The Potala Palace
I'm a bit late with this, but better late than never. This post has been prodded by photos I just found on Kadfly:
Friday, March 14, 2008
Pictures are at the bottom of this post.
The situation has gotten much worse. A quiet morning stroll down Beijing Street turned into running away with a crowd of Tibetans as an empty PLA convoy pulled through. Maybe 100 meters further there was a massive crowd of Tibetans surrounding a narrow alleyway. As it turned out, they were throwing stones and abuse at PLA soldiers who were blockading the passage to a monastery. After a minute or two, everyone rushed the PLA blockade and burst through. The soldiers left parts of their riot gear lying around and Tibetans started breaking them.
Up until this point the entire situation was almost jovial: there was no sign of danger whatsoever (unless you were a PLA soldier). Then things started getting out of control. Shops were taken apart, buses filled with passengers were attacked, motorcyclists were stoned. We fled into the relative safety of a nearby hotel as attention began to be drawn to us and from there we saw the street and nearby stores get ripped apart and more violence. Before being ushered into a safer part of the hotel away from the street we also saw a monk (or at least someone dressed like one) direct an attack on a store or restaurant with a small Chinese flag flying from it.
[read on]
Saturday, April 5, 2008
A few more pictures from Lhasa
First, thanks to "Bobby Fletcher" for bringing to my attention this article [try http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20080330_1.htm - sometimes it asks for authorization]. As it appears people are now photoshopping and manipulating the original photos, I have decided to reupload the entire set. They can be found on the original post.
The "man-with-the-knife" is most definitely in the original:
[more...]
via Epoch Times:
This is a copy of the picture of the same scene in Lhasa
but with the man with the knife now missing,
which was distributed after the man's identity was revealed
at a rally in Darmasala.[more...]
This is a cropped copy of the photo released by the Chinese Embassy purporting to show a Tibetan with a knife taking part in a riot.
A Photograph From Lhasa, March 14
I was directed to read the following 'news report' from Sound of Hope via Epoch Times. I assumed that the recommendation was made because I have shown interest in cases of media manipulation of visual images. To begin, I am going to excerpt the relevant sections (and ignore the pure propaganda stuff):Chinese Regime Implicated in Staging Violence in Lhasa.
By Qin Yue and Qi Yue. March 29, 2008.
Evidence is accumulating that the Chinese regime orchestrated violence in Lhasa in order to discredit the peaceful protests of Buddhist monks.
According to the Dalai Lama's Chinese translator, Ngawang Nyendra, a witness reported that a Chinese policeman in Lhasa disguised himself as a Tibetan and joined the protesters holding a knife in his hand. This witness also recognized the man from BBC news footage and news photos provided by China.
A Chinese woman from Thailand (who prefers that her name not be used) was studying in Lhasa when the protests broke out in March. As one of her friends is a policeman, she visited him at the local police station quite often and got to know other policemen there. After the protests on March 14, she and other foreigners were sent to the police station where she saw a man with a knife in his hand walking in with some arrested Tibetans. The man later took off the Tibetan-style clothes and put on a police uniform.
This woman was sent out of Lhasa with other foreigners the next day. When she arrived in India via Nepal, she recognized the policeman she had seen in Tibetan garb from BBC TV news and photos that the Chinese embassy had provided to the media.
Ngawang Nyendra said the witness was shocked when she saw the policeman in the BBC broadcast. She realized then that the man had disguised himself as a Tibetan in order to incite people to riot. The witness contacted a Tibetan organization in India and told them what she had seen. At a rally on March 17, the organization publicized a news photo originally provided by the Chinese Embassy in India in which the policeman appeared as a Tibetan rioter.
On Xinhua and other Chinese-language Web sites friendly to the regime, after the rally at which the witness spoke, the policeman in disguise had disappeared from photos taken at the same scene in which he had previously been visible. Recently, the original man-with-the-knife photo has returned to these Web sites.
Ngawang Nyendra said, "This photo with this man in it was sent by the Chinese embassy to BBC and Radio Free Asia. The other photo was sent out later. They are exactly the same except the man has disappeared from the second photo. From the TV news footage, you can see this man attempting to stab other people with a knife. But in later shots you can't find this person any more. They were acting. After people raised questions about these shots, this footage never appeared on TV again."[more...]
