By RFA

Authorities in the northern Chinese city of Xian have closed a literary Web site run by a Tibetan, apparently for posting “political” content, the editor said.

The site, known as “The Lamp,” claimed some 800 registered forum users. It was closed July 4 by Internet police in the city, the editor told RFA’s Tibetan service.

“When we called the office where we bought the Web site, they thought perhaps it was due to the detection of political content by the Chinese Internet police,” the editor said, adding that the Chinese service provider was unsure of the reasons for closure.

An official who answered the phone at the state-owned Xian Technology Ltd, a company that sells and distributes Web sites, declined to comment on the case.

The site, which offered a main Web site, weblog, and discussion forum, employed the editor, a technician, and an administrative assistant, the editor said.

One contributor to the site said its closure had distressed the Tibetan community it served.

“The sudden closure of this Web site has disappointed many young Tibetan readers. Many have already expressed their disappointment on another Web site called ‘Tibetan Language.’ Several college students called and informed me how they miss our Web site,” he said.

Another site closed
“Usually the Chinese authorities are very suspicious of Tibetan Web sites. They suspect political activities when we run Web sites in Tibetan. They think that Tibetans inside and outside China use these forums for separatist actions.”

The editor said another Tibetan-language site he edited, “China's Tibetan Residential Education Network,” was closed at the same time.

“The Chinese government issued rules on July 1 requiring …the name of an author [to appear] at the end of each article posted on a Web site. If the Web site contains articles on sensitive topics, the Web site or the author could be fined 4,000-60,000 yuan (U.S. $526-U.S. $7,893),” he said.

“The topics specified were writings on security, unity of the nation, ethnic unrest, writings against the Constitution and … unity of nationalities,” the editor said.

Political debate in China over the registration and disclosure of authors’ real names on content posted in Chinese cyberspace has continued for more than two years.

The country’s Web watchdog, the Internet Society of China, has published a suggested “self-discipline” code encouraging bloggers and online authors to reveal their true names.

But the move has drawn criticism from some of the biggest Internet service providers, who say anonymity is one of the attractions of blogging and forum participation, and who fear losing large numbers of Chinese customers to overseas service providers.

Detentions reported
According to the Paris-based press freedom group Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF), at least 30 journalists and 50 Internet users are currently detained in China, some of them since the 1980s.

“The government blocks access to thousands of news Web sites. It jams the Chinese-, Tibetan-, and Uyghur-language programs of 10 international radio stations. After focusing on Web sites and chat forums, the authorities are now concentrating on blogs and video-sharing sites,” RSF said in a statement on its Web site.

Chinese Internet users who do not use proxy servers are blocked from searching with keywords considered subversive by the country’s Internet police.

Critics are frequently sentenced to jail terms for “divulging state secrets,” “subversion,” and “defamation.”


Original reporting by RFA’s Tibetan service. Translated and edited by Karma Dorjee. Written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie, and edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.



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The state power of Beijing's communists and Thimpu's royalists is used to deny freedom to Tibetans and Nepalese under its heel, finds Meenakshi Ganguly of Human Rights Watch.

By Meenakshi Ganguly

The study of history provides rich lessons about the damaging effects of oppression and injustice, particularly egregious human-rights violations. One of the most important is that if legitimate claimants are brutally repressed into silence and desperation, their grievances can be exploited by those who instigate further violence. The result of this mistaken choice of war over peace is that almost everyone involved is drawn into a circle of fear and degradation in a way that leaves them even worse off.

Among the various battles raging around the globe - with cluster-bombs and suicide-bombs, between militants and soldiers, over religion or land - one peaceful struggle is rapidly disappearing from our newspapers, and another, possibly more violent, threatening to make news. Each is nourished by human-rights abuses and hidden by the "happy news" of the state concerned. The tiny mountain kingdom of Bhutan and the enormous state of China share the dubious distinction of representing dominant ethnic and linguistic majorities that would prefer to erase minority cultures.

In Tibet, China is building roads, rails and other infrastructure in an attempt to push people into choosing prosperity over religious and cultural identity. Tens of thousands who fled into exile can still cling to their language, culture and religion, but the millions who remain, after years of arrests and killings, have largely been forced into compromise. Many Tibetans believe they are ignored by the international community because their movement was peaceful.

Bhutan, even as it boasted of its high "gross national happiness", has violated international laws protecting political freedom and those shielding against discrimination based on religion or ethnicity, attempting to create a homogenous culture. When minority ethnic Nepalis complained, Bhutan responded by forcing into exile more than 100,000 of its citizens with impunity. Those that remained were silenced and terrified into submission. But now, Bhutan is witnessing the beginnings of a violent Maoist rebellion, one which has already led to reports of arrest and torture of suspected supporters.

