Instability peaks as Beijing cracks down, writes Asia Sentinel’s Saransh Sehgal

On Saturday, Feb. 12 an 18-year-old nun named Tenzin Choedron from the Mamae Dechen Choekhorling nunnery set herself afire in China’s Sichuan province, shouting protest slogans against the Chinese government before setting herself alight, an exile based rights group said.

With nearly two dozen self-immolations and a series of mass protests in the Himalayan plateau region inside China over the past months, there is growing concern over the possibility of an uprising equivalent to the one that shook Sichuan and Gansu in 2008 when deadly rioting in Tibet’s capital, Lhasa, extended to areas in neighboring provinces. As the tension has grown, China is said to be rushing additional security personnel to the region.

India Tibet Protest

Exiled Tibetans participate in a candlelight vigil to remember Tibetans who have died in Tibet. Pic: AP.

“We worry that more cases of immolation may occur in the coming days as our new year is approaching and the 10th March national uprising day as well, ” said Tsering Tashi, an exiled Tibetan and a member of the Students for a Free Tibet (SFT) group in New Delhi. ”We need the collective voices of the people and leaders of world that can save the lives of the Tibetan people.”

Tenzin Choedron joins 20 other Tibetan Buddhists, mostly monks and nuns and a few lay Tibetans, who have immolated themselves to protest Beijing’s policies in areas like the Ngaba prefecture of China’s Sichuan Province. Before lighting themselves on fire they chanted for Tibetan freedom and the return of their spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who fled to India during a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959. Chinese state media has however described the protests as mob attacks and riots fomented by the exiled leader’s followers.

In a recent press briefing, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said, “We believe that this is a case of a handful of criminals illegally gathering and smashing and looting.” He added that the “surprising” promptness with which overseas Tibetan activist groups reported the unrest “showed that they have colluded and premeditated the incidents. The Chinese government will resolutely crack down on any attempt to incite violence or to disrupt national unity and integrity.”

Sichuan has also seen bloody clashes between Tibetan and Chinese forces in recent weeks, partly because of the massive influx of Han Chinese into Tibetan -populated areas.

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