The UN Human Rights Commissioner, Mrs Mary Robinson, asked a Buddhist monk in Tibet yesterday to arrange a meeting for her with a leading Tibetan religious dissident, a 69-year-old monk who is on parole after 27 years in prison and said to be under effective house arrest.
Mrs Robinson arrived in Tibet yesterday morning on the fourth full day of her nine-day tour of China. Today she is due to visit the Potala, the magnificent palace in the centre of Lhasa, which was once the seat of power of the exiled Dalai Lama.
When visiting the Bakhor Temple in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, yesterday in the company of pro-Beijing officials, Mrs Robinson gave the monk a piece of paper with the request written on it, according to Charlie Bird of RTE, who is the only journalist given permission to accompany the high commissioner to Tibet.
The dissident, Yulo Dawa Tsering, is of particular interest to Mrs Robinson. His house arrest was imposed as punishment for speaking openly to a visiting UN human rights delegation in 1994, according to a group of three European parliamentarians who visited Tibet over a year ago.
One of the European parliamentarians, Ms Bernie Malone MEP, said after the visit to the monk in 1996: "They said he was on parole, but during the meeting it appeared to us that this was not parole in our sense of the word. He appeared to be under some kind of restraint. He did not have the freedom to come or go. He was not the master of his own movements."
The monk was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1959, but was released under an amnesty 20 years later. He was jailed again for 10 years in 1989 for spreading counter-revolutionary propaganda.
The MEPs met him for 10 minutes amid tight security and on condition that they took no photographs of him. They said he looked reasonably well and that he described his present condition as "better than those who are in prison". It was his first official contact with foreigners since 1995, when he gave an on-the-record statement to Mr Abdelfattah Amor, the UN investigator into religious intolerance, during an official UN mission to China and Tibet.
The monk at the Bakhor Temple replied to Mrs Robinson yesterday that the dissident was in Lhasa but that it would be "difficult" to arrange a meeting, Mr Bird said. A former abbot and theologian and once a philosophy teacher at Tibet University, Yulo Dawa Tsering told UN officials at his meeting with them four years ago that he had been arrested "for political reasons" and that he did not accept official statements that he had been released "for good conduct, submission to prison rules and recognition of his guilt".
According to his statement, which appeared in a UN publication on religious intolerance, the former abbot said he had been rearrested in 1987 for telling two Italian tourists about his support for Tibetan independence. He then "voiced his concern about the version of Tibet's history that is known to the international community".
He said that during his last seven years in prison the inmates had been forbidden religious practice, and he expressed concern about China's ban on monks and nuns rejoining monasteries after serving prison sentences. He told the UN that since his release he had been "forbidden to rejoin any monastery, just like other clergy who had demonstrated and put up posters calling for Tibetan independence".
Many Buddhist monks in Tibet support the exiled Dalai Lama, whose picture is banned from monasteries.
Mrs Robinson visited an afforestation and water project yesterday. Tomorrow she leaves Tibet for Shanghai.