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Protesters in a Chinese province force police to return the remains of a monk who self-immolated and died.

RFA

Sopa, a respected monk, died after setting himself on fire in Darlag, a Tibetan area of Qinghai province, on Jan. 8, 2012.

Hundreds of angry Tibetans forced Chinese authorities on Sunday to return the body of a monk who self-immolated, parading the corpse in the streets in China’s western Qinghai province, witnesses said.

Sopa, a respected 42-year-old monk, set himself on fire and died in front of the police station of Darlag (in Chinese, Dari) county in Golog Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture after shouting slogans calling for Tibet’s freedom and the long life of Tibet’s spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, they said.

It was the 15th Tibetan self-immolation since March last year, with Chinese security forces pouring into Darlag amid indications that thousands of Tibetans are planning to turn up for a memorial service this week for Sopa at a monastery where he had served.

Sopa, who ran a home for the elderly and an orphanage in Darlag, was a Rinpoche, an honorific used in Tibetan Buddhism for lamas and other high-ranking or respected teachers. He is believed to be the most senior monk to have self-immolated so far.?

Before setting himself ablaze, he climbed a local hill, burned incense, prayed, and then distributed several leaflets in which he wrote that he was performing the deadly act “not for his personal glory but for Tibet and the happiness of Tibetans,” a source from inside Tibet told RFA.

“The Tibetans should not lose their determination. The day of happiness will come for sure. For the Dalai Lama to live long, the Tibetans should not lose track of their path,” Sopa wrote, according to the source.

Dressed in the yellow outer gown of an ordained monk, he set himself alight at around 6 a.m. after he “drank and threw kerosene all over his body.”

“His body exploded in pieces [and the remains were] taken away by police,” the source said.

Several hundred Tibetans marched to the police station to demand his remains, and when their request was denied, “the protesters smashed windows and doors of the local police station,” another source said.

When the police finally relented and handed over Sopa’s remains, the protesters paraded the body in the streets, sources said.

“Only the head and chest parts [of the body] are intact, the rest were in pieces when Tibetans received the remains from the police,” a third source said.

High-ranking lama

Chinese authorities tightened security in Darlag, deploying additional security forces from the main town of Golog, as posters praising Sopa’s act and calling for a boycott of Chinese goods appeared in the county.

“Sopa Rinpoche has done this act for the freedom and peace of Tibet,” one poster said.

Sources said Tibetans planned to organized a large prayer session comprising about 2,000 people at Sopa’s monastery.

“Now it’s difficult to reach the Darlag area by phone,” a source said.

Sopa’s death came after two Tibetan monks set themselves on fire Friday in restive Ngaba (in Chinese, Aba) prefecture in China’s Sichuan province, protesting against Chinese rule and calling for the return of the Dalai Lama to Tibet.

The two from the troubled Kirti monastery, identified as Tenyi and Tsultrim, are believed to have died, a Tibetan said in an email to RFA, adding that the authorities have not handed over their bodies to their next of kin.

Rights groups say the unending self-immolations underscore the “desperate” situation facing Tibetans as Chinese authorities pursue a security clampdown.

?These latest self-immolations confirm that what we are currently witnessing in Tibet is a sustained and profound rejection of the Chinese occupation,” Free Tibet Director Stephanie Brigden said, before the Darlag incident on Sunday.

?It is a damning indictment of the international community that 14 people, in different parts of Tibet, have now chosen to set themselves on fire, and the international community has failed to respond.”

?We can only expect that such acts of protest will continue for as long as world leaders turn a blind eye to the desperate situation in Tibet,” she said.

Kalachakra

The latest self-immolations came as tens of thousands of Buddhist pilgrims from around the world traveled this week to Bodhgaya, a town in northern India, to hear the Dalai Lama give the “Kalachakra” religious teachings. Sopa had wanted to attend the event but the Chinese authorities refused to provide him a visa.?

At least 9,000 Tibetans traveling on Chinese passports, along with an estimated 1,200 Chinese Buddhists from the mainland, are among those who have registered with event authorities.

Tensions in the Tibet Autonomous Region and in Tibetan-populated areas in China’s provinces have not subsided since anti-China protests swept through the Tibetan Plateau in March 2008.

Chinese authorities have blamed the Dalai Lama for the tense situation, saying he is encouraging the self-immolations, which run contrary to Buddhist teachings.

But the Dalai Lama shot back, blaming China’s “ruthless and illogical” policy toward Tibet.

He called on the Chinese government to change its “repressive” policies in Tibet, citing the crackdown on monasteries and policies curtailing the use of the Tibetan language.

Reported by Dolkar, Chakmo Tso and Taklha Gyal for RFA’s Tibetan service. Translated by Karma Dorjee and Rigdhen Dolma. Written in English by Parameswaran Ponnudurai and Rachel Vandenbrink.
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Source: http://www.rfa.org/english/news/tibet/burn-01082012101534.html

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Until last weekend, many Germans were almost complacent about right-wing extremism in their country. Painful history had helped them learn to marginalize groups espousing such ideologies. And besides, they trusted that the authorities were keeping a careful eye on those kinds of radicals. But the country has been shocked recently by the almost daily revelations about a supposed neo-Nazi cell, which set off bombs, robbed 14 banks, brutally murdered at least 10 people and ? most stunning of all ? operated without being detected by authorities for 13 years. “These were systematic, cold-blooded serial murders,” says Hajo Funke, an authority on right-wing extremism at Berlin’s Free University. “We’ve never seen this before.”

