TSERING Phantsok looked at us with cloudy, unseeing eyes. At the hands of his Chinese guards, his 19-year-old eyes had already seen more torture than he could come to terms with. The young monk was 18 when he lost his sight from the brilliance of the snow on the Himalayan pass as he made his way up the savage, snow-capped terrain through Nepal, into India. The brilliance of the snow was literally blinding. By the time he got to Nepal, he could barely see. Doctors told him it was a common condition for Tibetans who survived frostbite and starvation as they attempted to cross the mountains that stand sentinel over India’s border with Tibet.
“I had heard of a land of freedom, where you could practice Buddhism without being beaten; this sounded impossible to me. But I knew our spiritual leader was there, and I wanted to see him and to ask for guidance. Around me, monks from many different monasteries called for an uprising; they wanted to fight. But that is violence and it is also suicide,” said the young monk who was on a bunk at the reception center for newly arrived Tibetans in Dharamsala, India, seat of the Dalai Lama’s government in exile.
Many of his friends and fellow monks from Salu Monastery in Western Tibet avoid tourists’ questions about the Chinese. But the flow of information in and out of Tibet is so tightly controlled by the Chinese authorities that some monks succumb to the idea that tourists can somehow spread the word that the situation is not improving. “They disappear only because they talk to Western tourists, and then we find them somewhere beaten, tortured and dying. An uprising will have no effect, impossible to defeat the Chinese, but the monks would rather die.”
Just a year after the monk traded his sight for freedom, thousands of Tibetans marked the 1959 armed uprising in Lhasa with vociferous and violent protests. This report appeared in the New York Times on March 15, 2008:
“BEIJING: Violence erupted Friday morning in a busy market area of the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, as Buddhist monks and other ethnic Tibetans brawled with Chinese security forces in bloody clashes. Witnesses said angry Tibetan crowds burned shops, cars, military vehicles and at least one tourist bus. State media said at least 10 people died.
Beijing is facing the most serious and prolonged demonstrations in Tibet since the late 1980s, when it suppressed a rebellion there with lethal force that left scores, and possibly hundreds, of ethnic Tibetans dead.”
Amid twirling prayer wheels and the chanting of prayers, a resolute group of Tibetan refugees is camped at the central chowk (market square) in Leh. As the sun sinks in the sky and the temperature drops to minus seven, 70 year-old Nagwang Dolma remembers with a smile how she walked 60 days to safety.
“We were young. That was the only way to travel. We walked days to the nearest village. I am not trying to make my journey sound hard. What is hard is the suffering of the people. We were beaten if we didn’t denounce our lamas in public. How could we do that?” It was 1959 and she doesn’t remember making a decision to follow the Dalai Lama into exile. It just happened.
The wrinkles close in over her eyes as Dolma recalls how there was blood in the dust of the unpaved streets of her village as “Chinese soldiers ran around killing, killing, killing, stepping over wounded children, or trampling them; sometimes they turned around and shot into their bodies just to make sure they were dead. We were hiding, walking, hiding, scared.”
The barren beauty of Ladakh in India’s far north reminds her of her home in Tibet. She longs to return but says she is comfortable in the refugee settlement of Choglumsar, where she can wake to views of the magnificent Himlayas. “I am on hunger strike because I am old; maybe the young can fight for the freedom of Tibet. I can only feel some pain for my people — my protest. The monks were forced into reacting violently in Tibet. How long must they tolerate the (daily) violence of the Chinese?”
How can monks, who train and meditate in the hope of serving society by attaining inner peace turn into rebel fighters? Very easily, says Lowell Thomas, author of “The Silent War in Tibet.” Their training casts them into the mould of the perfect warrior: “They can subsist on a meager diet, and the rigors of their duties give them muscular strength and stamina; they are superbly disciplined.” Their legends speak of King Gesar slaying enemies with a ruthlessness that seems at odds with Buddhist teachings. Several distinguished historians warn against ignoring Tibet’s warrior past when expansive tracts of the east ruled by three tribes, the Khampas, the Goloks and the Amdoans, who refused to pay taxes to central Tibet in a show of their disdain for what they saw as a corrupt bureaucracy that surrounded their beloved Dalai Lama. The Khampas were the most feared of the tribes. It was from among their ranks that the CIA recruited and trained several freedom fighters before air dropping them back into Tibet to lead a guerilla resistance movement. The rebel fighters (Chushi-Gangdruk) fought valiantly until they were outnumbered and savagely suppressed by the Chinese.
When Rinzen Tashi isn’t working at a nearby beauty parlor, she is wrapped in the writing of ex-CIA operative Roger E. McCarthy. In “Tears of the Lotus,” he describes the Tibetan rebels he worked with and their “wit”, “intelligence” and “unparalleled courage.” For young Tibetans roaming the lanes of Majnu Tilla, the largest Tibetan refugee settlement in Delhi, the stories take them back to a time when the people of Tibet were a proud, united force fighting for a common purpose: To protect their young king, the Dalai Lama, and their faith. Tashi, 17, says, “I want to fight, I want to die fighting. But I live in India, and my parents say there is a future for me here, but I want to study Buddhism and devote myself but then I read what the Chinese did and I hear they are still doing it, I think I must learn to fight before trying to learn Buddhism. Even monks can put aside their vows.”
