Empty original: Tsering and Razan, persecuted bloggers
Lali Sandiumenge | October 18, 2012
He is a poet, essayist, blogger and activist in defense of Tibet. Tsering Woeser should participate next week in Donosti in #Ticparalapaz, the “Woman” congress, technology and democracy for social change” organized by the Cibervoluntarios Foundation and the Culture of Peace Foundation. won't do it: Her passport was taken away a long time ago and she lives under control in Beijing.. Tsering will not attend Donosti but will symbolically participate in the congress through a video and a letter that he sent to the attendees. It will be Tuesday 24 October in the session “The empty chair of… Freedom of expression, opinion and information, “a fundamental right”, which he will also share in his absence with the Syrian cyber activist Razan Ghazzawi, that she will not be able to travel to Spain due to the possibility that the security forces of the Assad regime will arrest her when she tries to leave the country. The fears are founded: Razan was already detained last December on the Syrian-Jordanian border when she was heading to Amman to attend a seminar on press freedom in the Arab world..
Tsering Woeser and Razan Ghazzawi are two women of fragile appearance and identical determination. Write a blog, documenting what happens without censorship and constructing a narrative different from the official one has made them the target of repression.. Woeser, confined in Beijing for years with her husband, the writer and dissident Wang Lixiong, has been able to travel these days to Lasa, THE CAPITAL OF TIBET, where he was born in 1966, but only because the Chinese regime wants to keep it far away from the capital during the 18 congress of the communist party (CCP), which will be held at the beginning of November and which will designate the new leaders of the country. A few days ago it was posted on Invisible Tibet, the blog that writes in Mandarin, an entry in which he tells of the difficulties of entering the city.
Invisible Tibet is one of the few Tibetan blogs written in Mandarin Chinese and one of the few, but the only one, that manage to get the voice of the Tibetans to the outside world. Some of his entries can be read translated into English on the High Peaks Pure Earth website. Some of the most recent are dedicated to narrating and recounting a silenced drama, that of the self-immolations of Tibetan citizens, 46 Since February 2009 (“¿Why the number of Tibetans who have self-immolated varies?”). in 2008, Millennium Editions, in Spanish, and Pages Editor, in catalan, collected in a book, Tibet breaks its silence, Causes and reality of a rebellion, a compilation of the entries he posted on his blog during that spring, when he documented the wave of protests that shook Tibet after the first demonstration by Buddhist monks on 10 March in memory of 49 anniversary of the Tibetan revolt 1959. According to some calculations, The blog received three million visits between March and April.
The entries in the book were censored in China. Not only that, the blog was hacked in April of that year by a group of nationalist hackers, which destroyed the contents and replaced them with an animation of the Chinese flag and the phrases “Long live the People's Republic of China. Down with the independence of Tibet” and a photograph of him under which one could read: “Remember the horrible face of the Tibetan separatist, hit her hard like you do with dogs.". His email and Skype account were also hacked..
Tsering was already accustomed to harassment and intimidation by then. (lost his job in 2004 and has been questioned on more than one occasion) and had been censored before: The Chinese regime banned the book Notes on Tibet that he published in 2003 and closed his first three blogs, that was kept on servers in the country. Invisible Tibet is hosted on a US server.
