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China arrests two nuns in Kardze

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Yangkyi Dolma, one of the two nuns of Dragkar nunnery in Kardze, who staged a peaceful protest at the Kardze main market square on 24 March 2009. Police beat them and arrested them. Their current status is not known.File photo/TCHRD handout/China

Two nuns in Kardze have been beaten and arrested by Chinese police after they staged a peaceful protest calling for the return of the Dalai Lama and greater freedom in Tibet, reports Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD).

Yangkyi Dolma and Sonam Yangchen, the two nuns of Dragkar Nunnery in Kardze (Ch: Ganzi), distributed pamphlets and shouted slogans calling for “the return of the Dalai Lama,” “human rights for Tibetans” and “religious freedom in Tibet” on 24 March.

They were immediately arrested and beaten with rods and electric batons by the police, and driven in a police vehicle for detention. Their current status is not known.

Following the incident, at around 7 p.m. in the evening, a group of security forces ransacked Yangkyi’s family home, destroyed a portrait of the Dalai Lama, and rebuked the family members for being supporters of ‘separatist forces’.

Early next morning two police arrived at Yangkyi’s home and told her brother, Tsangyang Gyatso, to report to the Kardze County government headquarters. No further details are available with regard to what ensued after that incident.

Yangkyi Dolma’s father is Hormeytsang Dargay and mother Pema Khando from Roltsa Township, Kardze County in today’s Sichuan province in China.

Apart from sporadic incidents of small protests in the past few months, a major civil disobedience movement is taking a firm root in Kardze with farmers continuing to boycott tilling their farmland as a protest against the Chinese repressive polices in Tibet.

According to other sources, the local Chinese authorities in Drango County, also in Kardze, have given an ultimatum to the Tibetan farmers to till their farmland before 11 April or their farmlands will be confiscated.

Since 10 March, around 28 known incidents of protests were reported from Kardze and 60 people have been arrested so far. TCHRD believes that the figures could be higher, as the flow of information from Tibet to the outside world is severely restricted.

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