Anju Links for 27 Mar 08

NoKo: OPPOSING VIOLENT PROTESTS IS ‘TERRORISM:’ I think they’re referring to this. For the record, here is how North Korea deals with violent protests, and here’s how it deals with peaceful ones.

PROTESTORS from Reporters Without Borders disrupted the Olympic torch-lighting ceremony in Athens and interrupted a ChiCom party hack’s speech. The Washington Post has video. Tibetan protestors blocked a nearby road, and several were arrested. In Tibet, the protests continue:

In the Chabcha area of Amdo [Hainan/Tsolho Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture], there is a small monastery called Atso. I am from this monastery. On March 22, at around 11:15 a.m., the monks there began to protest. They put up Tibetan flags and gathered on the hilltop just behind the monastery, where they burned incense. They raised slogans like ‘Freedom for Tibet!,’ ‘Long Live the Dalai Lama!,’ and ‘Release the Panchen Lama!’ There are about 100 monks in the monastery. After these protests in the surroundings of the monastery, the monks all walked to the township center, not very far away. There, they pulled down the Chinese flag at the local government school and burned it. Then they returned to the monastery and continued their protest. Three trucks full of police then arrived, and the head of the police threatened the monks with ‘serious consequences’ if they continued their protest. He told them that ‘with just one phone call, we can finish you.’ [Radio Free Asia]

China continues round up large numbers of people for interrogation:

Many ordinary Tibetans are being detained. On average, one member of each Tibetan family is being taken away for interrogation and detention. The Chinese officials are displaying photographs and asking people to identify the persons shown in them.

As inexcusable as violence against ordinary ethnic Chinese may be, it’s no defense to China engaging in what is almost certainly violence on a far larger scale, albeit violence committed in the privacy of the state’s dungeons. And China, which is represses against peaceful dissenters and violent rioters alike, while attempting to mischaracterize all Tibetan dissent as violent, hardly speaks as a moral authority when some Tibetans choose the wrong way to react to Chinese oppression.