XIAHE, China, April 9 (Reuters) – Fifteen Tibetan Buddhist monks interrupted a state-sponsored media tour of a restive region of western China on Wednesday, demanding the return of the Dalai Lama and yelling that they had no human rights.
In the second such incident in as many months, the monks, carrying a banned Tibetan flag, burst out of a building at the Labrang monastery in the town of Xiahe, in the northwestern province of Gansu, and rushed across a plaza to a group of 20 visiting Chinese and foreign journalists.
“The Dalai Lama has to come back to Tibet. We are not asking for Tibetan independence, we are just asking for human rights. We have no human rights now,” one monk told the reporters in Chinese.
Many of the monks had covered their heads in robes. One monk, with his robe over his head, kept pushing his right hand over his left fist and saying “China – Tibet”, implying that China was suffocating Tibet.