July 19, 2015

RELATIVES OF TENZIN DELEK RINPOCHE, TIBETAN MONK WHO DIED IN JAIL, ARE DETAINED

Posted by The Himalayan Voice:
[According to Students for a Free Tibet, an overseas advocacy group, the police on Friday detained a sister and a niece of Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, 65, a widely revered monk and community leader who was serving a life sentence on terrorism and separatism charges. Human rights advocates contend that the allegations against Tenzin Delek were politically motivated.]

By 

Dolkar Lhamo
BEIJING — The authorities in southwest China have reportedly detained two relatives of a prominent Tibetan monk whose unexplained death in prison, reported to his family last Sunday, set off demonstrations that left over 20 people injured.
According to Students for a Free Tibet, an overseas advocacy group, the police on Friday detained a sister and a niece of Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, 65, a widely revered monk and community leader who was serving a life sentence on terrorism and separatism charges. Human rights advocates contend that the allegations against Tenzin Delek were politically motivated.
He died in a prison near Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan. Officials initially refused to provide a cause of death to family members, but on Saturday, the English-language edition of China Daily said Tenzin Delek had died of cardiac arrest. The article said he had received top-notch medical care during his incarceration but blamed him for his declining health, saying he had repeatedly refused to see doctors or take his medication.
On Thursday, prison administrators, brushing aside the pleas of family members and supporters, cremated his body rather than allow them to carry out traditional Buddhist funeral rites.
Witnesses say Dolkar Lhamo, 52, and her daughter, Nyima Lhamo, 25, were taken away from a restaurant in Chengdu early Friday by police officers from their hometown, Litang, a Tibetan community nearly 400 miles away, according to Padma Dolma, campaigns director for Students for a Free Tibet.
“We’re very worried for their safety because we all know how authorities deal with Tibetans in detention,” she said in a phone interview from New York.
Litang police officials reached by phone on Saturday declined to confirm whether the two women had been arrested.
Dolkar Lhamo had been at the center of a highly public campaign seeking the return of her brother’s body. Last week she and another sister were among nearly 100 Tibetans who staged a sit-in outside the building in Chengdu where Tenzin Delek was thought to have been imprisoned for the 13 years before he died.
She later presented prison officials with a petition demanding an investigation into his death, a document that Tibetan exile groups obtained and posted on the Internet.
Chinese authorities, anxious about potential ethnic unrest, have imposed draconian security measures in Tibetan areas; disappearances, abusive interrogations and secret trials that lead to long prison terms are common.
Nyima Lhamo
On Monday, at least 23 people were hospitalized after riot police officers sought to break up a demonstration in Nyagchuka, a county in western Sichuan where more than a thousand people had gathered to demand an investigation into Tenzin Delek’s death, according to Tibetan exile groups.
The authorities have imposed an information blackout across the region, a detail confirmed on Saturday by a man who answered the phone at the Public Security Bureau in Litang. “The Internet has been shut down for half a month here. It is a control measure,” the man said before hanging up.
Tenzin Delek was widely respected for his social welfare work and his efforts to fight illegal mining and deforestation in western Sichuan. In 2002, he was arrested and charged with planning a series of bomb blasts; he was sentenced to death during a secret trial but later given a reprieve. Critics, citing a lack of evidence, say the authorities were simply trying to eliminate a nettlesome community leader.
Tenzin Delek’s plight had become a cause célèbre among Tibetans and international rights advocates who in recent years had been petitioning Beijing for his early release, citing reports that he was suffering from a heart ailment.
The Chinese news media has largely ignored the news of Tenzin Delek’s death and the subsequent protests, though Global Times, a state-owned newspaper known for its nationalist sentiment, ran an editorial Thursday rejecting Western news reports that questioned whether he had been provided adequate medical care.
“It is common around the world for a long-term prisoner to die of illness in jail,” the newspaper said.

Yufan Huang contributed research.

@ The New York Times