Published by: World Tibet Network News, Friday, Jun 08, 1996

MONTREAL, Saturday, June 8, 1996

Feature Article in the Montreal Gazette

MARK ABLEY

It was a macabre display. On a coffee table in a sunlit Montreal office, with a Bartok violin concerto playing softly on CBC Stereo, lay eight instruments of torture. The man sitting in front of them - a shaven-headed Tibetan monk wearing a crimson robe - looked at them with easy familiarity. The thumbcuffs, the handcuffs, the electric cattle prods: he was intimate with them all.

Venerable Palden Gyatso is 65 years old. Except for the lower half of his face, which is crumpled, he seems younger. Yet for more than half his life, he was incarcerated in the labor camps and prisons of the Chinese gulag. Gyatso (now on a North American speaking tour) languished there for 33 years.

His official crime was "counter-revolutionary propaganda and agitation." In plain words, he took part in the 1959 rebellion against Chinese rule over Tibet, put up pro-independence posters, and refused to kowtow to Chinese bullying in "re-education" sessions.

"I've seen so many prisoners come and go," Gyatso said through an interpreter. "Some of them can take the beatings, the burnings, the torture; others can't. Some of them try to anger the Chinese so much that they'll be given one final rifle-butt to the head to end their misery - but the Chinese just keep coming back with their cigarette lighters and dogs and whips and boiling water.

"There are some prisoners who are very stoic, who never say a word. Compared to them, I'm nothing. I begged them to kill me several times."

Gyatso spent most of the 1960s, '70s and '80s in prison. His basic ration was a bowl of gruel a day; on one occasion, hunger reduced him to eating a boot. He lost track of the years.

Pressure from Amnesty International (which adopted him as a prisoner of conscience in 1991) and from an Italian human-rights group led to Gyatso's release in 1992. Donning a Chinese cap and torn, casual clothes, he caught a bus to a town near the Nepali border and, along with several other Tibetans, walked over the Himalayas to freedom. He now lives in the Indian town of Dharamsala, site of the Dalai Lama's Tibetan government-in-exile.

When he escaped from Tibet, Gyatso's knapsack contained more than just clothing and a few personal effects. It also held some of the weapons of torture that are routinely used against Tibetans who dare to speak out for freedom. Those weapons, more than mere words, would provide evidence of oppression to a world that prefers to look the other way.

One of the items - an electric baton or cattle prod - appears deceptively ordinary. About a foot in length, tapering at one end, it resembles a black metal flashlight. It sits lightly, almost gently in the hand.

But in the fall of 1990, it was a baton like this that caused Gyatso's worst injuries. During a re-education session for Tibetan prisoners, he yelled out, "We have no rights! The Chinese have taken away our rights!"

Usually, guards aim the cattle prod at a prisoner's chest or back (it feels, Gyatso said, as though the blood there is bubbling with heat). But on that day, he recalls, an infuriated Chinese official grabbed a prod, attached it to an adapter and rammed it down his throat.

"I remember the fire in my mouth," he said. "I don't know how long it was there, because I lost consciousness. When I awoke, I was back in my cell, covered in blood and urine and feces. Most of my teeth had come out. My tongue was twice the size it had been. To this day, I can't eat many foods because of the damage to my throat."

And does he hate his torturers?

"Westerners always ask this question," Gyatso replied, giving a sudden grin. "They always seem to be amazed when I say: 'No, I don't hate them.'

"I felt pain at the sight of Tibetans being cruel to other Tibetans. But they had to do it or else lose their jobs and not be able to support their families. And the Chinese were obeying orders, too. They were also in a situation they could not control."

*---*---*

Even if you don't believe Gyatso is telling the truth, there remain the hundreds of other cases that human-rights groups around the world have struggled to document. In Amnesty International's new directory of the victims of Chinese repression, more than 700 entries deal with imprisoned Tibetans.

Such cases also form the basis of a 192-page book, published this spring by Human Rights Watch/Asia: Cutting off the Serpent's Head.

The title comes from a propaganda manual, issued in October 1994 by the propaganda committee of the Communist Party in what China misleadingly calls the Tibetan Autonomous Region: "As the saying goes, to kill a serpent, we must first chop off its head. If we don't do that, we cannot succeed in the struggle against separatism."

What the book shows is that over the last three years, the Chinese government has been tightening its stranglehold on Tibet. For the first time since the Cultural Revolution of the late '60s and early '70s, China launched personal insults against the Dalai Lama, the prime symbol of Tibetan resistance (and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize). No longer imposing silence about arrests and political trials in Tibet, China began to publicize the heavy sentences its courts were handing out for non-violent "crimes."

