HONG KONG -- Four Tibetan Buddhist monks were handed prison sentences as long as 20 years last fall after a secret trial in southern Tibet, according to a Human Rights Watch investigation revealed on Tuesday.
The punishment is heavy even by Chinese penal standards considering the nonviolent nature of the allegations and the monks' lack of prior offenses. The U.S.-based human rights organization believes the case reflects China's heightened scrutiny of online activity and increasing pressure on local officials to take harsh "preemptive" action over even minor infractions, especially in minority regions like Tibet.
"The sentences, in our view, are unprecedented in their harshness, given that they were not connected in any way to any discernible political or illegal behavior," Sophie Richardson, HRW's China director, told reporters during an online press conference Tuesday.
The revelation comes on the 86th birthday of the Dalai Lama, Tibetans' spiritual leader, who has lived in exile in northern India since he fled his Chinese-ruled homeland in 1959. China considers him a separatist even though he long ago abandoned the goal of Tibetan independence in favor of it gaining greater autonomy.
The saga of the imprisoned monks began in September 2019.
HRW found that authorities raided the Tengdro monastery in the Tibet Autonomous Region, close to the border with Nepal. Twenty houses in the village, where monks and their families lived, were also targeted. More than 20 monks and nuns were detained while personal belongings -- including photographs and religious texts related to the Dalai Lama -- were confiscated.
HRW learned from residents that the raid was conducted by Lhasa police and "soldiers." During the blitz, Lobsang Zoepa, a 52-year-old monk, took his own life, apparently in protest against the authorities.
The tip-off came from a mislaid cellphone. Choegyal Wangpo, a monk at the monastery, had mistakenly left his phone at an eatery in the city in late August or early September of that year. The owner of the establishment handed the phone to the police.
Combing through the phone's contents, the police found contacts outside China, photographs of the Dalai Lama and messages to and from fellow Tibetans from the same village now living in Nepal and India. Choegyal Wangpo was immediately taken into custody and violently interrogated, according to the report.
The police appeared to be "particularly concerned about the donations he had sent to Tengdro's sister monastery in Nepal," sources told HRW. The money was sent to help Tibetans and their community recover from a devastating magnitude-7.8 earthquake that hit Nepal in April 2015 and claimed about 9,000 lives.
Monks walk along a path lined with Chinese flags at the Tibetan Buddhist College near Lhasa, in western China's Tibet Autonomous Region. © AP After months in custody, most of the monks and nuns were released. But Choegyal Wangpo and three others were put on trial behind closed doors at the Shigatse Intermediate People's Court.
Last September, Choegyal Wangpo was given 20 years imprisonment. The other three -- Lobsang Jinpa, Norbu Dondrup, and Ngawang Yeshe -- were sentenced to 19, 17 and five years, respectively.
Technically, sending online messages to recipients in neighboring countries and making humanitarian donations do not violate Chinese laws. On the other hand, the authorities have considerable room for interpretation when it comes to actions deemed to "endanger national security" or "incite separatism," even with flimsy evidence. Such allegations can lead to sentences of five years or more, but only when the defendant is "a ringleader or the one whose crime is grave," according to the Chinese Criminal Code.
"The Chinese government's assumption that Tibetan monks and nuns are potential subversives, the heightened border security, and increased restrictions on online communications and religious donations all combined to create a shocking miscarriage of justice," Richardson said in a statement.
The veteran China watcher described the case as a "perfect storm" where multiple factors, including pressure from higher-ups to take preventive measures on security-related matters, added up to a severe punishment for a minor matter.
The HRW report found that the local officials involved were "all seeking to prove their diligence and avoid punishment for failing to detect the case in advance."
The report also points out that, "In a hyper-securitized system such as Tibet, particularly in religious affairs, it is safer, if not essential, for cadres to magnify any accusation of illegality made against local people once an accusation has been made by more senior officials."
Handling such a case "properly" in the eyes of superiors can work wonders for a career. Indeed, several months after the raid, the head of the county public security bureau was promoted to deputy head of public security for Shigatse municipality -- possibly a stamp of approval for his conduct in the case.
"Chinese authorities are excessively paranoid about any kind of dissent, no matter how trivial or insignificant," Tsering Tsomo, executive director at the Tibet Center for Human Rights and Democracy, said in the same news conference Tuesday. "Due to historical and political reasons, Chinese authorities have been extremely vigilant to prevent and root out any signs of opposition."
Richardson said internet connections were cut off shortly after the raid and remain so. "The regional and central government authorities have a lot to hide in this case, and that's exactly what they are doing by shutting the whole community off," she said in the news conference.
HRW said it drew heavily from sources living outside China but who had detailed knowledge of what happened. For security reasons, all of them remain anonymous. The organization said it interviewed these sources "independently and repeatedly" while cross-checking facts with other data sources and previous interviews conducted by others.
"The horrific treatment of the Tengdro monks points to the Chinese government's pressure on officials in Tibet to find and punish cases of political subversion -- even if the alleged subversion is a figment of their imagination," Richardson said in a statement.