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Tibetan Refugees Brave Perilous Journey to Freedom •
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Tibet and the Ghosts of Tiananmen
By Bill Powell
Time
Tuesday 18 March 2008
It is still nearly five months before the Olympic torch is to be lit in Beijing,
officially starting the 29th summer Olympics. But, diplomats in the Chinese
capital believe that a high level game of chicken has already begun, one that
has now turned deadly - first, in Lhasa, the capital of what China calls the
Tibet Autonomous Region, and now elsewhere, according to Tibetan exiles and
human rights groups.
Yesterday, in China's Sichuan province, at least eight bodies were brought
to a Buddhist monastery in Aba prefecture, allegedly shot dead by Chinese riot
control police, according to an eyewitness account quoted by Radio Free Asia.
The escalating confrontation in and around Tibet is a nightmare for China's
top leadership, but one, some diplomats believe, that could not have taken anyone
in the central government completely by surprise. It pits the leadership in
Beijing against its domestic opponents - who include not only Tibetan dissidents,
but also separatist groups in the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang, as well
as human rights and political activists throughout the country.
Each side understood that the months leading up to the Games would be "extremely
sensitive," as one diplomat put it. The government knew "from day
one," another diplomat told TIME, that "a successful bid for the games
would bring an unprecedented - and in some cases very harsh - spotlight"
on China and how it is governed. On the other side, everyone from human rights
activists to independence seeking dissidents in Tibet and Xinjiang - "splittists"
in the Chinese vernacular - knew they would have an opportunity to push their
agendas while the world was watching. "Thought the specific trigger for
this in Tibet is still unclear, that it intensified so quickly is probably not
just an accident," the senior diplomat says.
According to this view, it was never hard to imagine a scenario in which some
group - and maybe several - would push things, try "to probe and see whether
they could test limits." The critical issue, now front and center, diplomats
say, is just how far angry Tibetan activists will push - and how harshly the
Chinese government will push back.
How extensive the violence has been thus far is not at all clear. Tibetan exile
groups claimed on Sunday that 80 people were killed in Lhasa on Mar. 13 and
14. Those claims are as yet unconfirmed by any independent reporting and Beijing
says just 10 "innocent" people were killed in Lhasa. It denies any
deaths elsewhere. The Dalai Lama surely stoked Beijing's anger on Sunday by
claiming, from the headquarters of the Tibetan government in exile, when he
accused China of "cultural genocide" against Tibetans and by declining
to urge his followers in Tibet to surrender to authorities there by midnight
tonight, as Beijing had demanded.
Thus, the dilemma for the Chinese leadership is clear. "They need to get
this under control, but to do so without a lot of brutality," the diplomat
says. The reason for that is clear enough: the memory of Tiananmen Square, undeniably,
now hangs in the background as the crisis in Tibet unfolds in this, the year
of China's grand coming out party. The scale of the unrest in the Tibet Autonomous
Region - as well as the threat they pose to the Communist Party leadership -
doesn't compare to the massive political demonstrations in Tiananmen Square
in 1989, which were brutally put down by Chinese military troops. But the issue,
at bottom, was the same: how to respond? And here, China may well understand
that 1989 was a long time ago. Beijing in those days could literally pull the
plug on CNN and Dan Rather and then thumb its nose at the rest of the world.
"It couldn't do that today even if it wanted to, and I don't think it does,"
the senior diplomat says.
China understands well, this diplomat says, that the world is carefully gauging
how it responds to the unrest. He notes that initial reports out of Lhasa had
the People's Armed Police, an anti-riot squad, responding to the demonstrations
- not the potentially much more lethal People's Liberation Army. The problem
for China is that the unrest, while apparently contained for the moment in Lhasa,
spread to other cities on Sunday. The government's dilemma is obvious: if Beijing
insists publicly - and actually believes - it has been relatively restrained
in its response to the unrest so far, what happens if it continues? "Knowing
full well that something like this - maybe not as intense, but something of
this sort was likely to come before the Olympics," says the diplomat, "is
different than knowing exactly what to do when it comes. I'm not sure the leadership
has a specific playbook for it." Let's just hope it doesn't reach for the
old one, circa the spring of 1989.
