Really shocking news, the worst we have heard from Tibet in a long time, with horrifying details, from a well respected and accurate newspaper. Nations who pretend to care about preventing demographic genocide or the Chinese concentration camps, like Auschwitz, should not even go to the Olympics at all, under any condition. To do so is to concede to genocide, and that is not what we as a nation can do.

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Friday 04 April 2008

    Beijing - Chinese paramilitary police have killed eight people after opening fire on several hundred Tibetan monks and villagers in bloody violence that will fuel human rights protests as London prepares to host its leg of the Olympic torch relay this weekend.

    Witnesses said the clash - in which dozens were wounded - erupted late last night after a government inspection team entered a monastery in the Chinese province of Sichuan trying to confiscate pictures of the Dalai Lama.

    Officials searched the room of every monk in the Donggu monastery, a sprawling 15th century edifice in Ganzi, southwestern Sichuan, confiscating all mobile phones as well as the pictures.

    When the inspectors tore up the photographs and threw them on the floor, a 74-year-old monk, identified as Cicheng Danzeng, tried to stop an act seen as a desecration by Tibetans who revere the Dalai Lama as their god king.

    A young man working in the monastery, identified as Cicheng Pingcuo, 25, also made a stand and both were arrested.

    The team then demanded that all the monks denounce the Dalai Lama, who fled China after a failed uprising in 1959. One monk, Yixi Lima, stood up and voiced his opposition, prompting the other monks to add their voices.

    At about 6.30 p.m., the entire monastic body marched down to a nearby river where paramilitary police were encamped and demanded the release of the two men.

    They were joined by several hundred local villagers, many of them enraged at the detention of the 74-year-old monk Cicheng Danzeng, who locals say is well respected in the area for his learning and piety.

    Shouting "Long Live the Dalai Lama," "Let the Dalai Lama come back" and "We want freedom," the crowd demonstrated until about nine in the evening.

    Witnesses said that at around that time, as many as 1,000 paramilitary police used force to try to end the protest and opened fire on the crowd. It was not known if the demonstrators had been throwing stones at the police.

    In the gunfire, eight people died, according to a local resident in direct contact with the monastery. These included a 27-year-old monk identified as Cangdan and two women named as Zhulongcuo and Danluo.

    Witnesses said a 30-year-old villager, Pupu Deley, was killed, along with the son of a villager named Cangdan, and the daughter of villager Cuogu. Two other people, whose identities were not available, were also killed and dozens were wounded, the witnesses said.

    They said about ten people were still missing today, including another monk, identified as Ciwang Renzhen.

    Armed paramilitary police patrolled the streets of the village today and surrounded the monastery. All communications had been cut.

    The latest upsurge of violence highlights the difficulties the Chinese authorities are facing in trying to end nearly a month of protests across the Tibetan region and the depth of anti-Chinese sentiment among a deeply Buddhist minority loyal to the exiled Dalai Lama.

    It comes just as the issue of unrest has become a magnet for activists around the world who are criticising China’s human rights record as it prepares to host the Olympic Games in Beijing in August.

    The incident, which will cast a shadow of Beijing plans to reopen the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, to tourists by May 1, came as the authorities appeared to have regained control of the vast parts of China that have large ethnic Tibetan populations.

    In Lhasa, police issued their Number 13 most wanted list, bringing to 79 the number of people still sought for their roles in a deadly riot on March 14 when angry Tibetans rampaged through the streets of the Tibetan capital, stabbing and stoning ethnic Han Chinese and setting fire to hundreds of shops and offices. At least 18 people died in the violence.

    Lhasa authorities today sent out a message by mobile phone to residents, offering a reward of 20,000 yuan (£1,300) to anyone who could offer information leading to the arrest of those wanted for the violence.

    Two monks in the mountainous Sichuan province have committed suicide, according to Tibetan sources. A 32-year-old monk at Kirti monastery hanged himself in his room on March 27, leaving a signed suicide note.

    A 72-year-old from Guomang temple, apparently upset after being detained while en route to a religious ceremony with his disciples, returned to his monastery and killed himself.

Submitter: Stephen Fox

Submitters Website: https://www.facebook.com/groups/592985284186083/

Submitters Bio:

Early in the 2016 Primary campaign, I started a Facebook group: Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Help Him Win! As the primary season advanced, we shifted the focus to advancing Bernie's legislation in the Senate, particularly the most critical one, to protect Oak Flat, sacred to the San Carlos Apaches, in the Tonto National Forest, from John McCain's efforts to privatize this national forest and turn it over to Rio Tinto Mining, an Australian mining company whose record by comparison makes Monsanto look like altar boys, to be developed as North America's largest copper mine. This is monstrous and despicable, and yet only Bernie's Save Oak Flat Act (S2242) stands in the way of this diabolical plan.

We added "2020" to the title.


I am an art gallery owner in Santa Fe since 1980 selling Native American painting and NM landscapes, specializing in modern Native Ledger Art.


I have always been intensely involved in politics, going back to the mid's 1970's, being a volunteer lobbyist in the US Senate for the Secretary General of the United Nations, then a "snowball-in-hell" campaign for US Senate in NM in the late 70's, and for the past 20 years have worked extensively to pressure the FDA to rescind its approval for aspartame, the neurotoxic artificial sweetener metabolized as formaldehyde. This may be becoming a reality to an extent in California, which, under Proposition 65, is considering requiring a mandatory Carcinogen label on all aspartame products, although all bureaucracies seem to stall under any kind of corporate pressure.


Bills to ban aspartame were in the State Senates of New Mexico and Hawaii, but were shut down by corporate lobbyists (particularly Monsanto lobbyists in Hawaii and Coca Cola lobbyists in New Mexico).


For several years, I was the editor of New Mexico Sun News, and my letters to the editor and op/eds in 2016 have appeared in NM, California, Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, and many international papers, on the subject of consumer protection. Our best issue was 10 days before Obama won in 2008, when we published a special early edition of the paper declaring that Obama Wins! This was the top story on CNN for many hours, way back then....


My highest accomplishments thus far are

1. a plan to create a UN Secretary General's Pandemic Board of Inquiry, a plan that is in the works and might be achieved even before the 75th UN General Assembly in September 2020.


2. Now history until the needs becomes clear to the powers who run the United Nations: a UN Resolution to create a new Undersecretary General for Nutrition and Consumer Protection, strongly supported ten years ago by India and 53 cosponsoring nations, but shut down by the US Mission to the UN in 2008. To read it, google UNITED NATIONS UNDERSECRETARY GENERAL FOR NUTRITION, please.


These are not easy battles, any of them, and they require a great deal of political and journalistic focus. OpEdNews is the perfect place for those who have a lot to say, so much that they exceed the limiting capacities of their local and regional newspapers. Trying to go beyond the regional papers seems to require some kind of "inside" credentials, as if you had to be in a club of corporate-accepted writers, and if not, you are "from somewhere else," a sad state of corporate induced xenophobia that should have no place in America in 2020!

This should be a goal for every author with something current to say: breaking through yet another glass ceiling, and get your say said in editorial pages all over America. Certainly, this was a tool that was essentially ignored in 2016, and cannot be ignored in the big elections of 2020.


In my capacity as Editor of the Santa Fe Sun News, Fox interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev: http://www.prlog.org/10064349-mikhail-gorbachev