November 1, 2011
Nepali security forces detained more than 60 Tibetan refugees earlier today as they demonstrated in support of Buddhist monks who have set themselves on fire to protest Chinese rule in their homeland.
Police say the demonstrators were arrested after shouting anti-China slogans during a prayer service outside a monastery on the outskirts of the capital, Kathmandu. Bowing to Chinese pressure, the Nepali government is increasingly cracking down on gatherings of exiled Tibetans. On Monday, China's military chief, General Chen Bingde, said Beijing approves of Nepal's “firm stance on issues related to Tibet.” Chen made his comments in Beijing during a visit by his Nepalese counterpart, General Chhatraman Singh Gurung, who reaffirmed his promise to never allow “anti-Chinese activities” to take place on Nepalese soil.
The protest followed the 11th self-immolation in Tibet on October 25, when a monk set himself on fire during a religious ceremony.
Dawa Tsering, a monk in his thirties from Kardze Monastery in Kardze (Chinese: Ganzi) Tibetan Autonomous Prececture in Sichuan, became the 11th Tibetan to have self-immolated since March 2009, and the tenth since March of this year.
Details from various exiled sources indicate that Dawa Tsering was still alive immediately after monks and other people attending a religious ritual at the monastery extinguished the flames, although his current condition and whereabouts are not clear.
One source indicated he was initially taken to hospital before monks then took him back to the monastery to prevent his arrest by police arriving at the hospital at around the same time; another source indicated he refused medical treatment and pleaded not to be taken to hospital. Both sources suggested however that Dawa Tsering was at the monastery in the care of other monks and laypeople, who were preventing Chinese police – stationed at the monastery in large numbers since the Tibet-wide protests of 2008 – from interrogating or detaining him.
Eye-witnesses report that Dawa Tsering was participating in a religious ceremony at the time of a Cham (monastic) Dance, attended by hundreds of local people inside the monastery when he set himself alight and shouted slogans calling for the Dalai Lama’s return to Tibet. The atmosphere at the monastery in the immediate wake of the incident was said by sources to be extremely tense, with Chinese police deployed around and inside the monastery in an apparent stand-off with the monks and lay-people protecting Dawa Tsering.
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