'It's all lies,' monks shout as China's media tour veers off script in Lhasa
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Share on DiggSHANGHAI - Weeping and yelling, "Tibet is not free," a group of monks disrupted a carefully scripted tour Thursday for foreign journalists in Lhasa, Tibet's capital, as Chinese officials tried to portray the recent riots as the work of thugs and separatists.
The 15-minute protest by about 30 monks, who spoke first in Tibetan and then switched to Mandarin when reporters asked them to, was in the Jokhang Monastery, one of Tibet's holiest shrines. The protest, videotaped by reporters, ended after government handlers shouted for the journalists to leave and tried to pull them away, an Associated Press correspondent on the tour said.
The protest erupted during a tour of the temple. Some of the monks shouted that there was no religious freedom in Tibet and that the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader in exile, had been wrongly accused by China of orchestrating the protests to disrupt the Olympic Games, to be held in Beijing in August. Some journalists said one monk complained that the government had planted fake monks in the monastery to talk to the reporters.
The monks, speaking in Tibetan, claimed government officials were trying to turn Tibetans against them by telling lies. But the monks didn't elaborate on the alleged lies, according to a translation by Tibetan scholars in the United States who listened to an audiotape of the confrontation made by AP Television News.
As the monks blurted out a stream of complaints, one cried: "The government is always telling lies, it's all lies."
"They killed many people. They killed many people," a monk said.
It was unclear whether the protesting monks were arrested. The government later said the monks had lied but would not be punished.
NEW YORK TIMES, AP
