Report: China expels Tibetan monks, dumps religious objects in river

BEIJING - Officials in Chinese-ruled Tibet have expelled monks from Tibetan Buddhism's holiest shrine and ransacked homes looking for pictures of the Dalai Lama, a monitoring group reported Saturday.

Government teams began house-to-house searches in Tibet's capital, Lhasa, last month and have thrown religious objects and pictures of the Dalai Lama into the Tsangpo River, the London-based Tibetan Information Network reported.

Primarily targeting Communist Party members and government employees, including teachers, the general population has also been ordered to teach children atheism, the group said.

The actions are part of a 4-year-old campaign intended to break the fervently Buddhist Tibetan people's allegiance to the Dalai Lama, Tibet's temporal and spiritual leader who fled to India 41 years ago amid a failed uprising against Chinese rule.

Party and government leaders decided to renew the campaign at a meeting in April in Chengdu, the Sichuan provincial capital, Tibet Information Network said.

It added that they were likely motivated by the escape to India in January of the Karmapa, a high-ranking cleric China hoped to use to win over Tibetans.

In stepping up the campaign, leaders at the meeting pinpointed religion as the main ''element of destruction'' in Tibetan society, the group said, citing sources it did not identify.

The Buddhist clergy, a target of the campaign from the start, appears to have come under renewed pressure. Last month officials expelled 30 monks from the Jokhang Temple in central Lhasa, the group said.

The 1,300-year-old Jokhang is one of Tibetan Buddhism's oldest shrines and its most sacred. The group said the government has set a limit of 120 monks for the temple but is not allowing any who leave to be replaced.

Officials with the Tibetan government and its religious affairs bureau could not be reached by telephone for comment as offices were closed for the weekend.

The renewed campaign has also placed officials under increased scrutiny. A front-page editorial in the government-run Tibet Daily on July 4 threatened officials with fines if they take part in religious activities and listed a telephone number to attract informants, the group said.

Already, families in Lhasa have withdrawn 17 children from schools in India, the group said. With monasteries, the traditional seats of learning, gutted by Chinese rule and under severe limits, many Tibetans go to India to receive a religious education unavailable in Tibet.