Tibetan environmentalist Karma Samdup to face court trial

A prominent Tibetan businessman and environmental activist, Karma Samdup, who is also one of the founding members (first General Secretary) of the award-winning environmental NGO Three Rivers Environmental Protection Association and the main protagonist of the popular book "Heavenly Beads" by Liu Jianqiang, is scheduled to face court trial today on charges of tomb-raiding. Latest report from the Times say that the court has postponed the trial. Reports indicate that Karma Samdup has been framed by authorities for attempting to get his two brothers freed from prison. His brothers were arrested on state security charges related to a small environmental NGO that they had started. As indicated in the Times article below, the actual reason of their (Karma Samdup's brothers') arrest seems related to an incident when the brothers tried to stop a local police chief from hunting protected wild animals.


Photo: Woeser's blog

The story was first made public by Acha Woeser-la on her blog. The Times has published a more detailed story yesterday. See full text below for readers too lazy to register for a free preview of the online article. If you read Chinese, check out this article about Karma Samdup from 2006.

Full text of the Times article:
Tibetan antique dealer and environmental activist charged with grave robbing: Karma Samdup's arrest may have been politically motivated, Chinese sources told The Times

Jane Macartney Beijing
Last updated May 31 2010 9:45AM

China's leading private collector of Tibetan antiques, an environmental activist, is scheduled to go on trial today on charges of grave robbing, an accusation already dismissed by police 12 years earlier.

Karma Samdup, a Tibetan from a village in remote Gongjue county, faces up to life imprisonment on the charges, which are believed to stem from political differences between the prominent Tibetan businessman and Chinese authorities in the restive region.

Karma Samdup, who is in his early 40s, was arrested in January while on a trip to the central city of Chengdu for discussions with the Hyatt hotel group about setting up a museum-style hotel in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa.

He was transferred to the mainly Muslim region of Xinjiang to face trial for grave-robbing. The charge was first brought against him in 1998 but soon dropped after it emerged that the Tibetan businessman had been unaware that some antiques he had bought had been sold to him by grave robbers. He was equipped with a government licence to purchase antiques and told police at the time that he could not be aware of their provenance.

However, anti-Chinese unrest that has roiled Tibetan areas of China in recent years, coupled with a feud between an environmental organization set up by his family in his home village and the police, may have led to the revival of the charges, Chinese sources who have followed the case told The Times.

Karma Samdup is the third of three brothers to find himself behind bars in the last few months. The two others were arrested in August last year on accusations that their Voluntary Environmental Protection Association of Kham Anchung Senggenamzong was an illegal organization. Karma himself founded the separate, well-respected Three Rivers Environmental Protection Association, a non-governmental group that has won a string of domestic and international awards for its work to protect local Tibetan culture as well as wildlife on the Tibetan plateau.

However, the brothers ran into trouble after their small group clashed with the local police chief when they tried to stop him from hunting protected wild animals. A reference to the Dalai Lama as a Nobel Peace Prize winner on their website resulted in the case being handled as a more serious political crime. The police chief has since been promoted.

The youngest brother was sentenced to serve one year and nine months of "re-education through labour", which is an administrative punishment. The eldest is still awaiting trial on full criminal charges.

Karma Samdup had tried to keep the case out of the public eye and had been confident of winning the freedom of his brothers before he himself was arrested in January. One Chinese source who has known the collector for several years said: "He was completely surprised. He never expected that they would try to find a way to lock him up."

He believed that his prominence in the Tibetan community and in the world of collecting would protect him. He was the protagonist of the popular book "Heavenly Beads" by writer Liu Jianqiang which describes the importance of an elongated bead carved from black and white agate that is the most precious treasure of Tibetans.

Karma Samdup is China's biggest collector of the "dzi" beads � known popularly as "heaven's pearl" -- and he commanded the market and set the price with a personal stock valued at more than 7 million yuan (700 thousand pounds).

Tibetans, and many Chinese, regard the beads as protective amulets, sometimes paying hundreds of thousands of pounds for those with as many as nine "eyes" -- or circular dots in the distinctive black and white design.

His lawyer, Pu Zhiqiang, said he was due to meet his client before the case came to trial today (Tuesday). He told The Times: "I have not seen sufficient evidence to support a criminal charge. This seems very inexplicable to me, especially since this dates back more than a decade. I have many questions."