by Kalsang Rinchen
New York, May 27 – The web blog of popular Tibetan writer Woser has been hacked, according to information received from the writer herself.
The Tibetan intellectual known for her critical writings and open admiration for the Dalai Lama has been under constant watch from the Chinese government and its internet police. She was earlier stopped from leaving China for Norway to accept a literary prize.
Her ID on the popular internet phone service provider Skype has also been hacked, and her password changed by intruders.”Someone has for a while on Skpye claimed that he or she is an overseas Tibetan, an officer from the Tibetan government-in-exile, or having secrets to pass on etc. It looks that he or she has stolen the list of my Skype contact list. Around 10PM, on May 27, when attempting to warn my contact list of this person I realized my Skype account has been hijacked. My password has been changed and I can no longer log in. As far as I can tell, the hijacker has begun to make contact with people in my account. This places me and my contacts in an extremely dangerous situation,” she wrote.
The Tibetan poet and writer Woeser,under house arrest in Beijing since March 10th, has been constantly writing and updating the world about recent events in Tibet. She has posted series of updates on Tibet.
Woser, born in 1966 in Tibet’s capital Lhasa, graduated with a degree in Chinese from the Southwestern Institute for National Minorities in Chengdu, and later attended the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing as a visiting scholar. From 1990 she worked as an editor of the journal Tibetan Literature (Xizang Wenxue) in Lhasa. She is the author of 10 volumes, including one book of collected poems, a prose volume Notes on Tibet (2003), and two books on the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution which are not distributed in China. She was removed from her position at the Tibet Cultural Association in Lhasa in 2004 after China’s United Front Department and its Publications Bureau determined that her writings contained “political errors” due to the positive references in Notes on Tibet to the exiled Tibetan leader.
Because readers in China have no access to her books, Woser began to make extensive use of the Internet to disseminate her writings. In February 2005, Woser established her first blog through www.tibetcult.net, which was earlier forced to shut down.
