Another Tibetan Sets Fire to Self Over China Rule

BEIJING — A 19-year-old former monk in a Tibetan town in westernChina set himself on fire on Saturday in a desperate plea for Tibetan independence, according to reports on Sunday by Tibet advocacy groups. The flames were put out by police officers stationed on the street, and he was taken to a police station, the reports said.

The former monk, Norbu Damdrul, was the eighth monk or former monk to set himself on fire to protest Chinasince March. All the self-immolations have taken place in Tibetan areas of Sichuan Province that lie in the remote region Tibetans call Amdo. At least four Tibetans have killed themselves in the wave of self-immolations, which scholars of modern Tibet say are a new and startling protest strategy by monks.

The attempt at self-immolation by Norbu was the seventh one this year in the town of Aba, called Ngaba by Tibetans. All of them have involved monks from Kirti Monastery, an institution that was a rallying point during the widespread Tibetan uprising in 2008.

Reports by advocacy groups say at least 10 Tibetans were killed by security forces during protests in Aba that spring. Many of the bodies were brought into Kirti, where monks took digital photographs of the corpses and transmitted them to people outside China. The photographs have been shown to foreign reporters visiting Kirti’s sister monastery in Dharamsala, India, the seat of power of the Tibetan government-in-exile and the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/world/asia/another-tibetan-sets-fire-to-self-over-china-rule.html?_r=1&ref=world

By: Joseph McGee