Chinese Security Forces Kill Another Tibetan Protester
Tibetans Protesting
Chinese security forces have announced on Friday to have killed a second Tibetan in a second round of protests in the Sichuan province, where a large Tibetan community lives. The killing on Friday is said to have raised the death toll to at least three people.
According to Free Tibet group, the Chinese security forces have shot and killed a person as they were trying to disband a group of people who were said to have protected a man searched by the police for distributing leaflets in the Aba prefecture.
Three clashes broke up for the past few days, and the activist groups consider that several people were killed and dozens were injured. This week marks the beginning of a new stage in the protest of the Tibetan people against the Chinese rule in Tibet, after 16 self-immolations of Tibetan monks, who protested this way the attack by the Chinese authorities on their religion and culture.
The increase of the protests leaves the Chinese leaders with two options: either they continue the crackdown on more Tibetan, which will become more radical, or meet their request to preserve their culture by not colonizing Tibet with Chinese Han population and their religion by allowing their spiritual leader, Dalai Lama, to return to Tibet, after a half-century wandering through the world, in exile.
China sees Dalai Lama as an enemy of the state, and his return as a threat against its own territorial integrity, although Dalai Lama said in more than one occasion that he was preoccupied with Tibetan cultural and religious autonomy, not independence.
It is said that non responding with understanding and concern to the protest of individual monks and nuns, the government of China set the stage for large scale protests against it, which could become more violent.
The violence this week mark the most violent week in Tibet since 2008, when the people rioted in the capital Lhasa, and their protest spread across Tibet proper and Sichuan, where many Tibetans live. The response of the Chinese then was to flood the area with security forces and seal the region off to foreigners. 22 people died in that instance, and the people continue to remember their sacrifice each year in March.
On Monday, thousands of Tibetans marched to governmental offices in the Ganzi prefecture in Sichuan, and the security forces reacted in anger, opening fire on them and killing up to three people.
ABC News reports that on Tuesday people protested in another area of Ganzi, and the police killed another two people, according to Free Tibet. On Thursday, police came to arrest a young man who had distributed leaflets.
The scandal continued, with the police saying that a police station was attacked and 14 officers had been injured. The spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry said that the regime would continue to respond like this to all such actions.
The people fear that their spiritual leader will never return to Tibet, and that China will somehow manipulate the appearance in the world of the next leader. China has expressed its intention of not recognizing the new Dalai Lama, after the demise of the actual one, which compelled Dalai Lama to say that he was taking into account the idea of terminating the office that has been enduring for centuries.
Dalai Lama has renounced his official prerogatives of head of state, and entrusted the political power to an elected government, whose first minister is now Lobsang Sanguy, who, earlier in the week urged the international community to send an investigation team to China to look into the killings of the regime.
