MB Civic

My Tibet: Secret report from the roof of the world
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Eleven years ago, Tash, above, risked his
life to flee Tibet. Now he has risked it
again, by returning with a hidden camera
to film the stories of torture, murder and
forced sterilisation that China does not
want the world to hear.

By Clare Dwyer Hogg
Independent – London, England
Sunday, 30 March 2008

Tash does not look like a man who has just
put his life in danger. But as he sits in a
cosy editing suite in London, the images on
the screens around him – a Tibetan
political prisoner showing his scars, a still
of Tash interviewing a Buddhist monk –
prove the contrary. He has risked his life at
least twice: the first time, 11 years ago, to
escape his native Tibet; and then, as the
screens document, when he went back with
a hidden camera to expose what he felt
were injustices perpetrated by the Chinese
government. “I can now never go back to
Tibet,” he says. “But it is worth it.”

What makes his actions particularly
dangerous is the Chinese government’s
blanket ban on journalists entering Tibet.
His report for Channel 4’s Dispatches
reveals detail not seen before: reports last
month of the recent uprisings could only
be given by major news sources from
vantage points outside the country –
usually Nepal – conveying what snatches of
second-hand experiences they could
garner from the other side of the
Himalayas. Tibet has an estimated one
Chinese soldier for every 20 Tibetans – as
opposed to one soldier per 1,400 Chinese
citizens. This country, about the size of
western Europe, has been firmly in the grip
of the Chinese government since the Dalai
Lama fled in 1959.

Tash fled Tibet, too, when he was 18,
without telling his family. Yet as a boy he
had been protected from knowing too
much of the political repression. “I knew
there were some people who had the Dalai
Lama’s book My Land and My People,” he
says, “but when I saw them talking they
wouldn’t let me join in – I was too young.”

He says everybody practised in secret.
“Boys would secretly watch the films of the
Dalai Lama teachings, but no one knew
anything of the outside world.” Eager to
escape to that unknown, Tash travelled the
treacherous journey across the mountains
to India, past frozen bodies half buried in
the snow, to freedom.

Not everyone is so fortunate. Footage
captured by Western climbers in
September 2006 (and shown in the
Dispatches programme) has a line of
refugees plodding through the snow, with
some of their number suddenly picked off
by bullets fired by the Chinese soldiers
behind them. “They shot a girl dead right
in front of me and dumped her corpse in a
hole nearby,” one of the group remembers.

These people were deliberately escaping
from what they considered Chinese
tyrannies. As a young refugee looking for
an education in India, though, Tash didn’t
realise the insulated nature of his old life
until the political relevance of his new-found freedom began to hit home. “On
Tibetan television almost every night, there
would be stories about the Japanese
invading China, committing genocide,
beheading the Chinese and raping girls. I
used to hate Japanese people, until I came
into India and realised that it was
propaganda,” he recalls. The memory of a
life in Tibet without fear seemed even
more preposterous during his three-
month undercover operation there last
summer.

“When we were in Tibet I was greatly
shocked,” he says, clenching his hand into a
gentle fist. “We’re going to lose all Tibetan
identity soon.

In Lhasa, if you don’t speak Chinese, it
doesn’t matter how good your Tibetan or
English is, you don’t get a job.” And the
fading of the ethnic way of life, he was
distraught to find, is down to more than
this systematic wearing away of cultural
and religious ties. Through tip-offs and a
web of contacts, he discovered that Tibetan
women are being forcibly sterilised.

One woman agreed to speak to Tash,
despite the cultural propriety that would
rarely see a woman speak about such
intimacies with a man, and the obvious
dangers of criticising the government. “I
was taken away against my will,” she
explains. She has two children – more than
the “one child” policy allows – and could
not afford to buy a certificate that stated
she had been sterilised. “Apparently they
cut the fallopian tubes and stitch them up,”
she says ruefully. “When they opened me
up they pulled them out by the roots. It
was agonisingly painful.” They didn’t use
anaesthetic, or provide any drugs aside
from aspirin. “I was sick and giddy,” she
says. “From the day after the operation I
had to look after myself. If I needed a drip I
had to pay for it myself.”

Anyone who speaks out against the policies
of the Chinese government like this, or
calls for the freedom of Tibet, is in danger
of being condemned a “splittist” – someone
who is splitting from the Communist Party –and sent to prison. This, Tash discovered,
can be for as little as raising a Tibetan flag
in a meeting. A farmer, found guilty of this
crime, explains: “I spent the prime of my
life in prison … from the age of 24 to 37.”
And so, the culture of fear is continually
reinforced by harsh sentences for
apparently minor crimes. An 18-year-old
Buddhist monk, Tash says, was recently
sent to prison for three years for
inscribing “Free Tibet” in a book.

And time spent in a Chinese prison
invariably means torture. One ex-political
prisoner on Tash’s film explains the use of
handcuffs: “There are types that bind the
two thumbs together,” he says,
demonstrating. “And others are serrated
so they cut into the flesh of the wrists. They
handcuff you and hang you from the
ceiling then beat you. They strike your body with iron bars.”

A Human Rights Watch report in 2007
claimed that tens of thousands of Tibetans
have been moved into permanent camps.
Tash visited a cluster of little concrete
homes, miles away from any town: the
people he spoke to expressed unhappiness,
but with their livestock confiscated and
roaming on the grasslands forbidden, they
have no hope of changing things. Apart
from protest, of course, but openly
protesting against the police is widely
acknowledged as a way to bring your life
to a swift and bloody end.

Only after spending time in his homeland
with the perspective of freedom does Tash
understand an incident in his youth that
he, blissfully ignorant, could not
comprehend at the time. “When I was
about 16 I sang an old song about the
Dalai Lama at my village’s New Year
festival,” he says. A friend had given him
the words, and he didn’t know it was
banned. “When I sung, the old men and
women were crying, I didn’t know why. The
head of the village thanked me and put a
red scarf round my neck.” Now he sees the
situation all too clearly. “Tibetans,” he says,
“are trapped. They are like birds in a net.”