Amnesty International issued a report which says that more than 1,000 Tibetans remain in police custody following the unrest in Lhasa and other Tibetan areas in March. From a Reuters report:
China’s grip on dissent in Tibet remains tight after deadly riots there in March, with more than 1,000 people still detained without charge, human rights group Amnesty International said in a new report on Thursday.
“Many hundreds, possibly thousands of Tibetans languish in prisons or detention centres without the government publicly acknowledging their whereabouts or formally charging them with a criminal offence,” the report read.
Many were denied access to family and lawyers in a violation of international human rights conventions, it said.
Also related, read an opinion piece in the Times Literary Supplement about China’s Tibet policies:
The political contestation of Tibet is pervasive and multifaceted, and it infects the discussion of Tibetan culture at every level. On the one hand, Tibet is an “inalienable and integral” part of the “multi-ethnic Chinese nation” according to the Chinese government and the millions of Chinese nationalists who swamp internet forums and university lecture rooms across the globe. On the other hand, according to most Tibetan voices, it is a country with centuries of independent history, intellectual and religious traditions, and literary culture, which has been forcibly annexed by China in the modern period. The two views are hard to reconcile because of the absolutism of the Chinese stance. To engage with China’s arguments concerning Tibet is to be subjected to a kind of intellectual entrapment, familiar in the Palestinian conflict, whereby the dispute is corralled into questions which the plaintiff had never sought to dispute. Tibetans complain of being robbed of their dignity in their homeland by having their genuinely loved leader incessantly denounced, and of being swamped by Chinese immigration to the point of becoming a minority in their own country. But China insistently condemns such complaints as separatism, an offence in China under the crime of “undermining national unity”, and pulls the debate back to one about Tibet’s historical status. Foreigners raise questions about human rights and the environment, but China again denounces this as a foreign intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation, and pulls the debate back to Tibet’s historical status.
