International Campaign for Tibet

Tibetan monk imprisoned after writing books about Tibet

Gartse Jigme, when he was taken into detention.

May 23, 2013

• A Tibetan monk, Jigme Gyatso, more well known as Gartse Jigme based on the name of his monastery in Amdo, has been sentenced to five years in prison after writing two books on the situation in Tibet and the suffering of Tibetan people, according to information from Tibetans in exile. Gartse Jigme’s third book, which was seized by police from the publishers’ before printing, includes a discussion on the self-immolations in Tibet and Chinese policy, sources say.
• Tibetan writers, intellectuals, and artists have been particularly targeted since the protests and crackdown in2008 and many have been ‘disappeared’, tortured, and imprisoned as the state seeks to control representations of Tibet.
• The sentencing of Gartse Jigme follows the screening of a new Chinese state media documentary seeking to blame exile Tibetans for the at least 116 self-immolations in Tibet since 2009 (http://www.savetibet.org/resource-center/maps-data-fact-sheets/self-immolation-fact-sheet). The new propaganda video is part of a more aggressive and formalized drive against the self-immolations that has involved the imposition of long prison sentences to Tibetans accused of ‘inciting’ these actions.

Gartse Jigme Gyatso was detained by police in his room at Gartse monastery in Tsekhog (Chinese: Zeke Xian) county in Malho (Chinese: Huangnan) TibetanAutonomousPrefecture), Qinghai on January 3 (2013) and taken to Xining. Gartse Jigme, who began his writing career in 1999 after study for a monastic degree, was sentenced to five years in prison on May 14. The exact charges against him are not known.

Gartse Jigme had been under constant surveillance and detained a number of occasions since the publication of his second book in 2008, called ‘Courage of the Tibetan King’ (‘Tsanpoe Nyingtop’ བཙན་པོའི་སྙིང་སྟོབས), a collection of essays in the Tibetan language about the political situation in Tibet since the March, 1959 Uprising and the protests that swept across Tibet in 2008. In one essay, translated into English by ICT, he wrote: “When I think about these things, it seems to me that the political protests in many places in central Tibet, Kham and Amdo this year [2008] were not organized by the Dalai Lama but were the inevitable expression of the pain stored up for so long in the minds of Tibetans young and old.”

Continue reading »