Tibet on Fire by Tsering Woeser

Author:Tsering Woeser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2016-01-12T05:00:00+00:00

International Media

One very cold afternoon in 2013, the weather in Beijing terrible as always, I sat in a coffee shop with a French journalist from Le Monde and a few of his friends. We spent the afternoon talking about the land of ice and snow that we call Tibet. Before our eyes we could see the flames igniting; in our ears we could hear the sounds of Tibetans’ cries. We felt respect, sympathy, and grief, but above all we felt pain—because every single one of those people who had bathed their bodies in flames were fellow human beings. The journalist and his friends had come back to Beijing two evenings before, returning from four full days in Labrang and Luchu counties, in Amdo.10 They were eager to tell me about their experiences visiting the hometowns of three Tibetans who had self-immolated in November of the previous year.

The Le Monde journalist unfolded a map and pointed out the towns of Amchok, Sangke, and Ngagod, telling me what they had seen in these remote towns overflowing with military police and watched over by Party cadres. Even though they had been uninvited strangers, they had received assistance from local herdsmen and were secretly taken, at great risk, to see the families of self-immolators, who had revealed to them the increasingly tense situation.

Such conversations were extremely dangerous for everyone involved. Two months before, the Kanlho Public Security Bureau had issued a notice in Tibetan and Mandarin requesting clues and leads regarding self-immolations and the “manipulators behind the curtain,” promising generous monetary rewards. This notice was put up in all of the towns and villages of the one city and seven counties of Kanlho Prefecture. The local authorities even sent out a text message with the same content on a daily basis, offering a reward of between ¥50,000 and ¥200,000. Many village entrances and monasteries had been equipped with cameras, and Party cadres took turns driving around day and night in search of any potentially “illegal” activities. In the seven months before this notice had been put up, six people self-immolated in Kanlho; after the notice was issued, within only one month, fourteen Tibetans self-immolated. The irony of this trend was obviously lost upon the officials whose job it was to prevent such immolations.

The number of secretly arrested Tibetans had also been increasing. The Le Monde journalist noted that ten days after the herdsman Gonpo Tsering from Ngagod Township had sacrificed himself, on November 26, 2012, his father and paternal grandfather had been taken away by the security bureau, and he remained missing. A girl who happened to witness one of the self-immolations was also taken away by the authorities. But, despite this “red terror,” there are still many Tibetans who visit the families of the self-immolators to pay their respects and to donate money and goods. One family of the two self-immolators from Sangke town was extremely poor: they owned just four yaks and less than twenty sheep. Following their son’s self-immolation, however, they

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