BEIJING — Defying a massive deployment of Chinese security forces, ethnic Tibetan protesters unfurled the banned Tibetan flag and burned a police station Sunday as the violence that by some reports has claimed 80 lives spread into Sichuan province and other parts of western China.
The exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, held an emergency conference with supporters and the news media in the mountain town of Dharamsala, India, and told them that he was powerless to stop the protests.
"It's a people's movement, so it's up to them. Whatever they do, I have to act accordingly," said the 72-year-old monk, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Thubten Samphel, a spokesman for the Dalai Lama, said that the exiled movement's sources in Tibet had counted 80 bodies of people killed around Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.
Tibetan activists said at least 15 more were killed near a remote mountain monastery in Sichuan province when paramilitary troops fired at a crowd of demonstrators who waved the Tibetan flag and chanted, "Free Tibet!" and "Bring back the Dalai Lama!"
Some of the bodies were dragged by monks into the Kirti Monastery, and others were left on display outside a police station in adjacent Aba County, according to the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy.
An enraged mob shortly afterward attacked the police station and government offices with Molotov cocktails. A policewoman was quoted by Reuters news service as saying that two police cars, a firetruck and a market had been burned down.
"They've gone crazy," the officer said.
The uprising presents the most serious challenge in years, if not decades, to China's iron grip over its restive minority population. It comes at the most inconvenient time, with human rights activists already calling for a boycott of the 2008 Summer Olympics, due to open here Aug. 8. In what now seems an absurd proposition, China had planned to route the Olympic torch through Tibet to underscore that the nation's minorities live in one "harmonious society."
"If the Tibetans attacked people like the Chinese say, [officials] should let people in to find out. . . . If it is discovered that Chinese troops fired on unarmed demonstrators like at Tiananmen, you will hear a lot of people calling for a boycott," said a European diplomat, referring to the military's suppression of 1989 protests at Tiananmen Square, during which hundreds and perhaps thousands of demonstrators were killed.
