Boys self-immolate in anti-China protest
NEW DELHI: A Tibetan schoolboy living in India has died four days after setting himself on fire to protest against Chinese rule, the hospital treating him said yesterday.
Dorje Tsering died from a cardiac arrest late on Thursday at the hospital where he was taken after setting himself ablaze at a housing settlement for Tibetan refugees in the northern city of Dehradun on Monday.
“He died last night around nine,” hospital spokeswoman Poonam Dhanda said, refusing to comment further.
The 16-year-old said from his hospital bed he had a “strong determination to do something for Tibet since my childhood”, according to a translation from Free Tibet.
The London-based advocacy group said the teenager was the eighth Tibetan to mount such a protest outside China.
It was the second such protest this year seen as an extreme expression of the anger and frustration felt by many Tibetans living under heavy-handed Chinese rule.
Kalsang Wangdu, 18, also self-immolated on Monday, according to Free Tibet, a group based in London.
Kalsang set himself on fire outside his monastery, Retsokha Aryaling, in what the Tibetans call Kardze prefecture, according to Free Tibet. Kardze, known as Ganzi in Chinese, has been a prominent site for protests against the Chinese authorities.
Free Tibet said that Kalsang had called for “Tibet’s complete independence” while self-immolating. Passers-by doused him with water, the group said; he was taken to a county hospital and later to one in Chengdu, the provincial capital, but died en route. Radio Free Asia, a news service funded by the US government, also reported Kalsang’s death.
Tibetan exile sources say at least 114 monks and laypeople have self-immolated over the past five years, with most of them dying. Radio Free Asia puts the number of self-immolations at 144 since 2009. Tibetan monks and nuns are among the most active opponents of Chinese rule and the strongest proponents of Tibet’s independent identity, prompting the authorities to subject them to harsh and intrusive restrictions.
Free Tibet also said a Tibetan woman, Mang Gha, 33, was detained on Tuesday after walking through a town in Ngaba prefecture, which includes Ngaba County, holding up a portrait of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader who fled to India in 1959.
Chinese officials have deemed it illegal to display images of the Dalai Lama anywhere in the nation.
Last month, the authorities began barring foreign tourists from going to central Tibet, known as the Tibet Autonomous Region, according to an advocacy group based in Washington, the International Campaign for Tibet. The shutdown is expected to last until the end of March.
Also last month, a court in Xining, the capital of Qinghai province, sentenced a popular Tibetan blogger, Druklo, to three years in prison after he had been detained for a year, the International Campaign for Tibet reported.
The blogger, who writes under the pseudonym Shokjang, has advocated true Tibetan autonomy within China, the same position that the Dalai Lama takes.
Tibetans last month celebrated their new year, Losar, another time when Chinese authorities are on the watch for protests.
On Thursday, Yu Zhengsheng, a top Communist Party official who is the chairman of a legislative advisory committee, addressed China’s ethnic policies at the opening session of the committee’s annual meeting in Beijing.
“We promoted ethnic unity and religious harmony to bring together the will and strength of the people,” he said, according to China Central Television, the state network.
Beijing blames the Dalai Lama and others for inciting the immolations and says it has tried to develop the region’s economy and improve quality of life.