Knowing about China’s use of agitators in the 87-89 protests (and their suspected use of them this times around), as well as their tendency to construct “evidence” makes these accusations almost impossible to believe. Especially since they are mentioned in connection with insane comments like the Dalai Lama is a “wolf in monks’ robes, a devil with a human face, but the heart of a beast” and his followers as the “scum of Buddhism.”
Only a couple of days ago, the monks at Kirti Monastery in Dharamsala released a statement with descriptions of the raid of their brother monastery in Amdo, Northeastern Tibet (Sichuan Province). Monks at Kirti Monastery in Tibet reported that their rooms had been raided by Chinese troops, who forced many of them at gun point to pose for photographs. They were made to hold photos of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan national flag, suggesting that they were following his orders. A small monk was forced to hide half his body underneath the wooden floorboards and made to place his hands on the keyboard of a lap top computer. One of the monks managed to make a secret phone call to the Kirti monks in Dharamsala, saying, “I am worried that the CCP is creating false evidence to try to show that His Holiness the Dalai Lama is the mastermind behind the protests in Tibet. The security forces forced us to act out these scenes against our will with guns pointed at us. I appeal to the people of the world, do not be persuaded by these fake videos.”
So even if China shows the world photos of the supposed weapons they’ve found in the monasteries, can we believe them? The monks at Kirti Monastery in Tibet said that the weapons confiscated were on display in the chapel of the monastery’s protector deity. These items are ancient traditional offerings to the protectors, and symbolize the overcoming of obstacles and negative emotions, not evidence that they were taking up arms as Xinhua alledged, and which has not been extrapolated into rhetoric of “suicide attacks.” It’s almost as if the Chinese government is making these statements to justify the fact that they have arbitrarily arrested 572 monks from Kirti Monastery alone.
Thankfully some media coverage is offering both sides of the argument.
“There is no question of suicide attacks,” Samdhong Rinpoche, prime minister of the government-in-exile in Dharmsala, India, said Tuesday. “But we fear that Chinese might masquerade as Tibetans and plan such attacks to give bad publicity to Tibetans.”
Experts on terrorism and security risks facing Beijing and the Olympics have not cited any Tibet group as a threat.
Scholars said the claim of suicide squads was a calculated move by China allowing it to step up its crackdown in Tibetan areas.
“There is no evidence of support for any kind of violence against China or Chinese,” said Dibyesh Anand, a Tibet expert at Westminster University in London.
Instead, Beijing is “portraying to the rest of China and the rest of the world: these people are basically irrational” and that there was no room for compromise, he said.
Tuesday’s accusations could also further divide the Tibetan government-in-exile and other groups like the Tibetan Youth Congress, which has challenged the Dalai Lama’s policy of nonviolence, Anand said.
“This is a way of pressuring the Dalai Lama to renounce Tibetans who have created violence,” he said.
Andrew Fischer, a fellow at the London School of Economics who researches Chinese development policies in Tibetan areas of China, dismissed Wu’s warnings as “completely ridiculous.”
What China is trying to do “is justify this massive troop deployment, a massive crackdown on Tibetan areas and they're trying to justify intensification of hard-line policies,” Fischer said.
I really hope that the world is smart enough to realize that this is the latest in a long stream of empty rhetoric by China – a government that is scared of how the international community disagrees with their crackdown in Tibet and their oppression of the Tibetan people.
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