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Monks disrupt media tour in Chinese province

Beijing: A group of around 20 monks disrupted a Chinese government-organised media tour of an ethnic Tibetan region in western China’s Gansu province on Wednesday, demanding the return of the Dalai Lama and claiming they had no human rights.

This was the second such disruption of a state-sponsored media trip in the space of a few weeks. A similar incident had occurred in Lhasa towards the end of March.

According to news agencies, the monks carried a banned Tibetan flag and burst out of a building at the Labrang monastery in Xiahe, a town in China’s northwestern province of Gansu. They went on to surround a group of 20 visiting Chinese and foreign journalists.

“The Dalai Lama has to come back to Tibet. We are not asking for Tibetan independence, we are just asking for human rights,” one of the protesting monks told the reporters in Chinese.

The official Xinhua agency also reported the incident but gave few details beyond saying that a group of monks had interrupted the event at Labrang monastery and that the visit resumed soon afterward.

Other news agencies and eyewitnesses described the protest as lasting for around 10 minutes before the monks were persuaded by senior colleagues to disband.

“What you journalists just saw was a very small minority of people who disrupt our harmonious and peaceful life and religious activities,” Reuters reported Gongqihujinba, vice-director of the Labrang monastery’s management committee, as saying. “We will take care of them under national law. What they did was not consistent with national security laws, or rules on religion.”

Labrang monastery is an important centre of Tibetan Buddhism and hundreds of monks from Labrang had led a march through Xiahe in mid-March, after riots erupted in the Tibetan regional capital Lhasa on March 14. Since then Xiahe has been largely closed to foreign observers. The ongoing media tour was the first one organised by the government to the region since the unrest began.

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