Armed police have thrown out hundreds of Tibetan nuns, some monks and Buddhist scholars from a nunnery and monastic institute in western China, razing their homes and threatening them with arrest if they return, a monitoring group said yesterday.
Some of those thrown out of the Serthar Buddhist Institute and Nunnery in Sichuan Province, just east of Tibet, were reportedly forced to sign documents denouncing the Dalai Lama, their spiritual leader, and promising not to return, according to the Tibet Information Network.
The London-based group called the expulsions part of a systematic clearing-out of Serthar on orders from provincial authorities and the central government in Beijing. The reason was not immediately clear, though China's government often views centers of Tibetan Buddhism as potential stewpots of opposition to Beijing's 51-year rule over Tibet.
The ethnically mixed institute, also known as Larung Gar, and in Chinese as Wumin, is a Buddhist academy in Ganzi Prefecture. Both the Tibet Information Network and the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile in India describe it as staunchly non-political.
The network's Web site showed a picture of wreckage it said was a demolished home at Serthar.
Police in Sida County, where the nunnery and institute are located, refused to answer questions yesterday. But a police official in adjacent Ganzi County, who gave his name only as Gao, said he had heard of nuns and monks being forced to leave Sida.
The expulsions are scheduled to be completed by October, the group said. It said more than 1,000 dwellings had been destroyed since mid-June. Roads leading to the institute were blocked and the site was sealed off before demolition began, it said.
More than 6,000 monks, nuns and students were believed to live at Serthar before the expulsions began.
In June, the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile in Dharmsala, India, said the monk who headed the institute, Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok, 68, had been detained and some expulsions had begun.
At the time, a spokesman for the Dalai Lama called such activity "very strange" because Phuntsok was involved in no political activity.
Phuntsok founded the institute in 1980 as a personal hermitage. Although not officially a monastery, it became home to thousands of monks and nuns.
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