Published by: World Tibet Network News Saturday, November 8, 1997

TIN News Update / 7 November, 1997/

- 17 Year Sentence for Tibetan "Spy" -

A 28 year old Tibetan has been given a 17 year prison sentence for collecting information and for starting a secret pro-independence group, according to official court documents about his case. The Tibetan was accused of planning to send abroad books about history and economics which are on public sale in China.

Lukhar Sham and two other Tibetans were sentenced to a total of 45 years in prison for planning to send the statistics books and other documents to Tibetans in exile, and for starting a pro-independence organisation in Eastern Tibet.

The three sentences are among the longest handed out to Tibetans for a non-violent political offence in the last twenty years. Lukhar Sham's sentence is exceeded only by three monks in Lhasa who published a pamphlet on democracy in 1989, and by the exile musicologist Ngawang Choephel who got 18 years after he was caught travelling with a video camera in 1995.

The sentencing of Lukhar Sham, then 25 years old, and his friends Tsegongthar and Namlo Yag took place in July 1994, but it has taken until this month for details of the trial to reach the outside world. Refugees from the area had previously reported the arrests but had put the sentences much lower than those given in the official documents now obtained by TIN.

The case took place in Qinghai, an area which is referred to by Tibetans as Do-med or Amdo, the former north-eastern province of Tibet, but which the Chinese authorities do not recognise as part of the Tibet region. The three men were from Tsolho prefecture (Hainan in Chinese) in Southern Qinghai, but were imprisoned and tried in Delingha, a military base in neighbouring Haixi prefecture where 83% of the population is Chinese.

Reports from the area are hard to obtain, and the delay in hearing details of the case suggests there may be more political dissent there than previously recognised.

Lukhar Sham, named in the Chinese documents as Li Kexian from Xinghai county in Hainan prefecture, received eight years for "espionage" and ten years for "the crime of organising and leading a counter-revolutionary group". His sentence was commuted to a total of 17 years, according to "Criminal Judgement Document No. 19 (1994)" issued by the Haixi Prefecture Intermediate Peoples' Court, a copy of which has been obtained by TIN.

The Haixi Prosecution Service told the court that Lukhar Sham and the two other men had "delivered four items of unlawful correspondence" which Lukhar had brought from India, and then "purchased and collected over 30 volumes of books and materials, such as surveys of eight autonomous prefectures or counties of our province" as well as eight items of "classified or top secret documents and data".

The prosecution presented as evidence to the court "one volume of statistical information about the national economy [and] one handbook of statistics about the education system", according to the documents.

County surveys and statistical compilations are sold openly in bookshops throughout China and Tibet and are frequently stocked in specialist libraries in the West, although they are not meant to be sold to foreigners.

Lukhar Sham, whose name is sometimes written as Lukhar Gyab or Lungkar Cham, had escaped from Tibet in 1991 to India, where he spent 18 months studying at a school run by the exile Tibetan Government. He returned illicitly to Tibet in November 1992, allegedly carrying 14 letters for Tibetans in Amdo, which he and his co-defendants delivered four.

The authorities said at the trial that he had been sent to Qinghai by an "external illegal organisation" - a reference to the exile government - to "deliver correspondence and gather intelligence" and that "on numerous occasions he disseminated reactionary opinions concerning such subjects as "Tibetan Independence"".

The case was uncovered in March 1993 when Lukhar Sham tried to make a second trip to India. He was caught by border police in Tingri, about 2,000 km by road from his home in Amdo and only 50 km from the border with Nepal. Police discovered on him some of the confidential documents together with two letters addressed to the exile government of the Dalai Lama, and returned him to Qinghai for questioning by State Security police there, according to the court documents.

The two letters he was carrying had been written by Tsegongthar, a 33 year old high-ranking policeman in Kangtsa county (Gangca in Chinese), in Haibei Prefecture, and Namlo Yag, an education official in Tsigorthang county, known in Chinese as Xinghai, in Hainan prefecture; the two men were detained in May 1993, two months after the letters had been intercepted.

Tsegongthar, named in the Chinese document as Cai Gongjia from Guide county in Hainan, was sentenced to 16 years, and 28-year old Namlo Yag, named in Chinese as An Leye from Xinghai county, was sentenced to 12 years for writing the letters, helping collect the confidential documents, and joining Lukhar Sham's secret group. Some sources say Namlo Yag is also known as Riglo Yag.

A fourth Tibetan, Sherab Dondrub, named as Xiawu Dongzhi in Chinese, was also accused of joining the pro-independence group, but the documents do not give his sentence, probably because he was under 18 years of age at the time and so would have been sentenced separately.

The four Tibetans had started a "counter-revolutionary organisation" called the "Amdo Youth Self-Sacrifice Organisation" and had arranged to print "reactionary leaflets". As a result the group had "created nationality disputes, incited nationality splittism, and endangered national security", the court ruled. The three men told the court that they had not campaigned for support for Tibetan independence or carried out any spying, and that many of the books were on sale publicly, but the arguments were rejected as "false and in contradiction with the law".

- Other Arrests, Linked to Jiang Zemin Visit -

The arrest of Lukhar Sham is believed to have been connected to the detention of an estimated 28 other Tibetans in Tsolho (Hainan) prefecture or nearby areas of Qinghai in June or July 1993, just before a visit by the Chinese President Jiang Zemin to the province.

The detainees are believed to have been suspected of spreading pro- independence leaflets linked to Jiang's visit from 16th to 21st July or to celebrations on 3rd August that year of the 40th anniversary of the naming of Hainan as a Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture.

Among the detainees was Menlha Kyab (also known as Menlha Cha), a famous Tibetan broadcaster, comedian and writer from Tsolho, who was released after six months but is reported to have suffered a serious mental breakdown as a result of his imprisonment. Another prominent Tibetan arrested was Samdrub Tsering, a postgraduate research student at the Nationalities Institute in Xining who had opened a Tibetan language nursery school near Xining one month before he was detained in June that year. He is serving a five year sentence for "counter-revolutionary incitement", a term often used to describe distribution of pro-independence leaflets.

Another Tibetan intellectual connected to the group from Hainan prefecture, the writer and teacher Dukar Bum, left the area at the time of the 1993 arrests in order to travel secretly to India, but was arrested when he returned a year later in September 1994. He is serving seven years in prison, reportedly because of his connections with the underground group and because of money he is alleged to have taken to India.

The high social positions of many of the detainees, such as the police chief Tsegongthar and the educationalist Namlo Yag, suggest that dissent in the Amdo area is relatively strong amongst Tibetan intellectuals and officials.

During his 1993 inspection tour of the Tibetan areas of Qinghai, Jiang went "deep into villages and pastoral areas", where he praised "officials who had left their homes in coastal and other regions to contribute to Qinghai's economic and social development" and called for the exploitation of natural resources in the province to be speeded up, according to a Xinhua report on 21st July 1993.

Recent political arrests from the Amdo area include five monks from Labrang monastery in southern Gansu province, detained in May 1995 after pro- independence posters were put up in the area, and 25 monks at Kumbum monastery near Xining in Qinghai province, detained in May 1996 in connection with political posters as well as with an unofficial literary magazine. The sentences passed on these monks are unknown, but in June 1995 a Tibetan student at the Lanzhou Nationalities Institute named Drolkar Gyab was detained and given a seven year sentence for "political reasons", according to unofficial reports.