Published by: World Tibet Network News, 96/03/29

BEIJING, March 26 - Popular discontent is growing in Tibet despite a Chinese campaign to crush dissent that has left more political prisoners in custody than at any time since 1990, a report by a human rights groups said on Tuesday.

"The Chinese authorities have tightened internal security in Tibet, given out longer sentences for political offences, increased contr monitors abuses, accused Beijing of restricting freedom of religion and of widespread torture of people detained for demanding independence -- sometimes resulting in death.

"Popular dissent and disaffection has increased in Tibet during the 1990s, despite the imposition of draconian security measures intended to defeat it," the report said.

"In its drive to crush dissent, the Chinese state is widening the range of discontent, increasingly criminalising the process of political criticism, and imprisoning more ordinary Tibetans than at any time since the late 1980s," it said.

The 80-page report, titled "Cutting off the Serpent's Head," listed 610 Tibetan political prisoners as of January 1996, but warned the total was incomplete as many were never reported.

The number of detentions rose after the United States and other Western nations lowered the importance of human rights in their relations with Beijing in 1994, the report said.

"Many Tibetans are convinced that the increased repression was a direct result of the easing of international pressure on China," said the report, which its authors said was based entirely on primary sources.

China dismisses Western concerns about human rights abuses as interference in its internal affairs and says life in the Himalayan region has improved immeasurably since the People's Liberation Army marched into Tibet in 1950.

Since 1994, Beijing has limited numbers of monks and nuns, banned some Buddhist rites and launched a vitriolic propaganda campaign against Tibet's exiled spiritual leader and 1989 Nobel Peace Prize laureate the Dalai Lama, the report said.

Police and prison authorities continued to beat and torture prisoners with impunity in 1995, it said, citing the case of three men detained in Lhasa who had their thumbs tied with wire by interrogators and were beaten with electric batons.

In May 1995, a monk named Jigme Gyatso was partially paralysed after being beaten by a drunk policeman after his arrest on suspicion of putting up posters, it said. Fearing the monk would die, officials released him -- but only after his family paid 1,000 yuan ($120) to local police.

The average jail term handed down to political detainees had risen to 4.52 years in 1995 from 3.29 years in 1987, it said.

China had stepped up repression after a meeting to decide Tibet policy in Beijing in July, 1994, the report said.

The meeting called for high-speed growth in Tibet, a move that had led to an increased flow of ethnic Han Chinese Into the region, causing discontent among Tibetans, it said.

Anger at controls on religion had been fuelled by Beijing's vilification of the Dalai Lama and its denunciation of a child named by him as the reincarnated successor to the Panchen Lama, Tibet's second most important spiritual leader.

"Political dissent is spreading to rural areas and to wider sections of the community," said the report, which echoed many of the conclusions of a May 1995 report by the human rights watchdog Amnesty International. Religious dissent had escalated dramatically, with monks from orders not previously active taking part in protests, the report said.

Tibet has been rocked by dozens of often violent riots and protests against Chinese rule in recent years, and the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959 after an abortive uprising to demand independence for the deeply religious region.