Nearly 10 thousand Tibetans gathered outside Tawu Nyitso monastery in Ganzi, Sichuan Province, China, on Nov. 6 to commemorate a Tibetan nun who immolated herself on Nov. 3 and to protest against the Chinese rulers’ harsh policies towards Tibet.
Tawu Lobsang Jinpa, a Tibetan who is currently an exile in India told the Voice of America’s Tibetan bureau that “The streets are crawling with Chinese security personnel.”
Protestors have been continuously shouting slogans and requesting that exiled Tibetans tell the world of the sad state of human rights in Tibet. They are also demanding that the ruling Chinese Communist Party change its tough tactics on Tibet; if not, there will be more Tibetans committing self-immolation.
New York-based Students for a Free Tibet also issued a statement on Nov. 6 to confirm that nearly ten thousand Tibetans participated in the protest.
China’s official media Global Times released an article written by “Yiduo,” which characterized the monks who had self-immolated as deeply poisoned by what it termed the Dalai Lama clique’s separatist ideology.
Dainzin Sangpei, a human rights activist in Geneva, Switzerland, responded to the article, saying, “The Chinese government should not blindly accuse the ‘Dalai clique,’ but investigate the root causes. Why did these Tibetans want to self-immolate? The slogans shouted during the self-immolation were: ‘let the Dalai Lama return to Tibet,’ ‘allow religious freedom and freedom for all Tibetans.’ These were their requests.”
Since March, there have been nine Tibetan monks and two Tibetan nuns who protested the CCP’s Tibet policy through self-immolation. After a monk of the Tawu Nyitso monastery self-immolated in August, the authorities dispatched a large number of police and military personnel stationed nearby and surrounded the temple. The water supply and electricity to the temple was also cut off for several days. Most communication with the outside world was stopped as well.
Read the original Chinese report.
