Tibet riot arrests reach 1,000

More than 1,000 people have been captured or turned themselves in for taking part in the Tibet riots last month, China announced today.

Their trials will be held before the end of the month, Lhasa’s deputy Communist Party secretary Wang Xiangming said, a sign of the government’s determination to get the issue out of the way well ahead of the August opening of the Beijing Olympics.

Wang’s remarks offer the most complete picture yet of the scope of the crackdown on the largest and most sustained anti-government protests in Tibetan areas of western China in almost two decades.

Beijing has sent thousands of police and paramilitary troops to the area to maintain an edgy peace, hunt down protest leaders and cordon-off Buddhist monasteries whose monks led protests that began peacefully on March 10 before turning violent four days later.

Officials insist peace has returned, but have continued to bar foreign travellers and journalists from a sparsely populated, mountainous region about twice the size of France.

Efforts to keep information about the clampdown from leaking out are easily felt, especially at monasteries. In Kangding, the head lama of the Nanwu monastery said he could not speak to the media without a government official present.

Wang said 800 people had been arrested in the Lhasa violence, in which the government says 22 people died, while another 280 had surrendered to take advantage of a police offer of leniency.

Also indicating Beijing’s haste to return Tibet to normal, the tourism authority announced that the region would reopen to foreign tourist groups on May 1, in time for a national three-day holiday.

Tour operators, hotels and restaurant owners have complained of major losses due to the closure of the region’s borders as part of the massive security clampdown.

Alongside the increased security, the region’s top officials have ordered boosted ideological education, an apparent acknowledgement that years of political indoctrination have failed to curb support for exiled Buddhist leader the Dalai Lama.

China accuses the Dalai Lama and his followers of orchestrating the violence in a bid to sabotage the Olympic Games and achieve an independent state.

Such campaigns have exacerbated tensions in Tibet and the resentment they created are believed by experts and Tibetans to have fed the unrest.

Zhang Qingli, Tibet’s hard-line Communist Party leader, ordered officials to direct ideological education at young people, focusing on negative portrayals of Tibet prior to the Communist invasion in 1950 and continued vilification of the Dalai Lama’s political agenda, according to the official newspaper Tibet Daily.

Already, officials including the national police chief have ordered boosted “patriotic campaigns” in monasteries whose monks led the protests.