(23 Oct 2013) A Tibetan monk whose cousin self-immolated a year ago in northwest China claims Chinese authorities falsely tried to lay the blame for the action on foreign-based separatist organisations.
Sangay Gyatso set himself on fire and burned to death near a white Tibetan Buddhist altar known as a "stupa", in a rural monastery not far from his village in the pastoral Gannan region.
His cousin - who has asked for his identity to be disguised because of fear of retaliation - said he was surprised and hurt when he heard what Gyatso had done.
"(I thought) 'Oh, he had been thinking and planning on doing this all the time'. But, I was not aware he would actually do it. I did not know. My heart felt pain. I cried a bit, because we are related," he told the Associated Press, in a rare interview conducted in this region.
He said that immediately after the death on 6 October 2012, the police immediately sought evidence that the 27-year-old's act was instigated from abroad.
The police wanted to know if monks helped to arrange the act, or if the young man had connections with exiled Buddhist spiritual leader the Dalai Lama or foreign-based separatists.
The monk said government officials pushed the family to corroborate the official account that Sangay Gyatso was persuaded to burn himself as part of an elaborate scheme to stir up ethnic hatred.
"They asked the family whether they had ties with India, and said 'You got three million (yuan) as a reward, right?'"
Official accounts in the Chinese media also claimed that the father of two was an incorrigible thief, a womaniser and a man without honest work.
The cousin refuted these claims when he spoke to Associated Press from his rural home amid Gannan's rolling hills along the incline towards the Tibetan Plateau.
Local police who followed AP journalists after the interview refused to comment on the issue, and refused AP permission to speak to local government officials.
He said that Gyatso set himself ablaze in despair at the Chinese denial of political freedoms and suppression of Tibetan traditional lifestyle.
The monk said self-immolations happen "because we lack human rights. It is for our ethnic minority, our human rights and our freedom".
The Chinese government forbids independent news coverage of the self-immolations that have raised questions on Beijing's ethnic policies.
Since early 2009, overseas Tibetan rights groups have reported that more than 120 Tibetans - monks and lay people, men and women, and young and elderly - have set themselves on fire. Most died.
The groups say the self-immolations are homegrown protests over China's heavy-handed rule in the Himalayan regions.
They are an image problem for Beijing, which first tried to blank out news of self-immolations.
After reports continued to leak out, Beijing struck back with accounts of immolators as outcasts who fall prey to the instigation of the Dalai Lama and supporters who allegedly want to split Tibet from China.
The Communist Party-controlled media describe the immolators as gamblers, thieves, womanisers, or suffering from life setbacks or physical disabilities.
The Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Buddhist leader who fled to northern India in 1959, has denied any role in the suicides, deplored the loss of lives and demanded that Beijing investigate under the watch of international monitors.
He also says he wants autonomous rule, not independence, for Tibet.
In the case of Sangay Gyatso, the true story of his self-immolation remains elusive as his immediate family members are still hushed one year after his death.
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