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TIN News Update / 9 November, 1996 v2/ no of pages: 2 ISSN 1355-3313

The leading dissident in Tibet has been placed under what is effectively house arrest, apparently as a punishment for speaking two years ago to a UN human rights team which visited Tibet. The head of the UN team, which monitors religious tolerance throughout the world, said today that close attention was being paid to the report.

The news emerged following an official visit to Lhasa last week by three members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who were allowed a ten minute meeting with Yulo Dawa Tsering, a 68 year old Tibetan lama. The lama had been released from prison two years ago after some 27 years behind bars.

"He appeared to us be under some kind of restraint - he did not have the freedom to come or go," said Ms Bernie Malone, an Irish MEP who was in the team that met the monk. "They said he was on parole but during the meeting it appeared to us that this was not parole in our sense of the word. He was not the master of his own movements," she added.

The report supports earlier unofficial accounts from Tibet that Yulo Dawa Tsering has been moved to accommodation in Lhasa which is guarded or regularly visited by police.

It is the first time the monk, a former teacher of philosophy at the University of Tibet, has been seen by foreigners since November 1994, when he gave an on-the-record statement to M. Abdelfattah Amor, the UN's Special Rapporteur on Religious Intolerance during an official UN mission to China and Tibet to assess China's record on religious freedom.

"The case of Mr Tsering is not one to which I am indiferent," M. Amor commented today, speaking from his home in Tunisia. "I will continue to examine questions of religions freedom wherever they arise, and especially in Tibet, and I will pay very close attention to this report," he added.

Photographs Not Allowed -

Last week's meeting took place after intensive lobbying by the MEPs and amidst tight security. "They were trying to keep us from him, that's certain," said Ms Malone. "It was so difficult for us to see him and they just didn't want to let us, but in the end they gave in because we were very, very insistent and because we had built up a certain relationship by visiting at their invitation and as their guests."

On the last day of their visit the three MEPs were driven without prior notification to an unnamed destination - a hotel in the western suburbs of Lhasa - and were allowed access to the building only after what was described as a "James Bond type security operation", apparently to make sure no locals had identified the venue or were following the visitors.

The meeting was allowed on condition that the MEPs took no photographs of Yulo Rinpoche, as he is referred to by Tibetans, and the visitors were told they could speak to him for a maximum of 10 minutes.

Unlike Yulo Rinpoche's 1994 meeting with the UN Human Rights team, the discussion with the three MEPs took place in front of officials and through two translators, one translating from Tibetan to Chinese and another from Chinese to English. A Tibetan-English translator was not provided.

The MEPs reported that the monk looked reasonably well and said that he had described his present condition as being "better than those who are in prison". They said the situation was too strained to allow other matters to be raised with the monk.

Ms Malone, a vice-president of the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, travelled to Tibet and China with Luigi Calajanni, an Italian MEP, and Joan Colon I Naval, a Spanish MEP. The delegation, which represented the Socialist group at the European Parliament, travelled as guests of the Chinese Communist Party and was received as a fraternal organisation entitled to greater access than a normal Parliamentary delegation.

Yulo Dawa Tsering, formerly an abbot at Ganden Monastery, was the first Tibetan to be sentenced when the Tibetan independence movement re-emerged in 1987. He was detained in December that year and given a 10 year sentence for having spoken about Tibetan independence at a meal with an Italian tourist six months earlier.

On 4th November 1994, three weeks before the visit by the UN Human Rights team, he was released on parole by the Chinese authorities, who announced that he had "admitted his guilt and showed repentance" and had "pledged to support the Chinese Communist Party after rehabilitation in society".

Later that month the Chinese authorities allowed M. Amor and his team from the UN to meet the the abbot, who told them of his "concern about the version of Tibet's history that is known to the international community," probably a reference to Beijing's claim that Tibet is part of China. He also said that he had been arrested for "political reasons" and that he did not accept official statements that he had been released "for good conduct and recognition of his guilt".

The European Parliament (EP) delegation did not say what action they would take as a result of their meeting last week but described the fact that it was allowed as "an act of goodwill on the part of the Chinese in the context of repression linked to activities in favour of independence," according to Mr Colajanni.

The Socialist group at the EP hopes to open up a dialogue with Beijing in return for "tightening up procedures in the Parliament's procedure for human rights", a reference to the Socialist MEPs' plan to limit the frequency with which members of other parties can place urgent resolutions criticising China's human rights record, according to Ms. Malone.

Ms Malone would not comment directly on China's human rights record on the grounds that human rights were difficult to define in the area because of "different stages of development and poverty".

"A lot of the wingeing that goes on by the people who are pro-Dalai Lama is ill informed and they just take one side and run with it", she said after her two day visit. She said she was struck by the ugliness of the city of Lhasa, which is undergoing a wave of new modernist construction, and by the military presence.

"There is a huge army population in Lhasa and a huge attendant flock of prostitutes," she commented. "It is true that the Chinese are putting money into restoration of the monasteries and that everything is in two languages, but I don't know if that is going to be enough," she said.