Tenzin Norsang monitored the progress of the Olympic Torch around the world with only one thought in mind — extinguishing the symbol of Chinese arrogance when it arrived in Delhi.
“That torch was a blood-stained propaganda vehicle (we could not allow) to pass through here,” said Norsang, joint secretary of the Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC). “We wanted to convey a message; our nonviolent protests are being ignored so we have to be more aggressive.”
India has been home to 140,000 Tibetans in exile since the Dalai Lama fled the Chinese Army as it overran Tibet in 1959. The TYC hears from thousands of the younger members of the Tibetan community in exile when they plan protests. They were seething at the idea of a torch being paraded through their home, and hundreds poured in to carry out covert operations in India’s capital, Delhi.
Norsang squatted in the debilitating summer heat. It would be a while before the monsoon arrived to relieve the sun’s scorching glare. He had memorized the route the torch would take and he surveyed every inch of the area, looking for “any hole, every space, corner” to conceal protesters who didn’t mind a stint in Tihar Jail. Seven hundred young Tibetans streamed into the city to engage in “guerilla protest tactics” hiding in secret locations all over Delhi as other Tibetan groups held hunger strikes and peace vigils.
The Indian authorities began to show their apprehension: They failed to find the Tibetans who they knew from past experience were concealed somewhere in the city. They cut the Olympic torch route from nine to three kilometers. The city refused Tibetans a permit to protest that day, but they were won over by “pacifism displayed” by Tibetan hunger strikers in Jantar Mantar, an area in central Delhi designated for protests, similar in spirit to the Hyde Park Corner. A permit was granted and the Tibetans engineered a little surprise on the side.
“Storming the Chinese Embassy gives young Tibetans a chance to confront the Chinese boldly and feel that they are doing something other than sitting and waiting; so many are sick of the nonviolent approach and they feel ignored and want to see results,” says Dhondup Dorjee, vice president of the Tibetan Youth Congress.
In Oct 2007, they managed to breach tight security at the Chinese Embassy by pulling up in a bus next to the impossibly high walls, scrambling over the hood and roof of the bus, stepping onto the wall, and dropping down into the embassy grounds. They quickly painted “Free Tibet” on the walls before they were arrested and dragged from the compound.
Migmar Tsering, 23, said, “I jumped in and suddenly I was face to face with a Chinese guard, Dil chaha kay alloo key taraha chheel kay maar daaloon, (I wanted to peel his skin like a potato and kill him there),” he says in fluent Hindi before continuing in English: “But then the Dalai Lama’s teachings kept coming into my head and my hands were locked. I was feeling so frustrated, I wanted to do more than just jump the wall. The Chinese have come into our homes in Tibet and dragged our people out and beaten them to death and I wanted this guard to feel some of their pain.”
In particular, the Tibetans were protesting a new Chinese law that banned reincarnations of “living Buddhas” that do not meet government approval; the banning obliterates a centuries-old Tibetan practice. As the torch approached the TYC’s protests intensified, and Beijing began to get agitated while Delhi promised to step up security. On April 16, police arrested 33 Tibetans as they once again tried to scale the walls of the heavily guarded embassy.
“They now spray the ground with water so we slip; they keep tools to break our chains if we chain ourselves to the gates; they are learning to defeat us, but we are continuing to keep up pressure on them,” said Norsang, who has the extremely difficult task of preparing emotionally charged Tibetans for a peaceful protest. “We keep having debriefings, explaining we do not want to hurt anyone, just make a point, so don’t throw stones at the Chinese officials, only at the building; don’t touch anyone, but their emotions run so high, it is very hard.”
Then there are independent operators like Karma Dorjee, 25 from Darjeeling. He shows up at organized protests but he takes orders from no one. He is a familiar face in the cells at Tihar Jail, having broken into the Chinese Embassy three times in the last 12 months.
“Dekho desh azaad karna hai (Look, I need to free my country) so I am willing to shed my own blood or the blood of any. Our other problem is not fear, when it comes to shedding blood I can promise you the Tibetans will rise and not worry about how much we shed, but the Dalai Lama forbids us for now. We are Buddhist. If we are fighting to preserve it, then how can we violate the idea of non-violence but then also how can we watch Chinese kill Buddhism?” said Karma who respects the TYC’s efforts but considers them too passive and pacific for his revolutionary taste.
Karma says he does not want to hear about torture, execution and starvation in Tibet. He wants to do something about it. But while the Dalai Lama insists on a peaceful approach, Karma confines himself to barging into Beijing’s buildings in Delhi.
But Thupten Ngodup had no such qualms. When police showed up to break up a 1989 hunger strike in order to appease Beijing, he doused himself with gasoline and lit a match. As the flames consumed him, he held his hands together in prayer, dying a few days later of his burns. Every young Tibetan conjures that story within a few moments of talking about violent action.