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Tibetan Refugees Brave Perilous Journey to Freedom
By Tim Johnson
McClatchy Newspapers
Monday 17 March 2008
Kunde, Nepal - As he slipped off a shoe to display a severely frostbitten
foot, Pema Tsering acknowledged that he made a dire mistake at the beginning
of an arduous trek over the Himalayas from Tibet to freedom in Nepal.
He forgot to bring plastic bags.
When he forded a stream with his younger brother early this year, he wasn't
able to keep his feet dry in the icy water, and it seeped into his canvas shoes.
For several days and nights, his feet grew colder and colder. Tsering, 18,
and his 15-year-old brother, Sonam Dhondup, couldn't stop for fear that Chinese
border guards would arrest them - or worse.
"We didn't sleep on the Tibet side. We just kept walking and walking until
we crossed the pass," Tsering recalled, adding that a Tibetan nun eventually
saw him limping and sent him to a tiny hospital here.
The icy Nangpa pass is a well-worn route. Thousands of Tibetan Buddhists have
crossed it in recent decades, part of an exodus of Tibetans escaping Chinese
religious and political control. The pass is no ordinary mountain crossing.
It's 18,700 feet high, higher than any peak in North America except Mount McKinley
in Alaska and Mount Logan in Canada's Yukon.
The thin air, drifting snow and occasional gunfire from Chinese guards make
the flight of Tibetans a remarkable - if little-documented - drama
that unfolds behind the headline-making journeys of the Dalai Lama, the exiled
Tibetan religious leader, who tours world capitals espousing nonviolence and
advocating greater autonomy for Tibet.
Some 2,000 to 3,000 refugees trek across the Himalayas each year. They take
no sleeping bags, no tents, no fluffy down jackets and no maps. The lucky ones
have guides, and carry sheeting to use as tarps and plastic bags to wrap their
feet. Most come in winter, when glacial crevasses freeze shut and Chinese border
guards stick close to their heated outposts rather than roaming the frontier.
The steady trickle of refugees bedevils China's claim that all is well in Tibet.
Some Tibetans chafe that they can't pursue studies primarily in their own language,
rather than Chinese. Many also revere the Dalai Lama, whom they consider a God-king,
even though China considers him a "splittist" who wants to shear away
Tibet from the motherland. China bans even his photograph.
Hoping to win over Tibetans, China has spent billions of dollars on roads,
schools and new settlements for Tibetan herders to coax them from a nomadic
lifestyle.
It also uses force, the locked and loaded version, deploying more armed guards
along the Tibetan border to slow the stream of migrants in the run-up to the
Beijing Summer Olympic Games.
"We've seen a real stepping up of security on the Chinese side,"
said Kate Saunders, the communications director for the International Campaign
for Tibet, a human-rights advocacy and monitoring group with offices in Washington, Brussels, Belgium, and Berlin.
The Chinese treats certain parts of China with large minority populations,
such as Tibet, as autonomous regions. Ethnic Tibetans also inhabit areas outside
of what China calls Tibet, dwelling in portions of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan
and Yunnan provinces.
On a cold, misty day in Kunde- elevation 12,600 feet, a hamlet that's
a strenuous two-day walk from the border with Tibet in eastern Nepal -
a paramedic described the travails of crossing the mountains.
"Some are unlucky. They get caught in bad snowstorms," said Mingma
Temba Sherpa, the chief health assistant at the Kunde Hospital, a small facility
established by Sir Edmund Hillary, the famed 1953 conqueror of Mount Everest. "They get snow blindness ... a few get frostbite or pneumonia or gastrointestinal
problems."
When refugees arrive with frozen extremities, doctors can do little.
"The frostbite treatment is not to amputate right away. You wait for demarcation
of dead tissue and live tissue. It can take up to a couple of months,"
Temba said.
Adding to their difficulties, the Tibetans can't carry a lot of supplies, food
or warm clothing or they'll call attention to themselves in Tibet as they near
the border.
"They have to pretend they are not on a long and dangerous journey,"
said Wangchuk Tsering, who was the Dalai Lama's personal representative in
Nepal until 2005, when Katmandu shut his office under pressure from China.
"The only time they can walk is at night. During the daytime, they rest
and walk only a little, behind boulders," Tsering said. "The higher
they reach, the more the snow."
