Alleged torch snatcher’s life in danger

HONG KONG: When the phone rang at an ungodly 2 am on Saturday at his home in Salt Lake City, Utah, Tibetan activist Lobsang Gendun’s first thoughts were that his relatives in India and Nepal were in some trouble.

What he didn’t know was that if anyone was in trouble, it was him: Chinese cybervigilantes had put out a “death warrant” for him in the mistaken belief that he was the Tibetan protester who had tried to snatch the Olympics torch from a one-legged Chinese athlete torchbearer in Paris.

They were now calling him at dead of night to tell him of the “death by a thousand cuts” that awaited him. 

After pictures of a Tibetan-looking man confronting Jin Jing, the wheelchair-bound Chinese athlete, in Paris surfaced, Chinese Internet users launched an international manhunt for the protester. Based on television footage of Gendun at the San Francisco protest days later, the cybervigilantes erroneously “established” that the Paris aggressor was him.

Within hours, they had “tracked him down”, and posted his address and phone number and even Google Map images of his residence. 

On Chinese-language bulletin boards and blogs, Chinese Net users bayed for Gendun’s blood. “Bury him alive,” roared one message. “Shoot him dead,” thundered another.

The few sober voices calling for restraint were drowned out in the avalanche of anger. “I don’t know how they concluded it was me,” Gendun, 44, told DNA, “but it isn’t me in the picture (with Jin Jing): I was in the US all the time, although I participated in the San Francisco protest.”

Gendun, who studied in Dharamsala (at a school run by the Dalai Lama’s sister) and in Anantapur, came to the US in 1992, and lives in Salt Lake City with his wife, two sons and his mother-in-law. As an office-bearer of the Utah Tibetan Association, Gendun is an active campaigner for Tibetan independence. 

When the Olympics torch relay, which encountered raucous protests by pro-Tibet demonstrators in London and Paris, came to San Francisco, Gendun was there, along with other Tibetans in exile, to protest.

“While in San Francisco, I gave media interviews — to the local Chinese-language television station and to local journals,” he recalls. “And during those interviews, I had a Tibetan flag draped around my head, like the torch-snatcher in the photograph.” It was perhaps that led to his erroneous identification.

Unnerved by the fact that Salt Lake City has a large Chinese population, Gendun said he had reported the menacing phone calls and e-mails to the local law enforcement agencies and alerted the FBI. In interviews to the Chinese media, he conveys the message that his campaign is directed at China’s “Communist regime”, not at his “Chinese brothers and sisters”.

“I support the Beijing Olympics, but I am protesting against the torch relay because I want freedom of religion, freedom of expression and protection of human rights in Tibet and China,” Gendun says.