First Foreign Journalists Enter Tibet Since Riots

By CHARLES HUTZLER, Associated Press
March 27, 2008

LHASA, China — Nearly two weeks after anti-Chinese riots and an ensuing crackdown, helmeted paramilitary police with batons checked identification papers in Lhasa's old Tibetan quarter yesterday, even as the government said the city was returning to normal.

The first group of foreign journalists allowed into the Tibetan capital since soon after the riots got an often carefully monitored glimpse of a city divided. While police presence was visible but not overbearing in the newly built up and heavily Chinese portions of Lhasa, teams of security forces stood in the lanes near the sacred Jokhang Temple.

Two Tibetan teachers drinking in a nearby bar said they were enjoying a first night out after nighttime curfews kept them at home eating mainly tsampa — roasted barley — since the day after the March 14 riot. One reason the curfew was loosened, they said, was the foreign press visit.

An acrid odor hung in the blocks near the old city where rows of burned out buildings stand as evidence of the violence. Many shops were closed, some from a lack of business, others from looting that left their migrant Chinese owners with little to sell.

"People are leaving because there's no business," a South Korean who came to Tibet to study traditional Buddhist painting and now runs a sundries shop, Jin Zhenman, said.

China rarely allows foreign reporters into Tibet under normal circumstances, so the media tour underscores the communist leadership's determination to contain any damage ahead of the Beijing Olympics in August that was supposed to celebrate China as a modern, rising power.