Tibet's hidden fractures
If China were to write the history of Tibet, it would describe a "splittist" monk who tried to dismember the nation and harm a government determined to provide its people with care and opportunity. A few journalists, allowed recently to travel to the region by Chinese authorities, reported a 13 percent annual growth rate, widespread construction, tourism and jobs. They were not encouraged to look at the continued repression of political activists, the arbitrary detention and torture, the fact that even possessing a picture of Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, is regarded as a crime. New housing projects are on display, with claims that government subsidies are encouraging nomadic tribes to gain access to education and health.

By contrast, little has been said about how the Chinese government is forcibly relocating those herders into the housing projects, demanding an end to their traditional livelihoods. Human Rights Watch, in a report published in June 2007 - No One Has the Liberty to Refuse: Tibetan Herders Forcibly Relocated in Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan and the Tibetan Autonomous Region - found that approximately 700,000 people have been resettled in western China. The economic and social rights of Tibetan herders have been violated as they are forced to slaughter their livestock and move into newly built housing colonies without consultation or compensation.

Stories such as those recorded in the report seldom surface. One herder said: "The government says that if we sell our animals and start businesses like shops and restaurants we would have a happy life and not have to work so hard. In our village at present, about 100 households still have cattle, and 100 have none left. Of those, about fifty opened shops and restaurants, but they don't know how to do good business or how to prepare food very well, so naturally they became poor. The other fifty have no shops, no restaurants, and no cattle." Yet Tibetans, led by the Dalai Lama, have remained staunchly peaceful. The Dalai Lama insists that eventually, truth and right will persevere: what after all, is a few decades in the life of a nation? This is easy enough to say for a man who is believed to be in his fourteenth incarnation; but in Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama presides over the Tibetan government in exile, restless young men alternate between figuring out a ticket to the west and dreaming of a homeland they insist will be lost unless they fight for it - with bombs and guns. They respect their holy leader and cannot disobey him, but no one pays attention to peaceful protests, they insist.

Bhutan's inner strains
In Bhutan, some young people have probably reached the same unfortunate conclusion. In the early 1990s tens of thousands of Bhutanese citizens were expelled from their home. They were ethnic Nepalis, Hindus unlike the Buddhist Drukpas and culturally distinct; the Bhutanese government believed them to be intruders, and potential troublemakers. The community had grown in numbers and influence, and the Drukpa elite believed that its own privileged position and cultural identity was at risk. Citizenship laws were tightened and in 1989, the king ordered all citizens to observe the traditional Drukpa values, dress and etiquette, even removing the Nepali language from the school curriculum.

This led to growing turbulence, culminating in mass protest demonstrations in late 1990. Instead of addressing the reasons for discontent, the government arrested and exiled a large number of ethnic Nepalis. For almost two decades, the refugees have remained in camps in Nepal. Their demand for repatriation was peaceful, but despite endless rounds of talks with Kathmandu, Bhutan has shown little inclination to let them come home.

Meanwhile, ethnic Nepalis who were allowed to remain in Bhutan face constant discrimination, unable to get government jobs, buy or sell land, find admission in colleges or open a business unless they are cleared by government, a certificate nearly impossible to secure. They have to wear the national dress and speak the Dzongkha language. In a report published in May 2007 on this long-term refugee crisis - Last Hope: The Need for Durable Solutions for Bhutanese Refugees in Nepal and India - Human Rights Watch quoted a man who said, "They don't ask me to leave, but they make me so miserable, I will be forced to leave. I have no identification, so I cannot do anything, go anywhere, get any job." The state will no doubt try to write this ugly chapter out of the history of Bhutan. But that won't make the situation any less volatile. In the refugee camps, an offer of resettlement by the United States and other countries has sparked unrest because to some it means an end to their quest for justice and the eventual goal of return to Bhutan. Refugees who speak in favor of resettlement are being threatened and intimidated; in late May 2007, they were attacked by a mob, one of their leaders beaten, and huts burnt. In the ensuing violence, Nepali police forces shot and killed two of the rioters.

Bhutan's Maoist leader Vikalpa, complaining about the "denationalization" of Bhutanese citizens, told a journalist that there was no option other than to launch a "people's war." "Where there is suppression, there is revolt. Where there is revolt, it explodes the empire of suppression into pieces", he said. Meanwhile, there are reports that a number of people allegedly involved with the Maoists have been arrested and tortured by the Bhutanese government.

China and Bhutan still have a chance to avoid the brutal confrontation their policies of ethnic suppression nurture. But to do so, they must stop propounding the cheerful narrative that writes their troublesome minorities out of the picture of national identity, and instead grant them the respect and rights to which they are entitled.


This article originally appeared on openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons license. To view the original article, please click here.


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