Chinese Tyranny in Tibet

THE swirling flakes had blotted out the high line of the sharp-peaked Himalayan range behind us. Through the gray wall of snow loomed the shapes of two men with long Tibetan robes of dark maroon and high-peaked hats with big flaps flying. As they came closer, we could see something humped at their backs. They set their burdens down in front of the Dalai Lama’s sister and knelt at her feet. The burdens were orphans. Would she take them into her home for children? The home, which we had just visited, was incredibly overcrowded — a couple of summertime bungalows built years ago by the British, with facilities which might on an emergency basis have been adequate for fifty or sixty, now trying to cope with 250 youngsters. But, of course, Mrs. Tsering Dolma took them in. W hat else could she do?

We all went into the main room, about thirty feet square, where nearly two hundred children, tightly packed in even rows, squatted on the floor. The older children had gone to the other bungalow.) Their round little faces were raised expectantly toward their teacher. When he gave the sign, they broke into song. The clear childish treble came with unexpected force, and the music — a Buddhist prayer — poured out of them with joy like that of bird song, but so loud and clear that it echoed inside our heads.

This was Dharmsala, on a lower rim of the Himalayas in India’s North Punjab. These children — crowded so that the small ones sleep four or live on a narrow string cot and the rest on thin straw mattresses on a stone floor, with barely enough clothing to keep warm and a diet very different from the high-protein foods of Tibet — these were the lucky ones. Those still in Tibet are being used as conscript labor by the Chinese, or have long since been snatched trom their parents and taken into China on the promise of being educated, apparently in order to de-Tibetanize them, make use of their labor, and perhaps return them to Tibet years hence, after they have been fully converted by Communist training. The mass kidnaping began in 1952, after China’s forceful take-over of Tibet in 1951. Some children were heard from for a while; others, not at all. Many Tibetans at last escaped into India without knowing what had become of their children.

What has happened to Tibet during the past ten years makes a story as sickening and as heartbreaking as the acts of Hitler at their maniacal worst. Hundreds of Tibetans, both men and women, were stripped and given physical examinations which concentrated on the sexual organs. They were then strapped down and subjected to brutal, as well as surgically inexcusable, operations, resulting in the loss ol sexual potency. Lamas and landowners were tortured in the most ingenious and disgusting ways before being finally destroyed — sometimes buried alive or strung up, so as to ensure a lingering death. Frequently Tibetans were made to beat or kill the lamas. The alternative was to be killed themselves. Monasteries have been sacked, sometimes shelled; holy books and images, destroyed or carted away. Food supplies, including those in the granaries, which have traditionally kept the people alive through the long winters, have been carted off to feed Chinese soldiers or simply shipped into China. Farmers have been robbed of their beasts of burden, and in cases where the animals died from overwork, the owners were made to carry the loads.

Here is one bit of evidence taken from a Tibetan who escaped into India, and it is by no means the worst:

“The Chinese called the people together and killed two lamas before them, both were shot at, but they did not die. Then boiling water was poured over one and he was strangled. The other was stoned and hit on the head with an ax. The Chinese said that they were exploiters of the people, and the time had come to see whether the lamas could save their own lives, let alone those of the people.”

This sort of thing has been happening since 1951, when China forced the signing of a document cynically called an “Agreement on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet.” In the very act of promising autonomy and cultural freedom, the Chinese swallowed the country. Appeals to the United Nations went unanswered. Finally, in 1959, unable to make any effective resistance, the Dalai Lama fled into India, where he was given asylum on the promise that he would not indulge in politics.

At the time of the invasion there were about four million Tibetans. Only a few thousand have succeeded in escaping — about 20,000 into Nepal, 3500 into Bhutan, 30,000 to 40,000 into India and Sikkim. They are still coming over the high mountains. Toni Hagen, representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross, recently flew by helicopter up to the fool of Mount Everest, where he found 6000 newly arrived Tibetans in a village of 2200 Sherpas. All were in danger of starvation, unless food supplies could soon be flown in. By difficult passes and long treks Tibetans kept coming into India, Sikkim, and Bhutan as well, until the snows stopped them.

The news they bring is that China is carrying on its systematic exploitation. Chinese now outnumber Tibetans three to one in their own country. Many are soldiers, but farmers have been sent in too. A railroad has been pushed into Tibet from China — it will be completed from Lanchow to Lhasa in a few months — and military roads are rapidly spreading out in strategic directions. A lama who escaped into India reported in 1959 that the Chinese provoked the Tibetan people by saying that Ladakh, Bhutan, and Sikkim had the same language and culture as Tibet, and added that these regions were really part of Tibet. Sooner or later they were to be amalgamated with Tibet proper.

India awoke a year or so ago to the fact that China had indeed been reaching out in that direction and had already occupied thousands of square miles of mountainous territory in Ladakh, which had always been regarded as Indian. Border negotiations dragged on for months and have ended in a complete stalemate, with the Chinese still in possession.

