Tenzin Delek Rinpoche was a buddhist monk and community leader actively engaged in human rights and environmental issues. He was admired for his activism against deforestation, mining and logging in western Sichuan province, a mountainous area that has historically been part of Tibet.
In 2002, the Chinese government arrested him and charged him and an assistant with planting bombs. They were both sentenced to death. His assistant was executed quickly, Rinpoch's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He had been in prison for the past 13 years. He was widely considered a political prisoner and various western governments raised concerns about his trial and treatment in prison. Human Rights Watch did a very extensive report a few years ago on his activism, trial and sentence titled: Trials of a Tibetan monk.
Rinpoche died on July 12, 2015 and this is where things began to get seriously strange. The Chinese government claims he died of cardiac arrest and had refused medical treatment. He was suffering from a heart condition which had been the basis of an appeal for his release a couple of years ago.
There were a series of demonstrations and an immediate crackdown:
the police on Friday detained a sister and a niece of Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, 65, a widely revered monk and community leader who was serving a life sentence on terrorism and separatism charges. Human rights advocates contend that the allegations against Tenzin Delek were politically motivated.
Dolkar Lhamo [Rinpoch's sister] had been at the center of a highly public campaign seeking the return of her brother’s body. Last week she and another sister were among nearly 100 Tibetans who staged a sit-in outside the building in Chengdu where Tenzin Delek was thought to have been imprisoned for the 13 years before he died.
She later presented prison officials with a petition demanding an investigation into his death, a document that Tibetan exile groups obtained and posted on the Internet.
The authorities have imposed an information blackout across the region, a detail confirmed on Saturday by a man who answered the phone at the Public Security Bureau in Litang. “The Internet has been shut down for half a month here. It is a control measure,” the man said before hanging up.
Chinese authorities would not permit relatives to take his body back to his hometown to perform rites. He was cremated quickly after a few friends and relatives were permitted to view the body. As they were taking Rinpoche's ashes back to his hometown of Garzê;,
this happened:
Geshe Nyima, a cousin of the revered religious figure and community leader, Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, 65, said that four Tibetans transporting his cremated remains to his hometown, in the southwestern province of Sichuan, for Buddhist funeral rites were held at gunpoint by Chinese police officers last Thursday night in the town of Luding and forced to hand them over.
“The ashes were taken back and not given to the family,” said Geshe Nyima, speaking in a conference call from Dharamsala, India, where he lives in exile.
“Police said that they would throw the ashes into the nearby river. The four people don’t know what happened to the ashes.”
Let us remember Tenzin Delek Rinpoche for his courage. And remember all activists fighting oppression under difficult circumstances. That the Chinese government is threatened by a dead man's ashes is a testament to the power of his words and deeds.
A few notes that describe Rinpoche's activism are below the Great Orange Firewall.
From Trials of a Tibetan Monk: The Case of Tenzin Delek by Human Rights Watch.
Based on interviews with numerous eyewitnesses, the report provides a detailed account of the circumstances surrounding Tenzin Delek's arrest and conviction. It concludes that the case was the culmination of a decade-long effort by Chinese authorities to curb his efforts to foster Tibetan Buddhism, his support for the Dalai Lama as a religious leader, and his work to develop Tibetan social and cultural institutions. His efforts had become a focal point for Tibetans struggling to retain their cultural identity in the face of China's restrictive policies and its continuing persecution of individuals attempting to push the accepted boundaries of cultural and social expression.
Throughout his monastic career, Tenzin Delek championed the economic, social, cultural, and spiritual aspirations of Tibetans in four counties of the Kardze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (TAP), a predominantly Tibetan area in Sichuan province. He believed Chinese government officials in the area had little inclination to address Tibetan needs, preferring instead to use their positions for personal gain. Tenzin Delek tried to address the needs of Tibetans in a variety of ways: he established schools, clinics, an orphanage, and old-age homes. He mediated economic conflicts between Tibetan communities and was active in efforts to preserve the area's fragile ecological balance from deforestation, excessive mining, and other potentially damaging projects. He built a permanent structure at a major monastic center which previously had depended on tents for shelter, and he expanded its geographic reach through the establishment of seven branch monasteries. Perhaps most threatening to the authorities, Tenzin Delek's efforts attracted a coterie of several hundred devoted disciples and widespread support among local people at a time the Chinese government was consolidating its control of Tibetan areas and struggling to diminish monastic influence and reinforce secular authority.
Over a twenty-five-year period, as Tenzin Delek's local status rose and he successfully challenged official policies on a number of issues, local authorities in the Kardze TAP came to perceive him as a threat and sanctioned progressively harsher measures to contain his social and cultural activities. By 1997, as a renewed campaign (labeled the "patriotic education" drive) to bring Tibetan monasteries under full government control extended eastward from the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) to Tibetan areas in Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu, and Yunnan provinces, Kardze officials moved decisively. A first step was to label many of his activities political and, therefore, forbidden. His religious activities were curtailed. He could no longer move about freely. He could not speak publicly about the Dalai Lama as he could earlier. By 2000, Kardze prefecture authorities stripped him of all his religious prerogatives. Two years later, in 2002, he was formally arrested on what appear to be trumped-up bombing charges.