BEIJING Thousands of Buddhist monks and other Tibetans clashed with the riot police in a second Chinese city on Saturday, while the authorities said they had regained control of the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, a day after a rampaging mob ransacked shops and set fire to cars and storefronts in a deadly riot.
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Back Story: Somini Sengupta Discusses Mt. Everest Decision (mp3)Conflicting reports emerged about the violence in Lhasa on Friday. The Chinese authorities denied that they had fired on protesters there, but Tibetan leaders in India told news agencies on Saturday that they had confirmed that 30 Tibetans had died and that they had unconfirmed reports that put the number at more than 100.
Demonstrations erupted for the second consecutive day in the city of Xiahe in Gansu Province, where an estimated 4,000 Tibetans gathered near the Labrang Monastery. Local monks had held a smaller protest on Friday, but the confrontation escalated Saturday afternoon, according to witnesses and Tibetans in India who spoke with protesters by telephone.
Residents in Xiahe, reached by telephone, heard loud noises similar to gunshots or explosions. A waitress described the scene as chaos and said many injured people had been sent to a local hospital. Large numbers of military police and security officers fired tear gas while Tibetans hurled rocks, according to the Tibetans in India.
Their slogans were, The Dalai Lama must return to Tibet and Tibetans need to have human rights in Tibet, said Jamyang, a Tibetan in Dharamsala, India, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile, who spoke to protesters. By Sunday morning, unconfirmed reports from pro-Tibet groups described new protests in other Tibetan areas of Gansu Province, and possibly elsewhere in Tibet.
The violence in Lhasa and Xiahe has created a major political and public relations challenge for the ruling Communist Party as Beijing prepares to play host to the Olympic Games in August. The demonstrations are the largest in Tibet since 1989, when Chinese troops used lethal force to crush an uprising by thousands of Tibetan protesters.
Chinas response to the weeks demonstrations is being watched carefully by the outside world. The European Union and the United States have both called on China to act with restraint. The White House called on China to respect Tibetan culture and issued a renewed call for dialogue between Beijing and the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism.
The president of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, rejected calls for a boycott of the Games to protest the crackdown.
We believe that the boycott doesnt solve anything, he said Saturday on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, The Associated Press reported. On the contrary. It is penalizing innocent athletes and it is stopping the organization from something that definitely is worthwhile organizing.
The tumult also undercuts a theme regularly promoted by Chinas propaganda officials, that Tibetans are a happy minority group, smoothly integrated into the countrys broader ethnic fabric.
What we see right now, what is happening in Tibet, blows the whole propaganda strategy in Tibet wide open, said Lhadon Tethong, an official with the New York-based advocacy group Students for a Free Tibet.
On Saturday the Chinese authorities defended their response to the violence in Lhasa. We fired no gunshots, said Qiangba Puncog, chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Regional Government, according to state media.
But Tibetan advocacy groups and witnesses in Lhasa offered contradictory accounts. The Tibetan government in exile said at least 30 Tibetans had died in the protests, according to Agence France-Presse. Witnesses told Radio Free Asia, the nonprofit news agency financed by the United States government, that numerous Tibetans were dead. A 13-year-old Tibetan, reached by telephone, said he had watched the violence from his apartment and saw four or five Tibetans fall to the ground after military police officers fired upon them.
Foreign journalists are being restricted from traveling to Lhasa, and the precise death toll remains unknown. State media reported 10 deaths and characterized most of them as shopkeepers. The governments official news agency, Xinhua, reported that the victims had been burned to death.