Word has filtered across the mountains that the Chinese are moving toward Bhutan and Sikkim, which are in fact culturally and religiously tied to India. The Chinese are trying to make friends of Sikkimese and Bhutanese in Tibet, teaching the languages to their own military officers, conscripting soldiers and sending them to the border, where roads, airfields, and military bases are taking shape. Nearby monasteries are being converted into barracks. With all this activity, the Chinese are still shipping grain out of Tibet, where famine has already begun. Bhutan, with its small population and its ability to raise large amounts of grain, is an irresistible attraction to the Chinese.

India’s fear of provoking China is apparent in the way it treats Tibetan refugees. While refusingaid from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and assuming full responsibility, it has temporized and muddled along with makeshift programs which are no solution to what is obviously a long-term problem. For, unless some other government invites them, the Tibetans are in India to stay.

At present, some 700 are getting training in crafts and small industries, while around 1200 have been sent south to Mysore to hack farms out of the elephantand leopard-infested jungle. Two schools in the Punjab mountains, run by Tibetans themselves, take care of about 500 out of the 4000 children. The remaining refugees are in tent camps in the hilly northern regions of Punjab and Assam, where they are working on the roads and drawing rations from the Indian government. Some of the children in these camps get a certain amount of schooling; others get none.

TYPICAL of these camps is one in a remote area near the Nepal border. In the distance rise the snow-capped high mountains, climbing to 26,000 feet, through whose passes the refugees had to find their way into India. We reached the camp after a two-day trip ending with a forty-mile jeep ride over a road that had been cut out of the mountainsides. The camp itself, at an altitude of only 7000 feet, is built along a rather steep slope forming the summit of what is here a small hill.

We got out of the jeep, dusted ourselves off, and began to climb the slope. Ahead of us stood rows of low huts built of roughly split rails from nearby native oak. The rails, driven into the ground, had been topped with a roof of poles and straw. Wide chinks appeared between the gnarled palings, and I wondered how the residents had fared through the winter.

As we walked up the slope, word of our arrival went ahead of us, and people began to gather outside the huts, placing their hands together in the Indian gesture of greeting. All ages turned up, from babies at the mother’s breast to old and weathered people whose skin had gone leathery and who had lost many of their teeth. Most of them wore the traditional long robe, though some of the men wore trousers beneath. All the women had heavy jewelry of silver or brass at their necks or girdles, and some had put on the attractive striped aprons which with embroidered boots complete a proper Tibetan costume. But much of the clothing was ragged or dirty. These people, 900 of them, had walked as much as 400 miles, mostly through difficult mountain passes, to get to India.

A young woman standing at the opening into her house looked at us with an intelligent smile. We asked through an interpreter whether we might step in. It was dark inside; the only light came from the chinks and from the open doorway. Around the sides, a layer of small, sharp stones had been placed on the dirt floor, and on this the bedding. In one corner, a few pots, and a fire in the middle of the floor, over which the housewife was cooking a rare delicacy — pork luncheon meat from Canada, one of the surplus foods which had found its way even to this remote place.

On a rough shelf a couple of images of Buddha in silver frames had the place of honor, with several small brass pots full of water and an equal number of oil lamps in front of the images. These could not hide the gloom and squalor, yet they were both brave and pathetic.

We stooped and went out and on up the ridge, the crowd growing thicker. In this arid, mountainous place there was no land for grazing or farming and nothing the people could do to earn a living. We passed an old man squatting under a little roof of boughs, swinging his prayer wheel and mumbling a continuous prayer. We stopped to watch a woman weaving with the simplest kind of frame and shuttle, just as her ancestors must have woven a thousand years ago.

The largest crowd was waiting for us in front of the only two-story building in the camp, and from the upper window an old lama with a benevolent, calm face peered out to see what was happening. A spokesman came forward dressed in Tibetan robe and Panama hat, fished something out of an inner pocket, and laid it across my hands. It was a yard of wide surgical gauze. In Tibet the symbol of greeting used to be a scarf of thin silk, but he had done the best he could. He had once been a sort of business manager in a lamasery and had fled with 150 of his people.

“Why did you leave Tibet?” I asked.

“Because the Chinese were taking our children away. And because they came and told us to do this, do that, and mistreated our lamas.”

“What are your plans for the future?”

“We want to go back to our own country when it is restored to us. Meanwhile, whatever His Holiness tells us to do, we will do.”

But, what? I asked the district commissioner how many Tibetans he thought might find work and a place to live in his area. “None,” he said. “We haven’t land enough for our own people. Or jobs.” Sympathetic, intelligent, and full of good ideas, he still could see nothing but shortterm road jobs for Tibetans.

“How about sheep herding?” I asked.

“No grazing land to spare. Besides, Tibetan sheep won’t live here. They die in the wet weather. We’ve tried several times to breed them.”

“Couldn’t they herd local sheep?”

“Inferior wool, no market.”

