Detained Tibetan’s wife details torture on blog
As China refused to release a noted Tibetan environmentalist and businessman arrested allegedly on “trumped up” robbery charges, his wife has taken to blogging in a desperate bid to tell the world of the “hundreds of different cruel torture methods” inflicted on him and fellow prisoners.
“I just didn’t recognise him,” writes Dolkar Tso, wife of Karma Samdrup, the 42-year-old whose arrest in January has sparked international concern.
“How could his tall and upright body become thin and small?” wonders Ms Dolkar in her blog posted Wednesday, after she attended the trial of her husband and was allowed to speak to him. Samdrup, a well-known Tibetan art collector and founder of the Three Rivers Environmental Protection Group, was arrested on the charge of “grave robbery” after he urged the authorities to release two of his brothers.
His brothers Namgyal and Rinchen Samdrup were arrested in 2009 after the local environmental protection group they had created in their village in Tibet’s Changdu prefecture highlighted alleged environmental abuses by local officials, including the hunting of protected species. Rinchen Samdrup is still in custody while Jigme Namgyal is serving a 21-month re-education-through-labour sentence for “harming national security”. “These are test cases for the Chinese government,” said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch.
“These people embody the characteristics the government says it wants in modern Tibetans — economically successful, lending support to only approved cultural and environmental pursuits, and apolitical — yet they, too, are being treated as criminals.”
In her blog, Ms Dolkar says the account they were told exceeded their “worst imaginations”.
“We heard about hundreds of different cruel torture methods, maltreatment around the clock, hitherto unheard of torture instruments and drugs, hard and soft tactics, and even of fellow prisoners being grouped together to extract a confession,” she wrote.
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