Reuters - Tibetan riots spread, security lockdown in Lhasa

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Tibetan riots spread, security lockdown in Lhasa

Sunday, Mar 16, 2008 3:40PM UTC

By Benjamin Kang Lim and Chris Buckley

BEIJING (Reuters) - Rioting erupted in a province neighboring Tibet on Sunday, two days after violent protests by Tibetans against Chinese rule in Lhasa that the region's exiled representatives said had killed 80 people.

"They've gone crazy," said a police officer in Aba county, Sichuan, one of four provinces with large Tibetan populations, her voice trembling down the telephone even as the main government building there came under siege.

The officer, who declined to be named, said a crowd of Tibetans hurled petrol bombs, burning down a police station and a market in the county's main town, and set fire to two police cars and a fire truck.

Security forces fired tear gas and arrested five people.

The Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said on a Web site that paramilitary police shot and killed at least seven protesters. A police officer, reached by telephone, denied this.

One ethnic Tibetan resident in Aba said there were sounds like gunshots and there was widespread talk of 10 or more dead.

"Now it's very tense. There are police going around everywhere, checking and looking over people for injuries," said another resident of Aba, adding that many of the rioters were students of a Tibetan-language high school.

The new disturbances came as the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet and Nobel peace laureate who fled to India in 1959, called for an investigation into whether cultural genocide -- intentional or not -- was taking place in his homeland.

"The Tibet nation is facing serious danger. Whether China's government admits or not, there is a problem," the Dalai Lama, who is reviled by Beijing as a separatist, told reporters in Dharamsala, his base in northern India's Himalayan foothills.

Meanwhile, anti-riot troops locked down Lhasa -- a remote city high in the Himalayas barred to foreign journalists without permission and now sealed off to tourists -- to prevent a repeat of Friday's violence, the most serious in nearly two decades.

A businessman there, reached by telephone, said a tense calm had descended on the city and most people were staying indoors.

State-run China Central Television (CCTV) on Sunday said social order had "basically been restored" in Lhasa, but showed footage of deserted streets choked with debris and burnt-out buildings near the downtown Jokhang temple area.

One young girl who could not jump from a burning building with her family members had died in the flames during the Lhasa violence, CCTV said.

Shops remained closed and residents had loaded 24 trucks with debris, it said, showing pictures of people shoveling piles of ash and charred wreckage.

BLOW TO OLYMPICS

The spasm of Tibetan anger at the Chinese presence in the region came after days of peaceful protests by monks and dealt a sharp blow to Beijing's preparations for the Olympic Games in August, when China wants to showcase prosperity and unity.

The government-in-exile in Dharamsala said 80 people had died in the clashes between authorities and protesters last week, and 72 had been injured.

The official Xinhua news agency said only that 10 "innocent civilians" had died, mostly in fires lit by rioters, and that 12 policemen had been seriously injured.

Tibet is one of several potential flashpoints for the ruling Communist Party at a time of heightened attention on China.

The government is concerned about the effect of inflation and wealth gaps on social stability after years of breakneck economic growth, and this month it said it had foiled two plots by Uighur militants in the large Muslim northwestern region of Xinjiang, including an attempt to disrupt the Olympics.

Kang Xiaoguang, a political scientist at the People's University of China who has long studied social stability, said there was very little chance of the Tibetan protests sparking a chain reaction in broader China.

"I think the chances are minimal," he said of possible copycat protests. "This is a localized problem. In the Han Chinese regions there's virtually zero sympathy for the Tibetan rioters, and so virtually zero chance that this will spread."

The Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said in an e-mail that monks of the Amdo Ngaba Kirti monastery, also in Sichuan's Aba prefecture, had raised the banned Tibetan flag and shouted pro-independence slogans after prayers on Sunday.

Chinese security forces stormed the monastery, fired tear gas and prevented the monks from taking to the streets, it said.

The report could not be independently confirmed.

Xinhua said many shops had reopened in Lhasa and cars were back on the streets as calm returned to the city.

But a businessman, reached by telephone, told Reuters: "It's dead silent. There are a few kids and people beginning to walk around, but mostly people are staying inside."

The authorities have set rioters in Lhasa an ultimatum, urging them to hand themselves in to police by Monday midnight and gain possible clemency, or face harsh punishment.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in a statement, urged Beijing to "release monks and others who have been detained solely for the peaceful expression of their views".

The Dalai Lama, who says he only wants greater autonomy for his people, said China deserved to host the Olympics but the international community had a "moral responsibility" to remind China to be a good host for the August 8-24 Games.

Monks first took to the streets of Tibet last Monday to mark the 49th anniversary of a failed uprising, and protests soon spread to adjoining regions inhabited by pockets of Tibetans.

(Additional reporting by Jason Subler, Lindsay Beck and Ian Ransom in Beijing, John Ruwitch in Chengdu and by Jonathan Allen in Dharamsala)