these people were armed and very intimidating:
Thousands of soldiers were seen in Lhasa on Thursday amid reports of a huge military build-up, as the Dalai Lama expressed fears China's crackdown on Tibetan protesters had caused many casualties.Harmsen/AFP/Yahoo
Long military convoys were on the move in Tibet while troops also poured into nearby provinces, after a week of violent unrest against China's rule of the Himalayan region, witnesses, activist groups and media reports said.
"We saw a big convoy of military vehicles with troops in the back," German journalist Georg Blume said from the Tibetan capital Lhasa early Thursday.
"One convoy was about two kilometres (1.2 miles) long and contained about 200 trucks. Each had 30 soldiers on board so that's about 6,000 military personnel in one convoy."
[...]
China said rioters killed 13 innocent civilians in Lhasa while denying that it used deadly force to end the protests. Exiled Tibetan leaders have said about 100 people were believed to have been killed in the Chinese crackdown.
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Q. How easy was it for you to see what you wanted to see?
A.[...] as the protests went on I think they also probably felt that having me there would help to get across the scale of the ethnically-targeted violence that the Chinese themselves have also been trying to highlight.
Q. What you say you saw corroborates official version. What did you see?
A. What I saw was calculated targeted violence against an ethnic group, or I should say two ethnic groups, primarily ethnic Han Chinese living in Lhasa, but also members of the Muslim Hui minority in Lhasa. And the Huis in Lhasa control much of the meat industry in the city. Those two groups were singled out by ethnic Tibetans. They marked those businesses that they knew to be Tibetan owned with white traditional scarves.
[...]
It was an extraordinary outpouring of ethnic violence of a most unpleasant nature to watch, which surprised some Tibetans watching it. So they themselves were taken aback at the extent of what they saw. And it was not just targeted against property either. Of course many ethnic Han Chinese and Huis fled as soon as this broke out. But those who were caught in the early stages of it were themselves targeted. Stones thrown at them. At one point, I saw them throwing stones at a boy of maybe around 10 years old perhaps cycling along the street. I in fact walked out in front of them and said stop.
I saw them carrying traditional Tibetan swords, I didn't actually see them getting them out and intimidating people with them. But clearly the purpose of carrying them was to scare people. And speaking later to ethnic Han Chinese, that was one point that they frequently drew attention to. That these people were armed and very intimidating.Economist's James Miles iv CNN 20.Mar.08
