Chinese authorities said yesterday that Buddhist monks had been advised to leave an earthquake zone in a Tibetan region because specialized personnel were needed for reconstruction work, rejecting accusations that they had been told to leave for political reasons.
The death toll from last week’s earthquake rose to 2,187, with schoolchildren accounting for more than 200 deaths.
The information office for the State Council, China’s Cabinet, issued a statement in response to reporters’ questions about why Tibetan monks were told this week to leave Yushu County, the epicenter of the quake in a remote corner of Qinghai Province.
“Now it’s the phase for epidemic prevention and reconstruction and [it] requires specialized personnel to start their work,” it said. “It would bring more difficulties to disaster relief work if lots of unprofessional personnel were at the scene.”
Though “we fully recognize [the] contribution of monks who came to the disaster zone from other areas, in order to ensure the scientific effectiveness and order of rescue work, we advised them to return to their monasteries,” the statement said.
Earlier this week, Tibetan Buddhist monks told reporters they had been told to leave the area. Monasteries were given verbal orders to recall thousands of monks who had flooded to the region from neighboring provinces in the wake of the April 14 quake that left more than 12,000 people injured. A total of 9,145 people remained hospitalized as of Thursday, the Health Ministry said.
China’s communist leadership remains wary of Buddhist monks because of their loyalty to their exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, whom Beijing says has pushed for independence in Tibet. At the same time, the government has capitalized on the full-scale relief operation to show it cares about China’s Tibetan communities, some of which staged anti-government protests in 2008.
The State Council Information Office acknowledged the monks’ “positive role” in quake efforts, saying they helped with rescue work, donating money and materials, organizing prayer sessions and conducting memorials for the dead.
State media quoted local officials in Yushu as saying yesterday that they too appreciated the monks’ work and did not request that they leave the quake zone.
“We did not give or receive any orders of such kind. Actually, we are very grateful for the role Tibetan monks played in the relief effort,” Wang Yuhu (王玉虎), governor of Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, was quoted as saying by Xinhua.
The quake killed 207 schoolchildren, a third of whom died after being trapped in collapsed school buildings, said Cering Tai, deputy director of the provincial education bureau, the official Xinhua news agency reported. The others died outside schools.
The earthquake affected 63 schools, with many school buildings cracked, but not destroyed, which allowed many students to escape, he said. The vast majority of buildings in Jiegu town in Yushu, mostly made of mud-brick and wood, collapsed.
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