Kathmandu - In yet another crackdown on right to freedom of expression, Chinese Internet authorities have shutdown a Tibetan language website www.tibetcm.com and its popular blog on 16th November, sources say. The Chinese internet police have deleted all the website's data from its server that has over 10,000 blog articles by their users.On October 16, a day before His Holiness the Dalai Lama was honored with the Congressional Gold Medal, the website along with another Tibetan language website www.tibettl.com faced temporary shutdown. The reason for shutdown was the political content and information about the Congressional Gold Medal in blogs posted by thousands ofusers. While the tibettl site was re-launched on 16th November under the same name, the tibetcm site has been terminated completely and ordered that they cannot use the same server to host the site again. Tibettl site in a move to save their language site has separated their site tibettl from its popular blog content, now they have moved their blog site under a new name www.tibetabc.cnHowever, the webmasters at the tibetcm in a web post have expressed strong desire to re-launch their site from another server and apologized to all their users. The post reads that even though sheer domination has completely terminated their website (known as the lamp website in Tibet), they have already taken precaution and backed up almost all their website and blog data, they have received financial help and moral support from some loyal local Tibetan leaders and many friends from near and far and now they are determined to shortly re-launch their site from another server.In December, Chinese Internet Authorities ordered Tibetan web masters to weed out all blog articles related to Tibetan author Woeser that are published on Tibetan websites in Sichuan Province. Tibetan author Woeser who primarily writes in Chinese is well known for many famous books like 'Serjye' about Cultural Revolution. The Chinese government blocks access to thousands of news Web sites like our website www.phayul.com but users in Tibet could download a software called freegate, bypass the firewall and view our website.

By Tenzin Choephel
Phayul Correspondent