ammunition on the crowd killing an elderly Tibetan woman. The casualties are believed to be much higher.

In a release, TID said that representatives of the organisation met with the Human Rights Commissioner Löning to deliver 19,245 signatures demanding the immediate release of political prisoners in Tibet.

“The repression taking place in monasteries and the persecution of intellectuals demonstrate that the Chinese leadership is pursuing the systematic destruction of Tibetan identity,” the Chairman of TID, Wolfgang Grader said.

In 2010, Löning had met with Lhamo Tso, the wife of the imprisoned filmmaker Dhondup Wangchen during her Europe tour to garner support for her husband’s release.

The diplomat, S Balachandran, was injured and hospitalised following an assault by a large group of Chinese traders in a 






































court in the eastern business hub of Yiwu. He was on an official mission to secure the release of two Indian traders who had been held hostage for two weeks by locals, demanding payment of their dues.

“We have taken it up pretty strongly with the Chinese, that this is no way to treat a diplomat, that he should be allowed access to medication,” source at the Indian ministry of external affairs were quoted as saying.

S Balachandran had to spend five hours in the court over prolonged negotiations where he declared that he was diabetic, but was not allowed medication or food.

The 46-year old diplomat had to be rushed to hospital when he fainted after being “manhandled” by the crowd that tried to snatch the two kidnapped Indians who clung to him as he tried to leave the courtroom.

The incident took place on the night on December 31 in the presence of police and the judge.

Riva Ganguly Das, the Indian Consul General in Shanghai, was quoted as saying that Balachandran was “manhandled” while trying to secure the release of the two Indians.

Although local officials reportedly apologised to the Indian diplomat following the incident, India doesn’t seem to be in a mood to tone down its protest.

According to media reports, India will be issuing a demarche to China over the ill treatment of its diplomat in Yiwu.

India’s charge de affaires Rahul Chabbra would make the demarche to the Chinese foreign ministry.

Relations between the two Asian giants hit a rocky patch recently when India cancelled high-level talks with China over the long drawn boundary dispute after Beijing demanded New Delhi scrap a religious gathering where the Dalai Lama was scheduled to speak.

Vaclav Havel, the Czech Republic’s first president after the Velvet Revolution against communist rule, has died at the age of 75.

The former dissident playwright, who suffered from prolonged ill-health, died on Sunday morning, his secretary Sabina Tancecova said.

As president, he presided over Czechoslovakia’s transition to democracy and a free-market economy.

He oversaw its peaceful 1993 split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Havel first came to international fame as a dissident playwright in the 1970s through his involvement with the human rights manifesto Charter 77.

‘Great European’

Tributes have been pouring in for the man many consider a driving force in the overthrow of communist rule in eastern Europe.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel hailed Havel as a “great European” in a letter of condolence to Czech President Vaclav Klaus.

“His fight for freedom and democracy was as unforgettable as his great humanity,” wrote Mrs Merkel, who grew up in communist East Germany.

“We Germans in particular have much for which we are grateful to him. We mourn this loss of a great European with you,” she wrote.

British Prime Minister David Cameron said he was “deeply saddened” and that Europe owed Havel a “profound debt”.

“Havel devoted his life to the cause of human freedom. For years, Communism tried to crush him, and to extinguish his voice. But Havel could not be silenced.

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt wrote on Twitter: “Vaclav Havel was one of the greatest Europeans of our age. His voice for freedom paved way for a Europe whole and free.”

Chronic ill-health

Havel died at his country home north-east of Prague.

In his final moments, he was comforted by his wife Dagmar and several nuns, his secretary was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency.

Havel had looked thin and drawn during recent public appearances.

A former heavy smoker, Havel had a history of chronic respiratory problems dating back to his years in communist prisons.

He had part of a lung removed during surgery for cancer in the 1990s.

He was taken to hospital in Prague on 12 January 2009, with an unspecified inflammation, and developed breathing difficulties after undergoing minor throat surgery.

Satirist

Havel began co-writing plays during his military service in the 1950s and his first solo play, The Garden Party, was staged in 1963.

His plays satirised the absurdities of life under communist rule, but his work was banned after the reformist Prague Spring of 1968 was crushed by a Soviet-led invasion.

After that his plays were banned and he was imprisoned several times.

By the late 1970s he had become Czechoslovakia’s best-known dissident. He helped found the Charter 77 movement for democratic change.

When communist rule unravelled in late 1989, he was elected president by the interim coalition cabinet. He resigned in 1992 after Slovak nationalists successfully campaigned for the break-up of Czechoslovakia.

He was elected first president of the Czech Republic in January 1993, serving until 2003 when he resigned as his health deteriorated.

Havel returned to literature and to supporting human rights activists around the world.

According to the Beijing based award-winning Tibetan writer Woeser, the incident took place at a Chinese railway engineering vocational institute in the provincial capital city of Chengdu.Around 200 Tibetan students were held hostage as 3000 Chinese students attacked their dormitory, trashing the Tibetan students and breaking the doors, windows, and furniture.

“The Chinese students shouted ‘Beat a Tibetan, Get an extra credit,’ and broke the doors of the Tibetan dormitories in the institute,” wrote Woeser on her blog.

Many Tibetan students have been reportedly hospitalised carrying severe injuries.

After the school authorities failed to quell the clashes, police had to be called to control the situation. More than 1000 People’s Armed Police personnel arrived at the scene and reportedly hurled tear gas to disperse the crowd.

Several police and school vehicles were also damaged in the clashes. Woeser writes in her blog that the following day, on December 15, when Tibetans students came to have lunch at the school mess, Chinese students, upon seeing the Tibetans, created a furore saying, ‘Han Chinese have been victorious over the proud Tibetans’.

The reasons for the clashes are not yet clearly known as the situation continues to remain tense.

According to Bawa Kalsang Gyaltsen, a member of Tibetan Parliament-in-Exile, messages saying ‘Don’t mind the injuries, be proud of standing up for you nation’ had appeared on social network sites following the clashes. News on the clashes briefly appeared on a few local news portals but were quickly removed.