According to confirmed reports filtering out from Lhasa, two monks from the Drepung Monastery committed suicide and around seventy were imprisoned as on the 29th of November following the intensification of China’s notorious ‘patriotic re-education campaign’.The monks were compelled to take the extreme and sacrilegious step after being repeatedly confronted by the Chinese “work team” officials during the “re-education” sessions to denounce His Holiness The Dalai Lama, inflicting immense mental pressure and inner turmoil on them. Another information ascertains that protests against communist China’s campaign have been going on for the past few days at Gharig Nunnery near the Sera Monastery with the entire sangha of the
nunnery, numbering around 120 demanding the freedom of Tibet and refusing to denounce H.H. The Dalai Lama. The situation is being described as immensely tense and volatile with reports of unabated torture of those imprisoned and the added presence of Chinese army, People’s Armed Forces and Public Security Bureau forces in and around the religious institutions.

The build up of the events follows the death of a 28-year old monk, Ngawang Jangchub, in his room at Drepung monastery in the first week of October under mysterious circumstances, a day after he refused to comply with the demands of the instructors teaching patriotic education to denounce His Holiness The Dalai Lama.

On the 23rd of November, five monks including a senior monk Ngawang Phelgyel were arrested by the Chinese authorities for refusing to oblige with the requirements of the patriotic re-education campaign to denounce His Holiness The Dalai Lama as a “separatist”and accept “Tibet as a part of China”. The arrest and expulsion of the monks triggered a mass silent protest
on the 25th of November, in which the monks of the Drepung Monastery, in almost entirety gathered at the monastery cathedral courtyard and sat in silence as a protest against the policies of the communist Chinese and to demand the release of the five monks. Fearing that the protests might spiral out of control a large contingent of army personnel was dispatched to the monastery and the peaceful protest met a violent end with monks receiving severe beatings before beingshoved back into their rooms.

For the civilized world, the barbaric Cultural Revolution in China which saw the unimaginable and ruthless murder of over 7.73 million people and the self destruction of China’s own history, the principles of humanity, the ethics of morality and the
pious relation of a child with his parents on the pretext of class struggle, ended in the late 1960s.For the civilized world the Tiananmen Square massacre could now be a ‘mistake’ of the past. But if the acceptance of reality is to be based on actual facts rather than on conceited interests, the world fully realizes that the barbaric Cultural Revolution has not yet ended in Tibet. The world knows that Tibet is still Tainanmen.

With Hu Jintao taking over the reigns of China, Tibet has been subjected to stricter control and direct state regulation over the religious places and monasteries with a low-key intensification of the continued suppression of the civil and political
rights of the common Tibetans. The demolition of Buddhist institutions for learning, the closure of schools and monasteries, the tap on the number of monks and nuns that a monastery can keep and their duration of stay coupled with the renewed
emphasis on the Patriotic Re-education campaign, the resumption of the Strike Hard campaign, the establishment of Re-education-through-labour camp, and the systematic obliteration of the ancient Tibetan practice and freedom of religious belief in the past decade by the Democratic Management Committees, an apparatus of Party control which empowers Chinese
authorities to tightly control all aspects of religious activities in monasteries and nunneries, all go to ascertain the vicious and age old Chinese policy to completely wipe out from the face of this earth the culture, identity and nation that is Tibet.

Despite years of deepening European and American economic and diplomatic engagements with China, ironically, the human rights situation there has worsened significantly with intensified crackdowns on religious organisations and political dissenters.

The most alarming aspects of the intensification of the patriotic re-education campaign and the brutal suppression of the peaceful protests that has followed since with the death of three monks are the facts that the events unfolded at a time when Mr. Manfred Nowark, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture was there in Tibet on his maiden visit to Tibet and China and that only a couple of days before, Hu Jintao had officially given assurances to President George W. Bush on improving human rights standards in China. China’s stringent policies in Tibet comes as a slap on the face of international diplomacy, the commitments on human rights and overtly dismisses its own recurrent claims of religious and political freedom in Tibet.

Now, with Zhang Qingli, former vice-governor of Xinjiang and a close aid of Hu Jintao at the helm in Tibet, the grounds are being laid for the stronger implementation of the brutal communist policies in Tibet that have largely succeeded in reducing the
other ethnic minorities in China into unthreatening, frightened and disillusioned group of people.

Tibetan Youth Congress demands the immediate termination and complete withdrawal of the “patriotic re-education campaign” in Tibet and warns China that further suppression of the basic human rights of the Tibetan people through such state policies will invariably culminate in a violent upheaval within the Tibetan community.

Tibetan Youth Congress calls for the immediate release of all the monks and nuns who have been arrested following the patriotic re-education campaign and demands the instant reinstatement of all the expelled monks and nuns.

Tibetan Youth Congress sincerely urges the Tibetan exile diaspora, the friends and supporters of the Tibetan cause and the international community not to lose sight of our commitments to Tibet with politically defined perceptions but to heed and
respect the aspirations of the Tibetan people of complete independence unto which our brethrens in Tibet continue to sacrifice their blood and life.