(TibetanReview.net, Apr06’23) – China is maintaining an online database of former Tibetan political prisoners as well as of those who had carried out protest self-immolations, besides that of their relatives, and uses it to deadly effect to deny them educational, livelihood and career opportunities, said the Tibetan Service of rfa.org Apr 5, citing local sources.
A relative of a Tibetan who self-immolated in 2013 “was denied an authorization letter from the government to sit for a university admission examination, and therefore that student never got to go to university, “a source in Labrang (Chinese: Labuleng) County in Kanlho (Gannan) Prefecture of Gansu province has said.
“Tibetans who took part in the 2008 unrest and also those related to people who were part of those protests are discriminated against in their job opportunities, schools and in other ways,” he has said.
The Tibetan Plateau was hit by large-scale protests on the anniversary of the Mar 1959 Tibetan uprising. China used brutal army violence to crush the protests after imposing a lockdown, leading to unaccounted numbers of deaths, disappearances, arrests and other forms of clampdown which continues to this day. From Feb 2009, there has been a series of self-immolations by Tibetans protesting against this clampdown and the Chinese rule in general. Well over 150 such self-immolations have taken place so far.
The Chinese government is stated to have been routinely harassing relatives of protesters in Ngaba (Aba) County of Sichuan Province and Labrang County of Gansu Province, where the majority of the protest self-immolations have taken place.
“In 2022 the Chinese government continued to harass and scrutinize a Tibetan who is the nephew of someone who self-immolated from Ngaba,” a source in Ngaba has said. “He was charged with contacting people outside Tibet and sentenced to three years in prison. Following that his family members were denied all the government assistance that they were receiving”.
As regards former political prisoners, “they are constantly under scrutiny; their lives never go back to normal and they are also denied lodging when they travel to different places,” a source Labrang has said.