China Claims Upper Hand In Restive Tibetan Regions
Officials Say Mass Arrests Are Response to Widespread Unrest

By Jill Drew
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, April 4, 2008; A18

BEIJING, April 3 -- Chinese officials said Thursday that they had succeeded in restoring order in heavily Tibetan areas across western China and were moving quickly to arrest monks and others involved in weeks of widespread anti-government protests.

The Tibet Tourism Bureau announced that the region will reopen to foreign tourists May 1. More than 1,000 people have been arrested or have turned themselves in to authorities in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital where deadly rioting broke out March 14, an official there said. The detainees will be tried by the end of the month, according to an account on Lhasa's official tourism Web site.

Protests spilled beyond Lhasa over the past few weeks and have been reported in more than 42 areas in surrounding provinces with large Tibetan and other minority populations. Mass arrests announced Thursday extend across the region, though the total number of those detained is not known. Exile groups say the arrests, a stepped-up police presence and harsh tactics are provoking fear and further unrest, while Chinese officials say they are acting within the law and fulfilling their duty to restore stability.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao appealed for unity and pledged more support for poor minority areas during a tour of Yunnan province, China's most diverse, on Thursday. "All ethnic groups form one big family," the official New China News Agency reported Wen as saying. "We must be united and help each other, to prosper and make progress together."

As host of the Olympic Games in August, China is eager to project an image of harmony and stability. To that end, it has taken a law-and-order attitude to rooting out protest organizers, insisting they are part of an organized "clique" of separatists led by the Dalai Lama. The Tibetan spiritual leader has denied involvement in the protests, blaming unrest on China's repression of dissent and religious practice.

Government officials provided details Thursday of one of the more violent demonstrations, which occurred March 16 in Sichuan province's Aba county, on the Tibetan border in southwestern China. More than 200 police officers and government officials were injured when rioters chanting Tibet independence slogans set fire to 24 shops, two police stations and 81 vehicles, Xiao Youcai, deputy chief of the Aba county government, said at a news conference in Beijing.

Police, he said, "exercised great restraint" as the protest began, but then rioters attempted to grab police weapons and storm an ammunition storage area, so police fired into the air. "When warning shots by police officers proved ineffective, police used their weapons according to the law," Xiao said.

Exile groups say at least eight people were killed and others wounded by what they described as random police fire. Many of the wounded cannot go to the hospital because they fear being arrested, according to the International Campaign for Tibet, a Washington-based advocacy group.

Xiao said he knew of no deaths, but said "a small number of rioters were hurt and fled." Police are hunting for them, he added.

Xiao said that on March 28, following tips from local residents, police seized weapons and ammunition hidden in a nearby monastery. He displayed photos of such a stash but did not respond to a question about whether the weapons had been used in the March 16 protest. "This incident was instigated by the law-breaking monks," he said. "The Dalai Lama has instigated these riots and forced many people who didn't know any better" to participate.

Although Xiao did not say how many people had been detained, one person in Aba reported seeing "three to four busloads" of monks arrested March 29, according to the International Campaign for Tibet. Police are targeting people with cellphones, who are suspected of sending out information about the riot, the group said.

Police this week stopped foreign reporters who were attempting to enter Aba and escorted them back to the provincial capital, saying the area was closed, the Associated Press reported.

With no access to the areas hit by unrest, it is difficult for reporters to assess the situation independently. But according to telephone interviews with residents in some areas, tensions remain high.

For example, a fight between a Tibetan shopper and a Chinese store owner over the price of a pair of shoes flared into a situation in which 100 Tibetans surrounded the store and banged on the door, a witness said from Jomda, a small county near the border of Tibet and Sichuan. The protest reportedly spread to a local monastery, where monks and others began shouting for the Dalai Lama to return to Tibet. Eventually, a senior monk calmed the crowd, and it dispersed.

"It is a very sensitive time," said the witness, who asked to be identified only by her surname, Zhang. "People are overly stressed."

Researchers Zhang Jie and Liu Liu contributed to this report.