To: M.Sisani@agora.stm.it
House to House Searches for Photographs Begin
House to house searches for photographs of the Dalai Lama were due to take place in at least one part of Lhasa on Monday 20th May, according an official in the Tibetan capital. The searches, together with attempts to enforce a ban on display of the photographs in Lhasa monasteries last week, appear to be part of a high-profile three month campaign against Tibetan separatists, initiated ten days ago.
"We have launched mobilisation meetings and will carry out home-by- home searches this afternoon to check for possession of photographs of the Dalai Lama," the unnamed factory official told a Reuters reporter in Beijing on Monday. The official said that he was not sure how people who opposed the order would be dealt with.
A western tourist, contacted by TIN in Lhasa, said on Sunday that local Tibetans had told him that the authorities were going through private houses searching for pictures of the Dalai Lama, although this report could not be confirmed.
It is still not clear if the searches are confined to the accommodation sections of government-run work units such as factories, or whether they will also take place in private residences. But the sweep of people's rooms suggests that the campaign to root out support for the exiled leader has been widened to include a ban on the private possession of the photographs as well as on their public display.
The ban on the photographs was enforced in government offices in mid-1994, in hotels, restaurants and shops in April 1996, and in monasteries and schools earlier this month, but there was no ban on private possession of the photographs except among officials. A statement published in the official Tibet newspaper on 5th April only forbade display of the photographs in monasteries and temples, but a public statement banning possession of the photographs elsewhere is not expected until the order has been widely implemented.
This evening Tibetans from Lhasa, contacted by TIN, said that there had been sporadic attempts during the 1980s to dissuade people from having the photographs, but that these had not been seriously implemented. One senior figure, who asked not to be named, said he could not recall the widespread use of house to house searches since the Cultural Revolution twenty years ago.
Three Month Anti Crime Campaign
The attempt to ban the photographs now appears to be the initial objective of a major campaign against crime that was announced on Tibet TV last week. The campaign was launched on 9th May with a large "mobilisation rally" attended by 1,200 senior Party cadres in Lhasa, who were told that a three month long campaign would begin from that day "to take immediate action against serious crime" throughout the prefecture and in the Tibet Autonomous Region as a whole. "We should fully mobilise and rely on the masses and fight a people's war", the meeting was told by Raidi, one of three executive deputy secretaries in the Tibet Communist Party and the highest ranking Tibetan in the region.
The political objectives of the campaign were suggested in a separate speech by Lobsang Dondrup, former mayor of Lhasa, who told the cadres that the campaign should be used "to unfold a serious fight against sabotage by separatists and other serious criminals ... Party committees must effectively prepare for the concentrated fight across the entire city," he said "We must deal a telling blow to criminals."
Any leaders who "pay no attention to the struggle ideologically" will be investigated, Raidi told the meeting, which is similar to a campaign against crime and sabotage currently taking place in Xinjiang, where China is also dealing with a strong separatist movement.
The 9th May meeting in Lhasa was chaired by the previously unknown Lobsang Gyaltsen, the newly appointed mayor of Lhasa, believed to have been formerly a senior official in Nagchu prefecture, in what appears to have been his first major public appearance. His appointment and his public initiation in such a role indicate an increase in local influence for Raidi, who also comes from Nagchu, and now has allies in both the Lhasa city and Tibet regional leadership: Legchoe, regarded as close to Raidi, was promoted last year from secretary of the Lhasa City Party to deputy secretary of the Regional Party, and Lobsang Dondrup has recently been promoted to the position of vice-chairman of the Regional government and has replaced Legchoe as Party secretary of Lhasa City.
The moves signify that Lhasa is again firmly controlled by the regional party, after a spell of relative autonomy under the leadership of Loga, who was dismissed as mayor in 1992. Loga's dismissal and the rise of Raidi are associated with the arrival in the region of Chen Kuiyuan, who has been Tibet Party Secretary since 1992 and is widely regarded as a hard-line conservative.
"These events indicate a trend back towards leftist policies, getting closer in style to class struggle tactics," one informed Tibetan told TIN, adding that they must have been sanctioned by Beijing. "Raidi and Chen cannot decide this alone - they are only the loudspeakers for the centre," he said.
A Government spokesman in Lhasa gave the first official confirmation on Monday that a fight had taken place at Ganden monastery, which had been closed down as a result. "Monks encircled government administrators, beat them and injured two of them. After this incident, according to Chinese law, the government closed Ganden monastery on May 8th for consolidation and rectification," an official at the Religious Affairs Bureau told AFP in Beijing, noting that the incident began on 6th not 7th May as reported earlier. Earlier this year the Chinese authorities announced that any politically active monastery must be closed down, and the present campaign anyway involves replacing all monastic officials with "patriotic" monks.
A statement by the exile Tibetan government in India also reported that two officials had been hospitalised after being injured by the monks in the fight at Ganden, and named one of the wounded officials as Lobsang, a Tibetan member of the Lhasa Nationalities and Religious Affairs Committee. At least three monks are known to have been wounded by bullet fire, one of them seriously, and there are unconfirmed reports that two others may have been killed. At least 40 monks and nuns had to be hospitalised after a separate incident on 14th May. [END]
