The Chinese escorted an approved group of journalists through Tibet but things didn’t exactly go as planned:
SHANGHAI — Tibetan monks shouting pro-independence slogans caught Chinese officials by surprise on Thursday during a highly scripted tour for Western journalists in Lhasa’s central Buddhist temple. The protest disrupted China’s effort to portray the recent Tibetan rioting as the work of violent thugs and separatists.
“Tibet is not free! Tibet is not free!” yelled one young Buddhist monk, who then started crying, according to an Associated Press correspondent in the tour.
Government handlers shouted for the journalists to leave and tried to pull them away during the 15-minute protest by about 30 monks at the Jokhang Temple in central Lhasa. It was unclear whether the protesting monks were arrested.
The demonstration amounted to another embarrassment for China. Its government organized the press tour to help sway international opinion, which has focused on China’s heavy crackdown and arrests in the aftermath of the riots. Chinese leaders have accused Tibetan separatists and their supporters of trying to spoil the atmosphere ahead of the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.
The Chinese wanted the reporters to see damage caused by the rioters and to interview Chinese victims of the violence, the worst here in 20 years.
Some American news organizations were invited to send representatives on the press tour. The New York Times was not.
Reporters on the tour reached by telephone said the monks shouted that there was no religious freedom in Tibet and that China had wrongly accused the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader in exile, of responsibility for the rioting.
These people aren’t backing down, which means this story isn’t going away.
