World Tibet Network News, Thursday, March 19, 1998

From: TIBET INFORMATION NETWORK

The validity of visits to Tibetan prisons by Western delegations organised by the Chinese authorities has been called into question by reports of a protest in a Lhasa prison during the visit of United Nations representatives last October. Prisoners involved in the protest, which involved a declaration of support for the Dalai Lama, are said to have been beaten and put into solitary confinement after independent experts from the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention left the prison. The group's report, which has just been published and is due to be presented to the UN in Geneva next month, makes no mention of the incident and noenquiries have been made about the welfare of the prisoners concerned since the UN group left Tibet. A spokesperson for the UN Commission for Human Rights, who has described the delegation's visit as "generally successful", said he was not aware of the protest.

A British Foreign Office spokesperson, who was also unaware of the incident, said this week that it would be taken into consideration in the preparations for an official European Union visit to Tibet in May. The visit was approved following the EU decision not to support a UN resolution criticising China's human rights record. The spokesperson said: "All reports of human rights abuses are of concern and we do take these seriously."

Unofficial sources name several prisoners in Drapchi prison who reportedly met before the arrival of the UN Working Group on 11 October to discuss the possibility of making a protest. When the Working Group arrived, Sonam Tsewang, a common law prisoner, stood up and said: "Long live the Dalai Lama". A member of the delegation told TIN: "We were very taken aback. The poor man was trembling and very agitated, but he obviously had a lot of courage." Sonam Tsewang was one of ten prison inmates that the delegation later spoke to in private.

Kapil Sibal, Chairman of the Working Group, would neither confirm nor deny that a protest took place during the delegation's visit to Drapchi. When asked about the incident, he said: "Our trip had a legal mandate." He added: "If on the basis of our visit we find that something is required to be done on behalf of a particular person, we will make inquiries." The Chinese authorities reportedly gave assurances that no prisoners would be harmed following the incident, but an unconfirmed report reaching TIN states that several inmates were later beaten by prison officials and cadres and taken for interrogation and that Sonam Tsewang was interrogated.

A reliable unofficial source reported that: "Several prisoners received very severe beatings and intensive daily interrogation. As a result of such incidents, not only are the prisoners being carefully watched, but the Tibetan cadres are also being watched secretly." The same source also reported that some Tibetan cadres had been transferred to other posts and that the number of Chinese cadres in the prison had been increased.

A spokesperson for the monitoring group Human Rights Watch in New York said: "In general Human Rights Watch have advised delegations going to Tibet not to visit prisons for fear of inadvertently putting prisoners at risk. This latest incident clearly demonstrates that the danger in fact exists."

The spokesperson for the United Nations Commission for Human Rights, John Mills, said that the 11-day visit of the Working Group to prisons and detention centres in China, which he described as "generally successful", was unprecedented in that it was the first time that a UN team had been able to interview prisoners of its own choosing in private. When informed of the prison protest, Mills said he would find out whether enquiries would be made by the UN about the welfare of the prisoners after the visit.

There may also be cause for concern about the confidentiality of the Working Group's "private" interviews in Drapchi due to their use of prison inmates as interpreters. The group, which refers to the Drapchi visit just twice in its report, states that it resisted the authorities' attempts to provide official Tibetan interpreters because it felt that using Tibetans picked at random from among the prison inmates was more appropriate. The report does not refer to any difficulties that these prisoners might have later faced at the hands of the prison authorities. Some of the prisoners interviewed by the group were picked at random, while some political prisoners were chosen by the authorities from a list submitted by the delegation.

The Working Group report says they were told that Drapchi had 968 inmates, 78% of whom were Tibetan, and that inmates receive education and professional training to allow them to find jobs after serving their sentences. The same figures were reported by Xinhua on 24 October 1997, a fortnight after the UN visit.

This is the third visit to Drapchi prison where there was apparently no mention of a protest in the official report produced by the delegation. At least five Tibetans were badly beaten and put into solitary confinement in 1991 after one of them attempted to give a petition to the then US ambassador James Lilley. The petition reportedly included names of prisoners who had been tortured. A Chinese woman accompanying the delegation snatched the petition from Lilley's hands and he left the prison without the document. In December 1991, a prisoner in his sixties called Tanak Jigme Sangpo, who was serving 20 years for shouting slogans against Mao Zedong, shouted: "Free Tibet!" when a Swiss delegation arrived at Drapchi. The prison authorities increased Tanak Jigme's sentence by eight years and he is now due for release in the year 2011, when he will be 85. In both cases the Western governments concerned only appear to have taken up the cases when the news was published much later by TIN.

European Union Troika to visit Tibet

The Foreign Office has announced that the Beijing-based ambassadors to China of Britain, Luxembourg and Austria will visit Tibet in the week commencing 4 May, accompanied by an EU representative. The visit was confirmed after the decision by the European Union, under Britain's Presidency, not to table or support a resolution against China at the forthcoming annual meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. A statement issued following the European Union Foreign Ministers' meeting in Brussels on 23 February stated that neither the Presidency nor any other member state should table or co-sponsor a resolution due to "the first encouraging results of EU-China human rights dialogue."

British Foreign Minister Robin Cook, who held meetings with Chinese President Jiang Zemin and the then Foreign Minister Qian Qichen during his visit to China in January, said that both China and Britain wanted to make "a fresh start down a broad road, which is wide enough for us to develop relations on the many matters of common interest to us both". The first EU-China Summit will be held in London in April during the second Asia-Europe (ASEM) meeting.

The Foreign Office stated that among the subjects to be discussed during the EU ambassadorial delegation's visit to Tibet would be issues of "ethnic balance" (referring to numbers of Chinese and Tibetans in Tibet), freedom of religion, and economic development. It also stated that a visit to Drapchi prison was planned.