[This article has been excerpted.]

CNN World News:

>From Correspondent Andrea Koppel

HUAIROU, China, September 3, 1995 (CNN) -- The issue of Chinese rule of Tibet is so full of raw emotion and the gap between the two sides is so wide...when they come together in the same room, sparks fly.

A workshop Saturday called Women and Development in Tibet was sponsored not by the Chinese government but by Tibetan women living in exile. The women portrayed Tibet as an occupied country whose citizens...are oppressed.

"Within five minutes I was taken and beaten by police," read one Tibetan exile from the testimony of a Buddist nun. The exiles said the nun was imprisoned in Tibet for participating in a peaceful political demonstration.

"Every day of those three months I was made to...withstand beatings with cattle prods, sticks, until I would finally collapse," she said. "These cattle prods raped me; were used on all parts of my body, including my breasts."

The Tibetan exiles say if the Chinese government had known who they were when they applied to come to the U.N.'s World Conference on Women, they would not have been issued visas. The Chinese government says...Tibet is already adequately represented by women members of the All China Women's Federation. The conference opens Monday in Beijing.

The Tibet members of the federation portray is quite a different place from the one described by the exiles. "They are also free to speak. They can say what they like. But we have come from Tibet. We have the most right to say how things really are in Tibet," says a delegate.

A number of Tibetan Chinese were present at Saturday's workshop by the exiles. So were a sizeable number of plainclothed Chinese police officers who videotaped and snapped pictures of men and women who joined the Tibetan Chinese in disrupting the workshop.

The exiles claim...they have been under constant surveillance since arriving on Chinese soil. But in spite of Chinese efforts to intimidate them, these Tibetan exiles say they plan to make the most of this rare opportunity to speak out for the rights of Tibetan women while standing on Chinese soil.