Months in detention, families forced to abandon fields/ENG

2012. április 10./Phayul.com/TibetPress

By Tendar Tsering

DHARAMSHALA, April 10: The continued mass detention of Tibetans after they returned from pilgrimage to India and Nepal earlier this year has thrown life for farming families awry.

With members of their families in detention for over three months, many farming households in Tibet have been forced to abandon their fields.

“My father and sister, both are in detention, so we couldn’t farm this year during the plantation season,” Tsering, (name changed) a Tibetan from Chamdo, eastern Tibet told Phayul over phone.

Due to the harsh climate in Tibet, many areas on the plateau have only one seasonal crop a year.

Tsering hopes that his father and sister will be released soon, so that they can work hard to see them through the winter.

“We have already missed the farming season but hopefully they will be soon released so that we can work hard and find means to help us survive through the long winter months,” Tsering added.

The United Nations Development Programme in 2010 again noted that Tibet continued to “lag far behind other areas of China in terms of human development income poverty as well as health and education.” With more than 80 per cent of its population living in rural areas, subsistence farming remains the principle form of livelihood for a vast majority of Tibetans.

Thousands of Tibetan devotees returning from pilgrimage to India and Nepal were searched, interrogated, arbitrarily detained and disappeared by Chinese authorities earlier this year.

Chinese security personnel manning a dozen ad hoc security checkpoints from the border town of Dram (Ch: Zhangmu) at the Nepal-Tibet border all the way to Lhasa, Tibet’s capital confiscated medicines, religious artifacts and even rosaries from the pilgrims.

Those returning by air had to go through multiple searches on arrival at Gonkar airport outside Lhasa, a process lasting from four to six hours.

The New York Times in an article dated April 9 reported that the Tibetans detained for more than two months are being “interrogated and undergoing patriotic re-education classes, and have been ordered to denounce the Dalai Lama.”

Human Rights Watch in a strict warning to Beijing in February had said the detention of Tibetan pilgrims will only escalate tensions in Tibetan regions.

"Authorities in the region should release these individuals, as their detention only escalates the tension in Tibetan regions which already have increased limits on travel and communication as well as troop and security presence," the rights group said.

Earlier reports had indicated that the Tibetans, including retired Communist Party and government cadre and senior citizens, some as old as 80 years, could be detained until May.