A woman’s gruesome hanging shocked Tibet
— but police have silenced all questions
Simon Denyer August
26 Washington Post
JIQIE NO. 2 VILLAGE, China
— She
was 27, a kind, hard-working woman who supported her family by
herding yaks and harvesting
caterpillar fungus, a prized health cure, on the high
grasslands of Tibet. Last October, Tsering Tso was found hanged
from a bridge in a small town near her home.
Her family and local villagers gathered outside the police station
in Chalong township to demand answers: She had last been seen in
the company of a local Buddhist priest and two
policemen.
The
authorities insisted it was suicide. Family and friends suspected
foul play and demanded an investigation. That night and the
following morning, an angry crowd stormed the gates of the police
station, smashing windows, according to local police.
The
authorities’ response was brutal, revealing much about
the crackdown
taking place in Tibetan parts of Chinaand showing how
unrest and unhappiness is increasingly viewed as dangerously
subversive.
On Oct. 10,
five days after Tsering Tso’s body was found, hundreds of armed
soldiers arrived in the town and descended on her funeral ceremony
in the remote hamlet known as Jiqie No. 2 Village in Chinese and
Raghya in Tibetan, in China’s western Sichuan province.
Witnesses
said more than 40 people were tied up, beaten with metal clubs,
piled into a truck “like corpses” and placed in
detention.
So much
blood was shed, “stray dogs could not finish lapping it up,”
according to a remarkable and rare open letter sent by the
community to President Xi Jinping asking for justice.
Most of
those detained were gradually released in the weeks and months that
followed, although many went straight to the hospital.
But on May
20, five relatives and family friends were sentenced to 2
1/2 years in prison. Acquaintances say they were
jailed for refusing to sign a statement absolving the police of
blame for Tsering Tso’s death.
In a
statement issued on its social-media account, the Ganzi county
Public Security Bureau contested that version of events. It said
some of the protesters had carried knives, iron pipes or stones and
had caused nearly $10,000 worth of damage. The bureau ran
photographs of several men climbing over a gate, but only two
broken windows were shown.
The jailed
men, the statement said, had either carried weapons or organized
the protest and had been found guilty of “assembling a crowd to
attack state organs.”
But
relatives who spoke to The Washington Post outside the family’s
tent on the remote grasslands said they were not convinced that any
investigation had been carried out.
No one
denied that a few stones had been thrown during the protest,
hitting a police car and office building, but they said that as a
result, their entire community had been accused of “splittism.”
That is a serious crime implying support for the Dalai Lama, the
exiled religious leader, or for Tibet’s independence from
China.
Internet
connections have been cut off in Chalong township since the
incident, and relatives have been threatened with further
punishment if they talk to outsiders. The village — a scattering of
tents and yaks in a scenic, sweeping grasslands valley — has been
told it will not get government subsidies for roads or houses for
three years because of its “bad character.”
The family
insisted that its demands were not political or ethnic in nature:
The priest and policemen last seen with Tsering Tso were local
Tibetans, and the family said it had no beef with the central
government.
All the
family wants, it said, is a proper investigation, justice for
Tsering Tso and freedom for the five men in jail.
“My
daughter was healthy and happy. She wouldn’t commit suicide,” her
49-year-old mother Adhey said, fighting back tears as she sat on
the grass with her 83-year-old mother and two young
sons.
“My beloved
daughter was murdered without any justice being given by the
government. Instead, they simply arrested more innocent people and
sent them to jail.”
What
happened on the grasslands near Chalong in Garze prefecture fits a
disturbing pattern. More than six decades after Chinese troops
first moved into Tibet, dissent continues to roil the plateau and,
if anything, is being suppressed ever more savagely.
Control and
surveillance have been dramatically tightened since riots and
demonstrations broke out in Tibet in 2008, and then expanded
further under Xi, with tens of thousands of party cadres sent to
monitor villages and monasteries, according to a January
report by the International
Campaign for Tibet (ICT).
In
a May
report, Human Rights Watch catalogued nearly 500 arrests
across Tibetan parts of China between 2013 and 2015. It concluded
that dissent had spread from urban to rural areas. Whereas the vast
majority of arrests in the 1980s and 1990s had been of monks and
nuns, most of those detained more recently were ordinary
people.
Many “had
merely exercised their rights to expression and assembly without
advocating separatism” — criticizing local officials, for example,
or opposing a mining development, the report said.
Yet even
relatively mild protests about poor governance are increasingly
seen through a political lens and labeled as “criminal acts,”
rights groups say. Punishment can be severe.
The
incident in Chalong “reflects the unrest and instability in Tibetan
society,” said Golog
Jigme, a filmmaker and former political prisoner who now
lives in exile in Switzerland. “It’s not outsiders or the Dalai
Lama stirring things up, it’s social issues.”
On the
evening of Oct. 4, 2015, Tsering Tso had received a phone call from
her boyfriend, a lama at the Gertse Dralak monastery in Chalong. He
insisted that he was ill and wanted to see her.
Her father
gave her a lift, only to find the lama drinking with two policemen.
He left her there. The following morning, Tsering Tso’s body was
found hanging from a small bridge in the town.
Although
police say an autopsy gave the cause of death as suicide, residents
are deeply skeptical. Some reported seeing bruises on her body and
said that a doctor’s report had noted a wound on her head as well
as a broken neck. They also said her clothes looked as though they
had been put on after her death. The lama, who had a reputation as
a womanizer, has since disappeared.
In its
statement, the Public Security Bureau said the two policemen were
on duty at the time of her death and could not have been involved.
But villagers insist that the two men were seen drinking with the
lama that night and suspect a coverup. Instead of investigating,
they say, the police just called in the army.
As they
rounded up suspects, security forces raided and ransacked
relatives’ homes, “smashing everything and stabbing knives into
sacks of rice and butter,” one relative said. “We’ve only seen that
kind of brutality before in TV dramas about Japanese
invaders.”
The raiders
confiscated photos of Tsering Tso — even checking mobile phones. A
family member showed scars on his head from a beating that he said
left his body drenched in blood. Released weeks later, he was
warned by officials not to talk to anyone, but he refuses to be
silenced.
He said
another relative walks with a limp after being beaten on his legs;
a third, a Buddhist monk, was beaten so badly on the head that he
bled from one ear and today cannot walk at all. Family members who
work for the government lost their jobs.
The police
statement merely said that 44 people had been
subpoenaed.
Many
Tibetans are too scared to speak out publicly against injustice,
but the communities around Chalong appear to have gathered to write
a remarkable open
letter about the incident. The
letter, first obtained by Golog Jigme, claims to have been written
in the name of 700 residents across 13 communities in the
area.
“These days
the Chinese Communists are claiming and announcing how they are
building a perfect Tibet and how free and happy Tibetans are in
China, but now we have no option but to show the world an actual
example of the real suffering endured by the people of the three
regions of Tibet under Chinese oppression,” the letter
begins.
Local
officials, the letter continued, had “conspired to use force to
bully the common people,” ending with an appeal to President Xi to
“investigate and rectify.”
ICT said
the incident reveals the extent of the impunity of officials and
police in Tibet, and the fact that it took so long to reach the
outside world shows how tightly information flows are restricted.
Free Tibet said it “clearly exemplifies not just the brutality of
life under the Chinese occupation but also how arbitrary and
illogical it can be.”
Xu
Yangjingjing contributed to this report.