Three monks sentenced to long prison terms for "inciting self-immolation"

A Tibetan abbot of a Buddhist monastery and two of his employees have been sentenced to long prison terms for "inciting self-immolation" in China's province of Qinghai. "China's authorities are trying to use this wrong judgment to intimidate the abbots of Tibetan monasteries, to make them exercise control on the monks and nuns," criticized the Asia-consultant of the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP), Ulrich Delius, in Göttingen on Wednesday.

The abbot of the monastery Bongtak was found guilty of encouraging the suicide of the monk Damchoe Sangpo on February 17, 2012 – and was sentenced to nine years in prison. His employees will be imprisoned for ten and eleven years. With his self-immolation, the monk wanted to protest against the Chinese authorities banning a religious ceremony in the monastery.

It has not become known until now, that another Tibetan woman burned herself last Wednesday. In an act of desperation, Dekyi Choezom – who is around 40 years old – wanted to protest against land expropriations by local authorities in the town of Jyekundo (Tibetan autonomous prefecture of Yulshul). Her whereabouts and her health condition remain unknown. Family members have tried to pay a visit to the seriously injured woman, but to no success. She is the 42nd person to choose self-immolation as a form of protest against China's policy on Tibet since February 2009.

"The draconian sentence shows that the Chinese authorities are not interested in the reasons for the self-immolations, but are trying to stop these acts of desperation by sheer repression," said Delius. Thus, several hundred Tibetans were expelled from the city of Lhasa during the past few weeks due to their origin alone. They come from urban areas in the Chinese provinces of Sichuan and Qinghai – areas where many of the Tibetans who burned themselves come from.

Furthermore, China still ignores the Tibetans criticism about the unimpeded influx of Han Chinese to Tibet. Since a direct railway line to Tibet was opened in July 2006, around 53 million passengers were transported. Hundreds of thousands of passengers stayed in Tibet – to the effect that the Tibetan settlement areas become more and more influenced by the Chinese. Every year, the number of passengers increases by ten percent. The railroad-company announced that seven more cities in eastern China will get a daily train-connection to Lhasa in the near future.