The two highest executive authorities of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the State Council and the Central Military Commission (CMC), issued a joint order conferring the honorary title ‘Model Frontier Police Substation’ on the Pali Border Police Substation under the Shigatse Detachment of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) Public Security and Border Defence Corps. Official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported on 28 December 2003 that the title was conferred for the outstanding contribution of the border post in “safeguarding the motherland’s unification and peace in the border areas” and specified that “the police substation has cracked five cases of people attempting to flee the country and caught 27 who sought to flee. It has also discovered and handled in good time several dozen problems relating to the social order of the border areas”.
The order which was signed personally by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, head of the State Council, and Jiang Zemin, chairman of the Military Commission, apparently relates to the police border station in Phari (Ch: Pali), which was set up in 1961. The border station is situated at a strategic position where it dominates the Dromo/Chumbi valley, Tibet’s traditional gateway into Sikkim. Sikkim became a part of India since 1975.
The Xinhua report refers, in several places, to the interception of “people attempting to flee the country” as a “border defence task” fulfilled by the post “with flying colours”. The post has made “outstanding contributions to safeguarding social stability in the border areas”, “safeguarding the motherland’s unification and peace” and “enhancing unity among ethnic groups”, thus carrying forward “the fine tradition” of “our party” and the armed forces, “abided by the party’s ethnic and religious policies in an exemplary manner”. The report culminates by praising the border post’s achievement in maintaining “its revolutionary spirit in a place with insufficient oxygen”.
The report mentions that in the past, the same border post has already been “gloriously awarded” one first class collective merit citation, one second class collective merit citation and four third class collective merit citations. Among other awards, it has been chosen as a “model unit in promoting ethnic unity” by the State Ethnic Affairs Commission in 1998; it was given the honorary title of a “model border police substation” by the Tibet Autonomous Region Chinese Communist Party Committee and Government in 2002; and was given the honorary title of “national model police substation” by the Ministry of Public Security in July 2003.
This award should be seen in the context of the report on 22 December 2003 from the International Campaign for Tibet which published pictures of the “new reception centre in the Snow Lands”, a detention centre in Shigatse, in the same prefecture as the Phari post, where Tibetans who have attempted to cross the border to Nepal are detained and from where major human rights violations are reported. In Tibet, although legal procedures to obtain a visa to visit Nepal do exist, it is in practice often difficult, sometimes even virtually impossible without ‘connections’ to obtain such documents due to restrictions imposed by the authorities out of a fear that too great a number of Tibetans travel to India to meet exiled Tibetans and the Dalai Lama.
