China Detains 70 in Crackdown on Tibetan Burnings
Chinese authorities have detained 70
people in a crackdown on self-immolations in ethnic Tibetan regions,
state media said on Thursday, the largest single reported sweep of
suspects to date as the government tries to stop the unrest.
Nearly
100 Tibetans have set themselves on fire to protest against Chinese
rule since 2009 across a large swathe of ethnically Tibetan regions,
with most of them dying from their injuries.
In
the past few months, the government has begun a new tactic to
discourage the protests, detaining and jailing people it deems to have
incited the burnings.
The latest
detentions took place in the northwestern province of Qinghai, where
police detained 70 "criminal suspects", 12 of whom were formally
arrested, meaning they will be charged, the official Xinhua news agency
said.
"Police will exert more
efforts to thoroughly investigate the cases and seriously punish those
who incite innocent people to commit self-immolation," it quoted Lu
Benqian, Qinghai's deputy police chief, as saying.
China
has repeatedly denounced exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama
and overseas Tibetan groups for fomenting the self-immolations.
"The
Dalai Lama clique masterminded and incited the self-immolations," Lu
said. "Personal information, such as photos of the victims, were sent
overseas to promote the self-immolations."
"A
few individuals with a strong sense of extreme nationalism showed
sympathy with the self-immolators and followed their example," Lu said.
"The self-immolation cases were
influenced by the separatism of the Dalai Lama clique, as the Dalai Lama
has prayed for self-immolators and Tibetan separatists overseas flaunt
them as 'heroes'."
Beijing
considers Nobel peace laureate the Dalai Lama, who fled from China in
1959 after an abortive uprising against Chinese rule, a violent
separatist. The Dalai Lama says he is merely seeking greater autonomy
for his Himalayan homeland.
He has
called on China to investigate the self-immolations. He has said he is
not encouraging them but has called them "understandable".
China
has defended its iron-fisted rule in Tibet, saying the remote region
suffered from dire poverty, brutal exploitation and economic stagnation
until 1950, when Communist troops "peacefully liberated" it.
Tibetan
areas in China have been largely closed to foreign reporters, making an
independent assessment of the situation there hard.
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Robert Birsel)
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