Ngawa County

Ngawa County (Tibetan: རྔ་བ་རྫོང་།, ZYPY: Ngawa Zong , Chinese: 阿坝县; pinyin: Ābà Xiàn), or Aba or Ngaba, is a county of Sichuan Province, China. It is under the administration of the Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture. It is located in the remote northwestern part of the prefecture, on the border with Qinghai and Gansu. The county seat is Ngawa Town.

Conflict

On 16 March, 2011 a 20-year-old Tibetan monk called Phuntsok set fire to himself at a market, in protest against allegedly repressive government policies in Tibet Autonomous Region and other Tibetan populated areas in China. He died in hospital early in the morning of 17 March.

Following Phuntsok’s self-immolation, hundreds of monks from the same monastery, Kirti monastery in Ngaba County, and other local residents staged another protest. Several of them were briefly detained and many others have since been taken into custody. Lobsang Choepel, 24, and Lobsang Ngodup, 32, both monks from Kirti monastery were detained on around 30 March. Two other monks from Kirti monastery, Dhonyoe Dorjee, aged around 34, and Tenzin Gyamtso, 27, were detained on 8 April. All were detained at the monastery and are believed to be held at the Ngaba county police detention centre.