Published by: World Tibet Network News, Wednesday, May 22 1996 (Part I)

By Mure Dickie

BEIJING, May 19 (Reuter) - China has ordered police to crack down hard on separatist ``terrorists'' in its restive Tibet and Xinjiang regions, saying activists who oppose Beijing's rule in the mainly Buddhist and Muslim areas must be crushed.

In a rare admission of the severity of anti-Chinese feeling in the Himalayan region, the official Tibet Daily ordered police to wipe out a campaign of ``terrorist'' bombings mounted by groups that support Tibet's exiled Buddhist leader the Dalai Lama.

In a front-page editorial of an edition available in Beijing Sunday, the government newspaper called on police in Tibet to intensify their crackdown on separatists and criminals amid reports of anti-Chinese protests and the sealing off of monasteries.

``In the ``Strike Hard' crackdown on crime we must relentlessly pursue and show no mercy to those splittists who transport, steal and hide explosives and firearms,'' the newspaper said.

The call for action against armed unrest in the tightly controlled region followed several reports of isolated bombings in and around Lhasa by Tibetans opposed to Chinese rule.

In the mainly Muslim northwestern Xinjiang region, leaders ordered a crackdown on separatists, saying their ``violent terrorist activities'' had killed innocent people.

In a front-page editorial in the official Xinjiang Daily, Communist Party leaders urged officials in the region that borders Afghanistan, Pakistan and three Muslim states in Central Asia to ``take protective measures to prevent enemy sabotage.''

``We must crush the arrogance of enemy elements,'' the newspaper said in an edition seen in Beijing Sunday.

``We must destroy the soil from which they take nourishment ... and eradicate their violent terrorist activities and their crimes in killing innocent people,'' it quoted Li Fengzi, secretary of the region's Political Science and Law Commission, as saying.

Xinjiang Communist Party leaders issued the call for a fresh crackdown against separatists after holding an emergency telephone conference, the newspaper said.

The crackdown on crime in Tibet should include a campaign against pro-independence forces loyal to the Dalai Lama, with the death penalty imposed whenever warranted, Tibet Daily said.

Most monasteries near the Tibetan capital appeared to have been sealed off following reports of a disturbance in the city last week, a Western tourist in Lhasa said by telephone.

The London-based Tibet Information Network (TIN), which liaises closely with dissenters in the region, said in a report that up to 80 people, at least 30 of them women, had been injured in a clash in Tibet with authorities on May 14.

An official of the Lhasa People's Hospital dismissed TIN's report that two truckloads of wounded people had been taken there after the clash.

``I don't know anything about a riot or disturbance. There have been no wounded here,'' the official said.

But the Western tourist had a different story. ``There has been some kind of disturbance. I heard about 40 people were hurt,'' said the tourist, who declined to be identified.

Lhasa residents said Saturday that officials had sealed off Ganden monastery, one of Tibet's largest, after anti-Chinese protests by monks in which dozens were reported arrested.

One monk was shot and wounded by police after fighting broke out at the 15th-century mountain-top monastery 25 miles east of Lhasa, reports from the region said.

TIN said the demonstration erupted on May 7 after officials tried to impose regulations banning the display in temples of photographs of the Dalai Lama, who fled into exile in India after an abortive uprising in 1959 but is still widely venerated among Buddhists in the deeply religious region.

In Xinjiang, where Beijing has waged a sometimes brutal campaign to counter Muslim and ethnic nationalism, the official newspaper called for officials at strategic targets to be on their guard against sabotage attacks.

``Departments concerned should take protective measures to prevent enemy sabotage of factories, mining sites, markets, warehouses, electric power stations and railway stations and lines,'' it said.

11:44 05-19-96