Published by: World Tibet Network News Thursday - October 9, 1997

NEW DELHI, Oct 9 (Reuter) - Tibetan exiles on Thursday urged India to press China to release Buddhist abbot Chadrel Rinpoche, jailed for six years for contacts with the Dalai Lama.

``We appeal to the Indian government and its people to take up the issue with the Chinese and prevail upon the Chinese to uphold the human rights of Tibetan people in occupied Tibet including that of Panchen Lama and Chadrel Rinpoche,'' the Tibetan Youth Congress said in a statement in New Delhi.

The former abbot of Tashilunpo monastery in Xigaze in southern Tibet is the most prominent among Tibetan monks serving jail terms for what China views as their campaign for independence for the devoutly Buddhist Himalayan region.

Chadrel Rinpoche was sentenced last April to six years in jail for conspiring to split China and for leaking state secrets after he notified Tibet's exiled god-king the Dalai Lama of the progress of his team in their search for the reincarnation of Tibet's second holiest monk, the Panchen Lama.

The 10th Panchen Lama died in 1989, leading to a dispute over the naming of his successor.

China refused to recognise the boy chosen by the Dalai Lama and instead installed its own choice of Panchen Lama, who the Dalai Lama has declared invalid and who was widely rejected by Tibetans.

Beijing is eager to maintain a tight grip on Tibet, which has been rocked in the last decade by a string of often violent protests against Chinese rule, most of them led by Tibetan monks and nuns.

Many of those monks and nuns have been sentenced to long prison terms.

Chadrel Rinpoche was being held in solitary confinement in a small, restricted compound within the Chuandong prison where the late chairman Mao Zedong incarcerated his rightist rival, Hu Feng, for 20 years, New York-based Human Rights in China said last month.

The abbot had been denied all contact with the outside since his arrival at Chuandong prison and was not allowed to leave his cell for exercise, the report said.

He had staged a hunger strike to protest against these conditions, Human Rights in China said. It was not known if he had resumed eating but ``sources report that his health is very poor,'' the Tibetan Youth Congress, based in the northern Indian town of Dharamsala, said.