The Irish Times - Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Tibetan nun's self-immolation ninth in protest over China rule

CLIFFORD COONAN in Beijing

 

A YOUNG nun became the ninth member of the Buddhist clergy to set themselves on fire in protest against Chinese rule in the remote Himalayan province of Tibet, while two protesters were shot and wounded by police during a protest outside a police station, human rights groups said yesterday.

The nun, Tenzin Wangmo (20), died after setting herself on fire on Monday outside Dechen Chokorling nunnery in Sichuan province’s Aba prefecture where a number of other self-immolations have taken place this year, the Free Tibet group said.

So far, seven of the nine clergy who have set themselves on fire have been monks from Kirti monastery in Ngaba, a couple of miles from Tenzin Wangmo’s nunnery. Up to four are believed to have died. The Free Tibet group said she chanted slogans as she set herself alight calling for greater religious freedom and the return of Tibet’s exiled Buddhist leader, the Dalai Lama.

“Those monks are not doing anything against Buddhism by self-immolation. In Buddhism, one person cannot give up for their own reasons, but it is a good thing if a person gives up his or her life for many lives. Their actions look like suicide, but they died for many other people’s lives and freedoms, because they are not allowed to attack and kill anyone else,” said one former monk based in China.

The self-immolations are a powerful protest against China’s administration in Tibet.
The Chinese response to Tibetan dissent has been swift and harsh since the March 2008 riots in Lhasa.
While self-immolation has been a high-profile act of defiance for many years, it is not really a Tibetan thing. At the same time, a total of nine monks and nuns have set themselves on fire since March in what are considered desperate acts to draw attention to repression of Tibetan Buddhism.

They tend to be accompanied by calls for Tibetan freedom and the return of the Dalai Lama, who fled to India amid an abortive uprising against Chinese rule in 1959.

China insists it is the rule of law in Tibet and the only public response to the self-immolations has been to jail those assisting the monks in acts of self-burning.

A Chinese court sentenced Tsering Tenzin to 13 years and Tenchum to 10 years for assisting in the death of a colleague, Rigzin Phuntsog (16), who set himself on fire in March. They were convicted of hiding Phuntsog after he lit himself on fire and depriving him of medical attention for 11 hours.

And yet the sheer number of self-immolations is making it difficult for the Communist Party to ignore. By adding nuns to the equation, the humanitarian impact is even higher among the Tibetans.

Chinese media are tightly controlled by the Communist Party, and the succession of self-immolations has made no impact on the mainstream media, and all other sources of information have been deleted – all blog entries, commentaries, everything.

The government-run newspaper China Daily carried a story on October 8th in which it said two Tibetans were “slightly injured” after a self-immolation attempt.