Germany’s Interior Minister, Hans-Peter Friedrich, is calling for reform in fighting racist crimes and says the killings represent a new form of extremism. The nine victims murdered between 2000 and 2006 had immigrant backgrounds, and were shot in the head, execution-style, at their places of work.(See “In Paraguay, a Quaint Inn with a Dark Nazi Past.”)

The alleged neo-Nazi ring came to light almost by happenstance ? given away by the supposed perpetrators themselves. On Nov. 4, police found two bodies in a burned-out camping van in the eastern city of Eisenach. The men, Uwe Boehnhardt and Uwe Mundlos, had just robbed a bank, and apparently set their vehicle ablaze before committing suicide. Hours later, a house in Zwickau, where the two men lived, went up in flames. According to the authorities, the woman who set the fire, Beate Zschaepe, was an alleged accomplice of the two bank robbers. Zschaepe has turned herself in to the police and is reported to be ready to speak to investigators, after initially remaining silent. The Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe issued an arrest warrant for her on Nov. 13, under which she is being held for suspicion of “founding and being a member of a terrorist organisation.”

Investigators said they then found evidence in the ruins in Zwickau linking the two men and woman to a series of unsolved murders of immigrants. It included handguns like the one used in the killings, plus a DVD from a previously unknown group calling itself the National Socialist Underground (NSU). In the never circulated video, the group claimed responsibility for the nine killings, plus two bombings in which more than 20 people where injured. In the burned-out van, investigators found the handgun that belonged to a female police officer who was killed in 2007, the 10th victim. The video also shows images of some of the victims that, according to the police, only the perpetrators of the crimes could have taken. The narration even pokes fun at the murdered. A voice at the start of the grisly 15-minute video identifies the NSU as a “network of comrades with the fundamental principle of ‘deeds instead of words.’ ” It then uses the Pink Panther character to take viewers on a “tour of Germany,” stopping at each city where murders occurred, showing a mix of photos of the victims from the press, crime-scene clips from TV and, apparently, photographs by the gang of the bloodied victims.

The discovery of the NSU has turned into a major embarrassment for the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency. The agency had been investigating Boehnhardt, Mundlos and Zschaepe in the eastern city of Jena in the late 1990s but lost track of them in 1998, when the trio went underground and began a murderous but slow-motion rampage up and down the country. All the while, police were puzzling over the unsolved immigrant murders, not seriously pursuing racism as a motive.(See pictures of East Germany.)

Questions emerging from an emergency Parliamentary Oversight Committee meeting on Tuesday in Berlin centered on whether the trio had acted alone. “There is evidence of more helpers,” said chairman Thomas Oppermann to reporters after the meeting. Over the weekend, a fourth man was arrested in Hanover for allegedly aiding the trio.

The Office for the Protection of the Constitution is also facing criticism from politicians that it is mismanaging its system of paid neo-Nazi informants at the least, and at worse, it is unwilling or unable to act on knowledge of the NSU. “There is a widespread belief that the intelligence agencies know what is going on in the right, extremist scene, but that is not always true,” says Jan Schedler, a social scientist at Ruhr University in Bochum. “We have been warning against this for years,” says Bianca Klose, director of Mobile Counseling Against Right-wing Extremism in Berlin. “In the middle of society there is an area where right-wing, extremist views are very well represented,” says Klose. “We really have to stop thinking of this as extreme.”

Klose says her organization, one of many that get state support to combat racism but are chronically underfunded, counts 137 deaths in Germany related to racism or right-wing violence since unification in 1990. That jibes with other counts by newspapers prior to this month’s discovery of the NSU cell in Zwickau but is dramatically higher than the government’s official figure of 48 deaths.

Critics like Klose point to the wide gap as proof that authorities are blind to violence on the right and say right-wing extremism is more deadly than Islamist or left-wing extremism in Germany. Says Klose: “Right-wing extremists have been murdering people for years. Getting rid of people who do not fit into their worldview is part of their ideology.” The Free University’s Funke says right-wing extremism is most widespread in sparsely populated eastern regions, making it largely invisible to the country as a whole. “This is our Alabama,” says Funke. “It’s down there.”

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Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/terrorism/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/time/20111118/wl_time/08599209961600

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LONDON ? Amid a heavy police presence, thousands of students marched through central London on Wednesday to protest cuts to public spending and a big increase in university tuition fees.

Police said more than 2,000 people took part in the march, which set off from the University of London at midday with chants of “No ifs, no buts, no education cuts.” Organizers estimated the crowd at 10,000.

About 4,000 police officers were deployed along the route.

Previous student protests have ended in violence by a minority of demonstrators, including a spontaneous attack on a car carrying Prince Charles and his wife Camilla in December.

Police said 24 people were arrested, most for breach of the peace and public order offenses, but the march was largely peaceful as demonstrators made their way through the city center.

At Trafalgar Square, a group of protesters erected more than 20 tents at the foot of Nelson’s Column in the latest spinoff of the Occupy Wall Street protest camp movement. The tents were quickly cleared away by police.

The marchers had planned to link up with an existing protest camp against corporate greed outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, but were stopped by lines of police in riot gear.

Annette Webb, an international development student at Portsmouth University, said tripling tuition fees to 9,000 pounds ($14,000) from next year “will price out most students.”

“It will mean that education is only for the rich and I believe it should be for everyone,” she said.

Police had warned that anyone involved in criminal activity during the march would face arrest and prosecution. Police said protesters may face being “kettled” ? contained inside a cordon ? if there is a threat of serious disorder.

Protest organizers accused the police of trying to intimidate marchers after reports that officers would be authorized to use rubber bullets if violence broke out. London police said officers along the route would not be issued with rubber bullets and they would only be used in “extreme circumstances.”

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/europe/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111109/ap_on_bi_ge/eu_britain_student_protests

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