A jailed Tibetan environmentalist used the opening of his trial on Tuesday to accuse Chinese captors of beatings, sleep deprivation and other maltreatment, his wife told reporters.
Karma Samdrup — a prominent businessman and award-winning conservationist — issued a statement in court detailing the brutal interrogation methods, including drugs that made his ears bleed, used on him since his detention on January 3.
“If not for his voice, I would not have recognised him,” his wife Zhenga Cuomao told the Associated Press.
She said Samdrup appeared gaunt when he appeared at the Yangqi county courthouse in Xinjiang, the mountainous province neighbouring Tibet.
Prosecutor Kuang Ying denied violence had been used against Samdrup, who founded the Three Rivers Environmental Protection group and pushed for conservation of the source region for the Yangtze, Yellow and Lancang (Mekong) rivers.
The wealthy Tibetan art collector is an unlikely political prisoner. His group has won several awards for its work, including the Earth Prize, which is jointly administered by Friends of the Earth Hong Kong and the Ford motor company.
In 2006, he was named philanthropist of the year by state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) for “creating harmony between men and nature”.
He was arrested earlier this year and accused of robbing graves and stealing cultural artefacts. Supporters say these were old, trumped-up charges that were dismissed by police 12 years ago. If convicted, the maximum penalty is death or life in prison, though his lawyer says a more lenient sentence is likely.
His trial has been delayed for several weeks amid claims that he is being unfairly punished for lobbying the authorities for the release of his two brothers.
His siblings, Rinchen Samdrup and Jigme Namgyal, were arrested last August after their separate environmental protection group — Voluntary Environmental Protection Association of Kham Anchung Senggenamzong — sought to expose officials who hunted endangered animals. Namgyal is serving a 21-month re-education-through-labour sentence for “harming national security”.
He is accused of illegally collecting information about the environment, natural resources and religion, organising petitions, and providing propaganda material for supporters of the Dalai Lama. Rinchen Samdrup is in custody but has not been tried.
According to the International Campaign for Tibet, this may be part of a new campaign against intellectuals.
The Washington-based group said last month that 31 Tibetans are now in prison “after reporting or expressing views, writing poetry or prose, or simply sharing information about Chinese government policies and their impact in Tibet today”.
Accusations of police and prison guard brutality are commonplace in China. This month, Wu Lihong — an award-winning anti-pollution campaigner in Jiangsu province — told the Guardian he was beaten by guards during the three year jail sentence he has just completed.
“A state security official name Xie Lixin lashed me with a willow branch and burned me with a cigarette end. A guy name Wang Kewei bump my head against a wall, and another man surnamed Shen beat me to make me confess,” he said. Wu — who is from the ethnic Han majority in China — was declared an Environmental Warrior by the National People’s Congress in 2005 for tackling contamination in Lake Tai. He was later jailed on charges of blackmail. – guardian.co.uk