MB Civic

Many questions were asked of people who
are not guilty of anything “They are just
guilty of being Tibetan.”

“Before, this was the best place, but now
it’s like a prison. When I watch TV,
everything is lies. So I walk in the streets
where the soldiers ask for my identity
papers. If there’s the smallest mistake,
you’re finished. We should be tolerant but
we can’t be tolerant any more.”

This is how one young Tibetan man
describes life in Lhasa these days in an
interview that was smuggled out of Tibet.*
A rare eye-witness testimony by someone
who was jailed in the aftermath of the
protests in March this year.

This same individual (whose identity is
withheld for obvious reasons) describes his
arrest and subsequent experiences at
Lhasa’s Gondzhe detention center. Chinese
police entered his house “broke down five
doors, checked everything, threw it all on
the floor and hit everyone present. It was
like a burglary.”

After he arrived at the prison, the man says
that the guards beat him around the head
“At first I thought they were going to kill
me…They gave us half a steamed bun a day.
Everyone was very thirsty and a lot of
people drank their own urine. We had no
clothes, no blankets, nothing to lie down
on, and it was very cold. For four days
nobody spoke to us. They just left us there.”

He describes the monks being singled out
for particularly harsh treatment. “I’m very
worried about the monks. The soldiers
regard [them] as something very different…
I can’t understand why they do terrible
things to monks.”

“I met an old man who had two ribs
broken. He was all bent over and couldn’t
stand up straight. He was dying, so the
police took him to People’s Hospital….The
people who are taken to hospital are
usually people who have been shot or
beaten, and they usually die there. A
brother and sister were sleeping in the
same room and all of a sudden soldiers
came and threw them out of the window
from a high floor to the ground. The
brother was killed on the spot. The sister
didn’t die, but she can’t lie down, she has 
to remain in a sitting position all the time.
They took the body away and told her that
she is forbidden to tell anyone.

I didn’t see the dead people, but in prison
people called out to the police or
soldiers, “Someone’s dead!” Every day
people shout that.” He says that one man
was beaten to death for owning a jacket
that the guards suspected he’d stolen. “I
can’t believe we are in the 21st century”.

The man interviewed goes on to recount
how a seventeen-year-old high school
student who hadn’t even participated in
the protests was subjected to torture
 “Afterwards, he said that he’d done all
kinds of things. That happens to a lot of
people. They pressure people to admit
things they never did….Many questions
were asked of people who are not guilty of
anything. They are just guilty of being
Tibetan.”

Even though the man who witnessed these things has been released, his
movements and activities will certainly be monitored from now on.

“I have a relative in India. I wrote just what
I heard and saw to send over the Internet. I
wrote a little and saved it on Word. All of a
sudden it disappeared, so I was very
frightened. So I haven’t checked my e-mail.
I have a lot of friends abroad and they send
many e-mails but I haven’t opened them.”

In a poignant moment, he recalls how he
used to complain about his family’s
cooking. “In prison I sometimes dreamed
about food. I would remember my mother’s and my sister’s cooking, and I
really appreciated how tasty the food is at home.”

But even after everything he’s seen and
been through, the stubborn Tibetan knack
for finding meaning in adversity is revealed
in this young man’s response to his
experience. “These are the worst things
that I’ve ever seen in my life,” he says, “but
you learn how to be a good person.”

*Source: Tibetan Center for Human Rights
& Democracy

Rebecca Novick is a writer and the
Executive Producer of The Tibet Connection
radio program. She is currently based in
Dharamsala, India.