"The snow was knee-deep," recalled Tashi Dawa, 19, an ethnic Tibetan
from Qinghai, north of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, who crossed over in early
February.
"It was not fresh snow. But it was deep and a little icy," added
Drakpa, his companion, who like some Tibetans goes by only one name.
Refugees generally bring a little sugar, yak butter and "tsampa,"
or roasted barley. They mix the tsampa with water or snow to form a paste for
sustenance. They bring only what fits in pouches or small backpacks. They leave
behind personal documents.
China rarely gives passports to Tibetans, and it harasses anyone who's discovered
to have traveled to see the Dalai Lama, who's in exile in India. Thus Tibetans
who wish to travel do so without papers.
Tibetans cross illegally into Nepal at any of three points. In addition to
the Nangpa Pass, the other points are far to the northwest, near Mount Kailash, a remote sacred Buddhist mountain, and at Kodari, where a Friendship Bridge
links the two nations. The majority go across the pass, which is the closest
point to Lhasa, Tibet's capital.
If all goes well, it takes a week upon getting off a bus in Tingri, a Tibetan
town with public transportation where would-be refugees can arrive without calling
attention to themselves, until they reach human habitation in Nepal. Another
few days of hiking take them to a road where they can catch a bus to the U.N.-managed
Tibetan Transit Reception Center in Katmandu, which offers shelter, food and
medical care.
A virtual underground railway of monasteries and guesthouses scattered over
the Khumbu Valley helps many of the Tibetans finish their journeys into Nepal.
At one guesthouse, in a village that's a 90-minute walk from here, the sympathetic
owner described how the refugees huddle together at night for warmth as they
camp in the open. Since he's breaking Nepalese law by taking in travelers without
proper travel documents, he spoke to McClatchy on the condition that he not
be identified.
"They sleep in Chinese garbage bags," he said, running to a closet
and fetching a torn white plastic bag.
Occasionally, Chinese border guards use lethal force against the migrants.
Once in late 2006, a bedraggled and "very scared" group of several
dozen Tibetans arrived, the guesthouse owner recalled.
"The group leader had a bullet hole in his pants," he said.
At least he was unscathed. Marksmen from the Chinese People's Armed Police
shot dead a 17-year-old nun in the same group as the Tibetans trudged up the
snowy pass.
The incident sparked an international furor. Foreign mountaineers at the base
camp of Mount Cho Oyu- the sixth highest mountain in the world, at 26,906
feet - adjacent to the pass, captured the scene on video as the guards
hoisted their rifles and aimed at the unarmed group of Tibetans walking single
file toward the pass.
"They are shooting them like dogs!" Romanian mountaineer Sergiu Matei
is heard saying on the videotape, taken the morning of Sept. 30, 2006.
While China initially said that the Tibetans had attacked the troops, it later
defended its tactics as normal border management.
Once refugees reach Nepal, dangers change. Soldiers prey on them for money.
"They asked us to give them money. We told them we didn't have any money.
Then they started searching us, even making us take off our shoes," said
Jamyang Jinpa, a 23-year-old Tibetan who came earlier this month. "They
found the money and took it."
Many of those who cross the mountains are teenagers and even children, sent
by their parents for a Tibetan-language education at schools overseen by the
Tibetan government in exile, headquartered at Dharamsala, a hill station in
India.
"Everybody wants to see the Dalai Lama. Their first reason is to see His
Holiness, the Dalai Lama, and the second reason is to study something,"
said Kalsang Chung, the director of the Tibetan Transit Reception Center.
"There are so many schools in Tibet," Chung said, "but the education
is not good. Behavior is not good. They have to study in Chinese (by middle
school)."
Several times a year, the Dalai Lama receives the latest batch of new arrivals,
giving them his blessings and urging them to study hard while in exile.
"He tells them, 'We have to be good people. We have to save our culture.
We have to challenge the Chinese.... We cannot fight them without education,'" Chung said. "'We cannot challenge the Chinese this way,'"
Chung said, shaking his fist.
Tsering, the 18-year-old refugee with the frostbitten foot, has finished fighting
against China. He's taken a room at the Tsamkhang Monastery in this hamlet,
and he said he might remain here indefinitely.
"I never want to go back," he said.
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Watch video of the Tibetan journey at http://videos.mcclatchydc.com/vmix_hosted_apps/video/1771220
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