B.RAMAN
There were two incidents of attempted
self-immolation by young Tibetan monks in their early 20s in Lhasa in the
so-called Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) on May 27,2012. One of the incidents
was fatal, while in the other the police managed to put out the fire. The
protester suffered burns, but survived.
2. The dead man was identified as
Tobgye Tseten, from the Tibetan-populated Gansu province which was separated
from Tibet by the Chinese authorities after occupying Tibet. The injured,
Dargye, is from the Kirti monastery area of the Sichuan province where the wave
of self-immolations in protest against the continued Chinese occupation of
Tibet started last year.
3. Since the protests through self-immolation
started in the Kirti monastery area of Sichuan in the beginning of last year,
there have been 37 attempted self-immolations---- 34 of them outside the TAR
and three in the TAR. The majority of the self-immolation attempts have been
reported from the Sichuan Province.
4. From the TAR, only one incident was reported
last year as against 34 from the Tibetan areas outside the TAR (Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai ). No
satisfactory explanation has been forthcoming as to why the TAR, which saw
widespread Tibetan protests against the Han occupation before the Beijing Olympics in 2008, has
remained the least affected.
5.Even in the two incidents of May 27, which took
place outside the sacred Jokhang Temple, the protesters had come from outside
the TAR and were not local residents. This would indicate that while the
Tibetans outside the TAR continue to defy the Chinese authorities, the Tibetans
of the TAR, who were subjected to brutal suppression after the violent
incidents of 2008, have continued to remain subdued. There have been no
copy-cat self-immolations in the TAR by local Tibetan residents.
6. The Chinese authorities seem more confident of
their ability to keep the TAR under control than the Tibetan areas of the other
three provinces. The Tibetans of the TAR maintain regular interactions with
Tibetan refugees in Nepal, India and the West and the radical Tibetan Youth
Congress (TYC), with its leadership based in the US, was in the forefront of
the revolt of 2008 in the TAR.
7. One would have expected that the Tibetans of the
TAR would have been in the forefront of the current wave of protests and
non-violent satyagraha, but this has not been so. What one has been seeing
since the beginning of last year has been a spontaneous movement with no
central organisation behind it. It is the anger of the young monks in Sichuan,
Gansu and Qinghai, outraged over the virtual Chinese occupation of the Kirti
monastery of Sichuan last year and the arrest and forcible detention of many of
the monks in a PLA detention centre, that has kept the protest movement
sustained. The effect of this anger and outrage is still to be felt in the TAR.
( 30-5-12)
( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet
Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For
Topical Studies, Chennai, and Associate of the Chennai Centre For China
Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com Twitter : @SORBONNE75 )
