CHINESE security forces were deployed to deter Tibetans from contacting a UN human rights delegation that visited Tibet last November, according to unofficial sources in Lhasa.
A week after the team left Lhasa four monks were arrested for staging a demonstration linked to the visit.
UN officials were apparently unaware that they were surrounded by plainclothes police, that monks were banned from the main temple area during the visit, and that military helicopters flew low over the Tibetan quarter of the city as a deterrent, say Tibetans and tourists who were in the city.
Twenty Tibetans who tried to submit information to the delegation smuggled messages out to a monitoring organisation in London after giving up the attempt to reach the UN, and at least four people sent written protests saying that they were unable to reach the delegation because of security operations.
A senior UN official who was on the 40-hour trip to Tibet, from November 25 to 27, denied that his team had been inaccessible.
'We visited many temples and squares, and people could have come to the hotel,' he said, speaking from the UN's Centre for Human Rights in Geneva.
