In Tibet, "the restrictions are more and more numerous and in all areas"
Buddhist monks walk past a poster showing Chinese President Xi Jinping and former leaders outside the Potala Palace in Lhasa, during a Chinese government-sponsored tour of Tibet, October 15, 2020. REUTERS - THOMAS PETER
Text by: Heike Schmidt Follow
7 mins
While the NGO Human Rights Watch publishes a report on the Chinese repression in Tibet, interview with ethnologist Katia Buffetrille, specialist in Tibet at the Practical School of Higher Studies (EPHE).
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"
Chinese officials view the monks as potential dissidents
," reads a
new report from the NGO Human Rights Watch
titled
Pursue Them With Impressive Power
.
The organization denounces the condemnation to heavy prison terms of four monks and the repression which falls on Tibet.
RFI: In its new report, Human Rights Watch denounces the prison sentences imposed on four monks from the Tengdro monastery whose only fault was to have sent messages or donations abroad. Would you say these are exceptional and unprecedented convictions
?
Katia Buffetrille:
Tengdro Monastery is located in the Tibet Autonomous Region, not far from the Nepalese border. A monk from this monastery having forgotten his phone in a restaurant in Lhassa where he was traveling, the owner handed it over to the police who examined its contents. Seeing that this monk had sent money to Nepal to help his fellow refugees who had been hit by the 2015 earthquake, the Lhasa police organized a search of the monastery and all the houses in the village where a member was at the monastery. Monks were arrested and one of them committed suicide. Four monks received 20, 19, 17 and 5 years respectively in prison for exchanging messages with exiled Tibetans, or donating money to help rebuild a monastery, or for possessing literature on the Dalai Lama.
These penalties are extremely severe, but they unfortunately have some precedents.
Already in 2008, Wangdu, a young Tibetan who worked in an NGO, was sentenced to life imprisonment for sending information abroad on the situation in Tibet.
In another case, Dorje Tashi, a wealthy entrepreneur from Lhasa, received the same punishment in 2010 for sending money to the Dalai Lama.
According to a Tibetan exile newspaper, local authorities have banned residents of Lhasa from communicating with their relatives living abroad.
The restrictions are more and more numerous and in all areas.
Local authorities are so afraid of being accused of not "maintaining stability" that they are enacting increasingly repressive new laws.
► See also: China: a 19-year-old Tibetan monk dies following torture in detention
Does the Chinese government automatically consider Tibetan monks and nuns as potential subversive elements?
This is indeed the case.
It should be remembered that until 2008, the year when the entire Tibetan plateau caught fire during an uprising, all the demonstrations against the Chinese occupier were led by monks.
They are also monks and nuns who first immolated themselves.
The reason is that the religious do not have dependent families and so if they are killed, they leave no one behind.
The monasteries are indeed considered by the Chinese authorities as places of subversion.
The role of school which they traditionally fulfilled has been abolished.
Since 2018, monks trained in India and returned to Tibet no longer have the right to teach, and since 2019, it is no longer allowed to teach the Tibetan language there, while this teaching is gradually prohibited throughout the Tibet (Tibet Autonomous Region or RAT, as well as Kham and Amdo, located in the Chinese regions of Sichuan, Yunnan, Gansu and Qinghai).
This way of monitoring social networks and prohibiting communication with foreigners is reminiscent of the situation observed in Xinjiang. Is the daily life of Tibetans now similar to that of Uyghurs in Xinjiang?
The situation of Tibetans is extremely worrying, but does not (yet) know the extreme repression experienced by the Uyghurs. We have no examples of detention camps such as those in Xinjiang, nor concrete evidence of forced labor. But we know that there are military-style training centers for Tibetan nomads and villagers to "educate" them to enable them to perform low-skilled jobs in manufacturing or the service sector. thus enter the world economy of factory workers. Of course, only Mandarin is allowed in these centers.
Once “educated” Tibetans are “encouraged” to find work outside the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR).
By leaving their lands, their pastures, these Tibetans abandon places in which their system of life and their traditional beliefs were inscribed.
► To read also: China: "The government imports into Tibet practices already tested in Xinjiang"
What surveillance measures are imposed on Tibetans?
A very sophisticated surveillance system was installed from 2011 by Chen Quanguo, the Party secretary in the TAR until 2016, when he was appointed to Xinjiang. Moreover, any expression of interest in Tibetan culture, religion and language or even the Dalai Lama is criminalized and leads to an accusation of "separatism". The history of Sino-Tibetan relations is being rewritten by the Chinese Communist Party in an attempt to legitimize the incorporation of Tibet into the People's Republic of China, and anyone who expresses any doubt about this historical version is accused of " historical nihilism ”, a very serious fault.
Let us add that the Tibetans, for whom the landscape is inhabited by deities, see their environment destroyed by mining, dams, roads and other infrastructure works.
Forced to abandon their land, their pastures, they continue to struggle, sometimes to find themselves in prison.
But many young people have turned to studies focused on ecology in order to use their knowledge in an attempt to save what can be saved.
And intellectuals and artists often express their sadness in the face of attacks on culture and the environment through writings, songs, paintings or films.
Do Tibetans today live in their country as in an open-air prison and in fear that their culture will disappear
?
That's right.
Since 2014, a policy of assimilation has been put forward and even theorized with researchers such as Ma Rong, Hu Angang and Hu Lianhe.
All three share the idea that the future of China depends on the realization, in practice and not only in rhetoric, of the idea of "zhonhua minzu", that is to say of a Chinese nation in which categories of ethnic identities would be eliminated.
► Also to listen: Olympics 2022: Beijing furious following calls for boycott
* Katia Buffetrille,
The Golden Age of Tibet,
Les Belles Lettres, 2019
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