Nun Sets Herself On Fire
[su_publirb]
She was protesting the Chinese occupation of Tibet.
The nun, Yeshi Khando, is believed to have died because of the intensity of the fire. The death could not be confirmed because the police took her away after dousing the flames with fire extinguishers, said the groups, which had spoken with people in the area where the self-immolation occurred on Wednesday.
Yeshi Khando, who was in her 40s and was from Nganggang Nunnery, set herself ablaze near a monastery in the Kardze area of Sichuan Province, known in Chinese as Ganzi. She was the second woman to set herself on fire this year and the 138th Tibetan to do so since 2009 in Tibetan regions ruled by China, according to the International Campaign for Tibet, an advocacy group based in Washington.
The protesters acted largely out of anger and frustration at what they call the Chinese occupation of their homeland, according to the groups, which are based outside China…
Chinese officials maintain that the Tibetans who have set themselves on fire are mentally unstable or have been manipulated by India’s “Dalai clique.”
Free Tibet, a London-based advocacy group, said the nun walked around Kardze Monastery on Wednesday and set herself on fire at 9 a.m. near the Kardze County police station. The group said that while she was on fire, she shouted the slogan “Let His Holiness return to Tibet” and others.
“While many Tibetans are turning to other forms of protest, Yeshi Khando’s action shows us that some still feel self-immolation is the only way to express the depth of their grievance,” Eleanor Byrne-Rosengren, director of Free Tibet, said in a written statement. “Once again, we hear calls for Tibetan freedom and for the country to be reunited with its spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.”
[su_facebook]
[su_center_ad]
illinoisboy1977 April 12th, 2015 at 11:40 am
While self immolation is a powerful form of protest, it’s also powerfully stupid. Just my opinion.
burqa April 12th, 2015 at 10:24 pm
It was an act of desperation in the face of persecution that has gone on for 65 years. The slaughter in Tibet rivals that of another atheist commie regime under Pol Pot in Cambodia.
The horrors visited on those people is unimaginable for us.
To go with my post above, here is more from The Black Book of Communism:
““After our armed enemies have been crushed, there will still be our unarmed enemies, who will try to fight us to the death. We must never underestimate their strength. Unless we think of the problem in precisely those terms, we will commit the gravest of errors.”
Thus Mao Zedong adjured the Central Committee of the Seventh Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in March 1949.
Was repression in Communist China simply a replication of the practices of the Soviet Big Brother? After all, until the early 1980s, Stalin’s portrait was still to be
seen everywhere in Beijing. …
[464] The answer again is yes if one looks at the scale of the genocide in Tibet, some 10 to 20 percent of the inhabitants of the “rooftop of the world” died as a result of Chinese occupation.”
– pages 463-464
illinoisboy1977 April 13th, 2015 at 10:56 am
By terminating one’s self, an individual makes a powerful statement, this is true. But, the individual also take his/her voice out of the equation, for any future protestations. In the long run, it’s a most unwise form of protest.
burqa April 14th, 2015 at 9:56 pm
There’s no faulting your logic. It makes perfect sense.
I think this was done with the emotional, rather than the logical part of her mind was dominant and her reason was unable to correct the imbalance.
When one faces overwhelming persecution and there is no alternative, occasionally people resort to things like this, or becoming suicide bombers. There is an interesting study of suicide bombers by Robert Pape titled “Dying To Win,” in which he studied 315 cases and discovered that in general, they were not carried out by kooks or people with mental deficiencies, but were carried out by normal, well-adjusted functioning members of society.
Military history is filled with examples of soldiers charging the enemy despite impossible odds, but they felt there to be a larger issue and so they sacrificed themselves.
burqa April 12th, 2015 at 9:52 pm
Atheist commie persecution of people of faith in Tibet began with the 1950 invasion:
“But the worst years by far for Tibet were those that had begun with the arrival of the Chinese troops in 1950 and culminate in forced collectivization in 1959, three years after the rest of the country. The collectivization drive sparked an insurrection, which was put down with brutal repression and led to the flight to India of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet, together with 100,000 other refugees, including the majority of the country’s tiny cultivated elite. Although the 1950s were also an extremely difficult decade for China proper, exceptionally violent measures were used in Tibet to impose both Communism and Chinese domination on a ferociously independent people who were either seminomadic (about 40 percent) or attached to monasteries. Tensions increased further during collectivization in the middle of the decade. The army responded to an uprising by Khampa guerillas with atrocities out of all proportion to the rebellion’s scale. In 1956, during the Tibetan New Year celebrations, the great Chode Gaden Phendeling monastery in Batang was destroyed by aerial bombardment; at least 2,000 monks and pilgrims were killed.
The litany of atrocities is hair-raising and in many cases unverifiable. But the eyewitness reports concur so precisely that the Dalai Lama’s assessment of this period seems beyond challenge: “Tibetans not only were shot, but also were beaten to death, crucified, burned alive, drowned, mutilated, starved, strangled, hanged, boiled alive, buried alive, drawn and quartered, and beheaded.” The darkest moment was undoubtedly 1959, in the aftermath of the uprising in Kham, in eastern Tibet, in which the rebels captured Lhasa. Several factors promoted the uprising, including reaction against the people’s communes, the Great Leap Forward, several years of Chinese quotas, and the large-scale [545] repatriation by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency of the Khampa warriors they had trained in guerilla camps in Colorado and Guam. The civilian population, which was quite sympathetic to the rebels and allowed them to blend into society, suffered massive bombardment by the Chinese army. The wounded were left untended and were often buried alive or devoured by stray dogs – accounting for the high number of suicides on the losing side. Lhasa itself, a bastion of 20,000 Tibetans armed with only muskets and swords, was retaken on 22 March at a cost of between 2,000 and 10,000 lives, with the Ramoche and Potala temples suffering major damage.” as retaken on 22 March at a cost of between 2,000 and 10,000 lives, with the Ramoche and Potala temples suffering major damage.”
– “THE BLACK BOOK OF COMMUNISM Crimes, Terror, Repression,” Edited by Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Margolin, (Harvard University Press, 1999), pages 544-545
https://archive.org/details/TheBlackBookofCommunism10page