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INTERNATIONAL CAMPAIGN FOR TIBET
the Toelung valley. In one reliable account, a Tibetan spoke of witnessing bodies piled
together in the back of an army truck on the road leaving Lhasa. The side of the truck
was covered with dried blood. The source estimated there were more than 15 bodies
in the truck.
Stories ‘to give you nightmares’
Many eyewitness or other reliable reports have reached ICT of deaths of Tibetans during
the crackdown in Lhasa following the rioting on March 14. A Tibetan eyewitness
told a source that in the afternoon of March 14, he saw four people carrying a Tibetan
who had been shot dead. In the evening, a member of the family went to collect a child
from school at around 6 pm, and the source said: “The military was shooting at the locals
who went to pick up their children. One woman got shot in her leg and one man
was hit in the head or neck and he died. Later his brother wanted to get his corpse
from the hospital, but the hospital didn’t want to give it [to him]. Finally the brother
got so desperate that he threatened to burn himself and the hospital if they didn’t
give his dead brother to his family. The hospital gave him his brother’s body, but just
a few hours after he got home the military came and took the dead body away again.”
The same source said that after March 14, in order to take a member of a family who
had died for sky burial, a traditional Tibetan ceremony, three different papers were
needed from the local police, hospital and a legal office, and that the reason for the different
levels of bureaucracy was in order to ensure that the bodies of Tibetans who had
been shot dead were not photographed and sent outside Tibet. Similarly, according to
several sources, the corpses of those who had been shot were immediately taken away
from people’s homes by armed police or the military. The source added: “Walking the
streets of Lhasa today, seeing big tea houses unusually empty and many shops still
closed, makes you aware of how scared people are now. Very few people stop on the
street when they meet friends, because every gathering of people is suspicious. A lot
of people still stay at home because they are scared they will get arrested for no reason
if they go out. When you finally find someone who is not too scared to talk to you, you
hear consistent, dramatic, disturbing and daunting stories to give you nightmares.”
There were further protests in several districts around Lhasa over the weekend of
March 15–16. In Phenpo Lhundrup (Chinese: Linzhou) county police reportedly fired
on a crowd of hundreds demanding the release of monks arrested for demonstrating.
A young businessman in his twenties called Jinpa was killed. All 90 or so monks of
Ganden Chokor monastery and hundreds of local residents were arrested at the time
and in subsequent search operations in the county town and surrounding villages.
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