World Tibet Network News Saturday, June 20, 1998

LONDON, June 19 (Reuters) - ``Patriotic Education Work Teams'' sent into Tibetan Buddhist monasteries by the Chinese authorities have dismissed hundreds of lamas, monks and nuns from the institutions, according to a European Union report published on Friday.

The report follows a first ever visit to Tibet by a team of EU diplomats from Britain, Austria and Luxembourg, last month. They spent 10 days in Tibet accompanied by Chinese officials.

``The delegation was in no doubt that the authorities in the TAR (Tibetan Autonomous Region) exercise extremely tight control over the principal elements of Tibetan religion and culture,'' the report issued by Britain's Foreign Office said.

The delegation was told that there were now some 1,700 monasteries in the deeply religious Himalayan country, with 46,000 lamas, monks and nuns.

``It was clear that the authorities consider this a proper limit to the number of religious personnel,'' the report said.

It said the delegation had been told that the authorities sent the ``Work Teams'' into the monasteries in 1996 and 1997.

They said this was because they had become concerned that the numbers of monks and nuns had become too great and some monasteries had harboured followers of the exiled religious leader the Dalai Lama.

The Work Teams had been charged with educating members of the monasteries in national unity, opposing ``splittist'' tendencies, the law and government policies, the delegation said.

The report said that in total 3,754 people had been dismissed from the monasteries, 1,115 because they were below the Chinese-imposed minimum age of 18 and most of the rest because of ``bad conduct.''

It said it was clear that the Work Teams had the job of setting a limit on the number of monks or nuns in an institution, and all but one of the nine monasteries were almost at their limit.

As a result, there was little recruitment of new monks or nuns going on.