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 Jan. 3.
“If not for his voice, I would not have recognized him,” his wife, Zhenga Cuomao, told reporters.
She said Samdrup appeared gaunt when he appeared at the Yanqi county courthouse in Xinjiang, the mountainous province neighboring Tibet.
Chinese 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 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 Ford Motor Co.
In 2006, he was named philanthropist of the year by state broadcaster China Central Television for “creating harmony between men and nature.”
He was arrested earlier this year and accused of robbing graves and stealing cultural artifacts. 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 in August last year 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-labor sentence for “harming national security.” 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 brutality are commonplace in China. This month, Wu Lihong (吳立紅) — an award-winning anti-pollution campaigner in Jiangsu Province — told the Guardian he was beaten by guards during the three-year jail sentence he had just completed.
“A state security official name Xie Lixin lashed me with a willow branch and burned me with a cigarette end. A guy named Wang Kewei bumped my head against a wall and another man surnamed Shen beat me to make me confess,” he said.
Wu was declared an Environmental Warrior by China’s National People’s Congress in 2005 for tackling contamination in Lake Tai. He was later jailed on charges of blackmail.
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