www.TibetanReview.net, July 18’08
Chinese troops entered a monastery in eastern Tibet and began to randomly shoot at the monks in a revenge attack against a Tibetan protest on an earlier occasion, Radio Australia online Jul 9 cited Dr John Powers, a scholar in Tibetan religion and culture at the Australian National University, as saying after a visit to the area. The troops were not looking for people involved in the protest; it was pure retaliation for the fact that they had protested, Dr Powers was quoted as saying, citing a monk who had escaped from the monastery after seeing three of his closest friends being shot dead before his eyes, with many more other falling down.
No information could be obtained from or delivered into the unnamed monastery since then, a situation all too common with most of the monasteries across the Tibetan Plateau after the Chinese suppression of the Mar 2008 Tibetan uprising.
While many monks have been arrested or expelled, those that remain have to undergo what is called a patriotic re-education course conducted by work teams with support from the paramilitary People’s Armed Police. Introduced in 1006 in and around Lhasa, it was greatly extended in 2002 to cover all the bigger major Tibetan monasteries. Those who refuse to sign a document at the end of the Chinese indoctrination course by signing a document denouncing the Dalai Lama faced expulsion from monastery, possibly with a jail term as well.