(NY Times,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/17/world/asia/17quake.html?pagewanted=1&fta=y)
Chinese Premier Visits Tibetan Quake Survivors
Monks loaded the bodies of earthquake victims onto a
truck for a Tibetan burial near the Jiegu Monastery in Jiegu,
China, on Friday.
JIEGU, China — Prime Minister
Wen Jiabao spent Friday in the
Tibetan high country, comforting survivors of this week’s
devastating earthquake in a prominent display of concern by the
country’s Han leadership for one of
China’s most troubled ethnic
minorities.
“No matter whether you are Tibetans or Hans, you are all in one
family,” Mr. Wen said during a visit to an orphanage in Yushu
Prefecture, a remote area of western China to which he had raced on
Thursday after canceling a trip to Indonesia, state news media
reported. President
Hu Jintao also changed his
plans after the quake, cutting short a trip to Brazil.
The government’s efforts will be closely watched. Although the
scope of destruction does not compare with the
2008 earthquake in Sichuan
Province, which killed about 87,000 people, the
disaster in Qinghai Province presents a delicate political
challenge.
The government raised the official death toll of this week’s
quake to 1,144, from 791 earlier in the day, with many thousands
more injured and suffering in the freezing cold at 13,000 feet.
Most of those affected are ethnic Tibetans, whose relations with
the Chinese government have never been easy.
In 2008, those tensions
flared in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, during
deadly rioting that pitted local residents against ethnic Han
migrants. Since then, sporadic unrest and crackdowns have occurred
across Tibetan areas of the country, Qinghai included, although
Jiegu has been relatively quiet.
At a news conference on Friday in Beijing, government experts
seemed at pains to stress that the distribution of relief supplies
had been unaffected by ethnic considerations, and that supplies had
been handed out solely on the basis of need.
But there were obvious tensions in the earthquake zone. Many
monks said that the army and the police had prevented them from
searching for survivors in the first few days after the quake and
that the emergency teams that came from other parts of the country
worked with a lack of urgency. “We have been digging with our bare
hands to save lives,” said Tsewang, a 21-year-old monk who, like
some Tibetans, uses only one name. “We are very disappointed in
them.”
For now, people here seem most concerned with survival or
recovering loved ones lost beneath the ruins that dot the city.
After a day of rescue efforts led by shovel-wielding monks,
hundreds of rescuers with heavy machinery began arriving Thursday.
They clambered over the remnants of schools, hotels and mud-brick
homes looking for signs that some of the hundreds of people still
missing might be alive.
But with time passing and nightfall bringing freezing
temperatures, the chances of survival seemed to be dimming, and
bodies, wrapped in colorful shrouds, piled up in the city.
Ger Lai Tan Zeng, a 20-year-old Buddhist monk, was the recorder
of the dead, his graceful Tibetan script filling an old datebook.
By Friday morning, he estimated that there were 900 bodies spread
across the brightly painted pavilion that normally functioned as a
seating area for the monks at his monastery. “We’ve been too busy
tending the living to count the dead,” he said.
In one piece of good news, two people, including a 13-year-old
girl, were pulled from a toppled three-story hotel here on Friday,
witnesses said.
Relief efforts picked up the pace, with caravans of bottled
water and instant noodles arriving, much of it transported from the
provincial capital 12 hours away. With desperation mounting among
the survivors, the provisions seemed to arrive just in time.
Still, there were some strained moments. Outside the toppled
gate of the municipal government headquarters, several hundred
hungry people tried to push their way through a cordon of riot
police officers, who tried to assure them that there were tents and
food for all. As the crowd’s anger reached a boiling point, the
police gave up and allowed them to stream past.
Conditions remain dire. There is no running water or
electricity. Thousands of people are living outdoors; few buildings
escaped damage, and the wood-and-mud structures that housed many of
the city’s nearly 100,000 residents were particularly
vulnerable.
Several school buildings in town pancaked during the earthquake,
once again raising questions about substandard construction. No one
seemed to know how many schoolchildren might have died, but there
were suggestions that the numbers could reach into the
hundreds.
At the Yushu Ethnic Minority Vocational School, where a section
of the girls’ dormitory turned into rubble, teachers said more than
200 students might have been lost. Cheng Guangming, the assistant
principal, said he and others pulled out five students, but two
later died. “We could only save three,” he said, his voice weary
after spending three days watching workers poke at the remains of
the three-story building.
(Page 2 of 2)
He said the dorm, built 15 years ago, was structurally
deficient, but he was reluctant to assign blame. “At the time,
everything was built from mud, so we thought it was modern
construction,” he said.
Most of the students came from far-flung corners of the county,
a wild region thinly populated by nomads and farmers who scrimp to
send their children to school in the city.
The girls had just finished their morning calisthenics and were
washing up or eating breakfast when the quake struck at 7:49 a.m.
“A few minutes earlier, and they still would have been outside and
alive,” said Luo Na, a teacher.
All across the city, there were tales of lives saved and lost.
He Jie, 23, said a friend and his wife kept calling him from their
hair salon in what had been the ground floor of a hotel. On
Thursday, however, a fire erupted inside the rubble, probably a
crushed gas canister, he said, and by the time rescuers found the
couple, they were dead, their charred bodies in an embrace.
But in another section of the same ruined building, there were
signs of life. Just after daybreak on Friday, a man said he heard
the voices of friends from deep inside the debris. A crowd gathered
to watch while rescue workers with listening devices, sniffer dogs
and chain saws picked at the pile. By evening, their work was still
not done.
Halfway up the dusky mountain that overlooks the city, the monks
of Jyegu monastery were busy praying for the dead, including eight
of their own. The bodies arrived in the trunks of cars, or in one
case by the dozens on two flatbed trucks. With 500 monks, the
monastery is one of the most cherished in the region, and many
residents dropped off bodies so prayers could be said for the
required three days of mourning.
Under normal circumstances, many of the dead would be given sky
burials, the traditional Tibetan ritual in which vultures consume
the bodies. But Pu Be, the monastery’s chief lama, said the sheer
number of corpses made such a ceremony impossible. Instead, he
said, there would be a mass cremation on Saturday.
“This is the unfortunate reality of our situation,” he said.
A few mourners, however, were determined to give their relatives
traditional burials. Qi Min pulled up on a motorcycle to claim the
body of his older brother. A group of robed monks gently lashed the
body, bent at the waist, to the back of the motorcycle. Then, Mr.
Qi drove off.