In November 1993, for example, a monk named Jampa was sentenced to four years in prison for putting up a leaflet containing "reactionary slogans" on a door in an obscure town 700 km east of the Tibetan capital, Lhasa. An official radio broadcast said: "The trial of this specific case served as an example in educating the masses."

Lay people have not been exempt from the repression - a schoolteacher named Kunchog Tenzin was reportedly beaten so badly in 1995 that he can no longer stand upright. The authorities had identified him as the author of a pro-independence pamphlet.

But, as usual in Tibet, the brunt of resistance to the Chinese occupation is borne by Buddhist monks and nuns.

Tibet's youngest political prisoner, a novice nun by the name of Sherab Ngawang, died in May 1995. She was only 15 years old, but had spent the last three years in jail. Along with other nuns, she had joined a political demonstration in Lhasa. The Human Rights Watch report describes her condition:

"According to a Tibetan undertaker, Sherab Ngawang's kidneys showed signs of acute damage, and there were adhesions on her lungs. During her imprisonment ... prison guards reportedly beat her with electric batons and with a plastic tube filled with sand because she allegedly made a face at them when they were closing the cell doors one evening. She also was trampled on or kicked. One source reported, 'They beat her until she was so covered with bruises that you could hardly recognize her.'"

Tibetan groups now say their country has a new political prisoner, even younger than Sherab Ngawang: a boy named Gedhum Choekyi Nyima. In May 1995 the Dalai Lama recognized him, in accordance with custom, as the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama, Tibet's second most important monk.

Two months later, the boy and his family disappeared. They have not been seen since. China then chose another 6-year-old boy to be the next Panchen Lama - a bizarre move by a supposedly atheist regime.

In 1996, the repression has been stepped up. Two months ago, China forbade the display of pictures of the Dalai Lama in monasteries, temples, schools, offices, even private homes.

In subsequent clashes, Chinese soldiers wounded as many as 80 Tibetans. Ganden, one of Tibet's leading monasteries, is said to be closed and virtually abandoned after police opened fire on stone-throwing monks in May.

Last week, Chinese police repeated a June 30 deadline for separatist "assassins" to surrender.

*---*---*

China has the largest population in the world; it also has one of the fastest-growing economies. That combination makes foreign governments fearful to anger the Chinese by speaking out too loudly on questions of human rights. In Ottawa, as in other Western capitals, private sympathy for Tibetans is rarely translated into public words that might offend Beijing.

"The more our relations with China intensify," said Colin Stewart, a spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs, "the more we raise human-rights issues in private talks. Tibet is pretty much at the top of the list. At the same time, we're going ahead with our commercial objectives."

Canada's longstanding position is that when the Trudeau government recognized China a quarter-century ago, it also accepted Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. Tibetan questions are consigned to the status of a purely internal matter, in which we have no more right to speak publicly than does Beijing about Quebec separation.

But the analogy is far from exact. For one thing, China's occupation of Tibet has been condemned several times by the United Nations. International jurists have written that Tibet has an excellent case for regaining the de facto independence it enjoyed until 1950.

Apart from all this, precedents do exist for Canada to offer a public denunciation of human-rights abuse in Tibet. In January 1991, the Mulroney government suspended a $150-million line of credit to the Soviet Union after Soviet troops killed civilians in the not yet independent republics of Latvia and Lithuania. And in October of that year, Canada (as part of the 38-nation Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe) agreed that fact-finders could investigate human-rights violations in a member country - even without that country's consent.

In the U.S., support for Tibetan independence is more widespread, and more glamorous, than here. Look at the lineup of stars for the Tibetan Freedom Concert: a two-day festival to be held in San Francisco on June 85 and 16. Among the headline acts are such bands as Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sonic Youth, The Smashing Pumpkins and Rage Against the Machine.

The concert is being organized by the Milarepa Fund, a Tibetan support group that was set up two years ago by a rock group called the Beastie Boys. But the Milarepa Fund's ambitions go beyond music. It has also organized an international boycott of all Chinese goods for the month of June.

"People have a right, as consumers, to vote with their dollars," explained John Dinusson of the Milarepa Fund. "This is a boycott against the Chinese government, not the Chinese people. Our press doesn't always reveal this, but many of our foreign policies are made not for the benefit of the people, but for the interest of large companies that do business with China."

The boycott has now been endorsed by more than 100 groups in the U.S., including the AFL-CIO. Environmental groups, churches and some Chinese democracy organizations are also on board. In this country, the Canada-Tibet Committee has lent its support.

As for Gyatso, he continues his fight from his new home in Dharamsala. "Our struggle is for the truth," he said, packing the torture equipment into a canvas bag. "It sounds very simple - but truth must prevail."