The greeting from our Tibetan host over, we were now invited into the two-story building ahead of us. We climbed a set of outside stairs, stepping into a room lighted only by the little oil lamps in front of a row of framed images. Above them rested piles of big oblong packages tied up in cloth — sacred books, brought all the way from Tibet. The attending lama took one down and opened it; first a pair of boards tied with a long thong, then three separate cloths. Inside lay a pile of unstitched sheets of fine paper, handmade from bark and covered with beautiful brush strokes.

But the big surprise lay in the room beyond, where the old lama with the benign face awaited us. At one end of the room stood a sort of palanquin, brightly painted and ornamented and surrounded with lamps. Toward the top I noticed a small window. From behind me someone caught the daylight with a mirror and sent it to the pane. A face leaped into view — smooth, impassive, like a Japanese No mask.

“It is a holy man,” our interpreter whispered. “When he died many years ago, he said he would come to life again. His body is softening now. The time is coming.” They had carried him, too, over all those dreary miles and lofty passes.

We climbed on up the slope to a scrap of flat land just big enough to contain a circle of squatting children, who were shouting the multiplication table in Hindi. Learning an Indian language would, of course, be a great help to the refugees, but most of the adults know only Tibetan. Nor, aside from a few basic skills, such as weaving or shoemaking, known to the few, had they anything to offer in a labor market already glutted.

Since this is so, they must be retrained, resettled, educated if they are not to remain an enclave of dependent refugees and beggars.

LIKE other people who are having their first exposure to a different sort of civilization, these Tibetan refugees are often excitingly educable. I spent an hour or two one sunny morning teaching English to a small class of teen-agers. We squatted in a circle on a bare piece of ground, our only equipment a few cheap picture books and a small, old-fashioned slate with a sliver of chalk. They learned quickly and eagerly. As for the small children, who for lack of anyone to guide them just mill around most of the day, they arc a charming set of round-faced cherubs. They surround the visitor, hungry for attention, struggle good-naturedly for possession of his hands, and are delighted to be lifted, touched, regarded. When lunch comes, they squat in little circles about the yard. A longrobed Tibetan woman drops food into their tin cups. The smaller children go at it with fingers and spoons, smearing it impartially over their mouths, faces, and clothes.

One group of children has gone to Switzerland, where a house has been built for them in the Pestalozzi Village, which accommodates several other nationalities. The Tibetans go to school with the others, but can preserve their own language and customs as well. Another group is studying agriculture in Denmark. When I talked with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, it was apparent that he would welcome other opportunities for children to study abroad. When I told him how teachable I had found the youngsters, he smiled and said: “A friend of mine from Europe says, ‘They all have large round heads stuffed with brains.’ ”

About 2500 lamas are now in exile, many of them in Assam, where the Rimpoches, or teachers, are instructing about 1500 junior lamas.

I asked His Holiness whether there was something in Buddhism which accounted for the dignity, fortitude, and cheerfulness I had found in his people in the face of disaster.

“Yes,” he said, “it is the idea of karma — that what comes to us is not only inevitable but also the result of our own actions in this life or in others we have lived. Therefore, we have to accept it. Some Buddhists think it better to suffer than to be happy, because this is the path to betterment. But our Tibetan Hinayana Buddhism has tended to emphasize the compassionate Buddha.”

Tibetans surely merit our compassion. How does it happen that their plight has raised so little interest in the world?

Some help has come from the United States. It has included food, clothing, medicines, and support for schools and training centers. But, as yet, there is no all-out program to educate the young and retrain the mature so that they can earn their livings, establish homes, care for the old or weak, or set up centers where something can be preserved of the culture China is systematically destroying. To do this for 40,000 is not an impossible job for a country the size of India, but political considerations have stalled a real program. Many Indians are as badly off as the Tibetans, or in worse straits. If too much is done, the inflow of Tibetans may increase.

In Nepal, the situation is different. The government, realizing that caring for 20,000 refugees calls for skills and experience it does not possess, has accepted aid from the International Committee of the Red Cross. A special plane able to fly at high altitudes and land on the few small fields has been brought from Switzerland to get desperately needed food to points where the refugees can reach it. There arc no roads in Nepal beyond Katmandu Valley. Even a small plane can deliver in one hour for about $170 what it would require twenty porters to bring after sixteen days of walking at a cost of $390. But unless two more planes can be financed immediately, thousands will starve. Plans are also being made to resettle the refugees in upland areas where they can continue as herdsmen and do some cultivating, but resources are needed to carry out the plans.

It seems certain that refugees will continue to cross the borders in the years ahead. The difficult terrain, the uncertainty of what may await them after the long trek, and the surveillance of the Chinese may limit the numbers, but it is likely that thousands will come. Until now the fear of Chinese displeasure has prevented a proper program. But, as the Indian leader Jayaprakash Narayan said at the Afro-Asian Convention on Tibet: “The question of Tibet’s freedom is as much an international question as that of Algeria or Kenya or the Congo.” The United Nations High Commission for Refugees should be in the picture. India, for fear of offending China, has not wanted it. But by now it should have become clear that China will not need any excuse to do exactly what it likes in Tibet or on India’s borders.