China silences Tibetans in one city as Beijing lashes out at critics

Cara Anna, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
CHENGDU, China - The city's main Tibetan neighbourhood was bustling on Sunday with backpackers browsing souvenir shops for paintings and prayer wheels - and armed police in squad cars, siren lights blinking, slowly cruising by.

Unlike in Tibet, where the flow of visitors is tightly controlled, or in remote areas in surrounding provinces that can be clamped shut with a few roadblocks, Chengdu is one of China's largest cities and the home of a significant international community.

Here, Chinese authorities have had to clamp down on a Tibetan neighbourhood without throwing foreigners out in an effort to prevent fresh anti-government protest while protecting China's image abroad.

Since demonstrations in Lhasa exploded into violence on March 14, sparking pockets of sympathy protests in surrounding regions, China has sought to reverse a public relations disaster ahead of the Aug. 8-24 Olympics in Beijing.

The lighting of the Olympic flame is set for Monday in Greece. One of Thailand's six torchbearers withdrew Sunday to protest Beijing's response to the Tibetan demonstrations.

Thousands of Chinese troops have swarmed a broad swath of western China in recent days, setting up encampments and patrolling the streets to prevent new riots.

Beijing lashed out at critics of its crackdown and blamed the unrest on the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader.

"The evil motive of the Dalai clique is to stir up troubles at a sensitive time and deliberately make it bigger and even cause bloodshed so as to damage the Beijing Olympics," said the Tibet Daily on Sunday. The newspaper, run by Chinese authorities, called it "a life-and-death struggle between ourselves and the enemy."

The Dalai Lama, who said he did not instigate the Lhasa violence, denied the allegation Sunday from the sidelines of a Buddhist prayer session in New Delhi, India.

"I always support (that the) Olympics should take place in China," he said.

In Chengdu, capital of the populous western Chinese province of Sichuan and the main gateway to Tibet, residents of a Tibetan neighbourhood say armed police arrived a week ago soon after protests against 57 years of Chinese rule in Tibet turned violent.

The neighbourhood was quickly silenced.

At the local university for Tibetans and other minorities, signs posted last week warn students of a 9 p.m. curfew.

Even as the police presence in the neighbourhood started to scale back this weekend, many Tibetans who were approached refused to talk. "I don't dare," one man said.

One young Tibetan man accused a journalist of being a spy. "How do I know you won't go out and tell the police?" he said. "Do you believe what the Chinese government is reporting about Lhasa?"

But one young monk who arrived from Tibet just before the uprising began agreed to talk. "Of course we have the same point of view as the monks in Lhasa - freedom," he said. "But there's nothing we can do. We're all really nervous."

Two older monks with him nodded at him to be quiet, and they moved on.

Ju Xi, a Tibetan student in jogging clothes and sneakers, struggled to express himself without landing in trouble. "I think ... the government is being a little too violent," he said. "I think some parts of this situation are being hidden, too."

The Tibetan teachers at the university, he said, have told Tibetan students not to go out and demonstrate.

"It's difficult," he burst out in English at one point, switching from Mandarin. "We could be kicked out ... If we protest, they could kill us."

The tourism industry in Chengdu continued.

"Of course I have to smile," said Zuoni, a young Tibetan woman serving dumplings and butter tea at a restaurant next to a backpacker hostel, just a couple minutes' walk from a police checkpoint. But alone afterward, she looked distraught.

"There are foreigners coming in, customers," she said. "If I show them the pain in my heart, they'll feel bad, too."

Telephone calls to her family in Aba, a heavily Tibetan county northwest of Chengdu where the Chinese government acknowledged firing on protesters last week, have not gone through for several days. She keeps the restaurant open as she waits anxiously for news.

"I have to do business," she said. "We all do. But we all feel terrible."

Beijing is saying order has been restored.

China's official Xinhua News Agency said Sunday more than half the shops in Aba were reopened for business and authorities were in control in Gansu's Xiahe and Maqu counties.

At a police checkpoint on the road to Aba, about an hour outside Chengdu, armed police were searching incoming buses and questioning Tibetans.

Xinhua has published a commentary bashing Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, who called China's crackdown "a challenge to the conscience of the world."

Xinhua accused Pelosi of ignoring the violence caused by Tibetan rioters. "'Human rights police' like Pelosi are habitually bad tempered and ungenerous when it comes to China, refusing to check their facts and find out the truth of the case," it said.

The anti-government protests in Lhasa began peacefully March 10 but turned violent four days later as rioters threw rocks, torched and looted shops and overturned cars.

Xinhua says 22 people died, but the Dalai Lama's exiled government says 99 Tibetans were killed - 80 in Lhasa and 19 in neighbouring Gansu province.

© The Canadian Press, 2008