5 Tibetan monks sentenced for political writings

Asian Economic News, Feb 14, 2005

BEIJING, Feb. 14 Kyodo

Five Tibetan monks in western China have been jailed for allegedly disseminating tacit political messages through poetry and articles published in a newsletter, a U.S. radio service reported over the weekend.

Radio Free Asia quoted sources as saying the monks from the Dakar Treldzong monastery, in the Tsolho area of Qinghai Province, were arrested around Jan. 16 and sentenced Feb. 5. to jail terms of two to three years each.

The five, including the monastery's lead abbot, Tashi Gyaltsen, had been publishing the newsletter for 10 years.

The government reportedly objected to poems and articles praising fellow Dakar Treldzong monks already serving jail terms.

Three newsletter editors got three-year terms, and the others will serve two years, Radio Free Asia reported.

Chinese authorities on the lookout for Tibetan separatists ''see the monasteries as a breeding ground for political dissent,'' remarked Paul Bourke, head of the Sydney-based Australian Tibet Council, a nongovernmental organization.

According to the group, more than 6,000 Tibetan monasteries have been destroyed since Chinese forces took control of Tibet in 1949, and less than 40 stand today.