Published by: World Tibet Network News, Monday, October 28, 1996

The Independent - London, 25 October 1996

Michael Dempsey follows the Tibetans' perilous route to exile from their occupied homeland

It was on the road out of Tibet, not long after we first spied Mount Everest, with clouds tailing off it like Buddhist prayer scarves of white silk, that we were stopped by the Chinese police. They were childish, dangerous and insisted on searching our car.

One removed his green, furlined overcoat with finesse, like a rich dowager sweeping into a restaurant. Our Tibetan driver lumped out nervously and opened the rear of the jeep where our luggage lay covered in dust. As an officer prowled round the back, the other, without saying a word or lettering any expression ripple across his impassive face, slid into the drive's seat, next to me. He punched a tape into the cassette player and waited. Nothing happened. It dawned on him that he first had to turn the ignition key. My companions and I thought this was all part of the drill, that he would drive off down the road and loot our stuff at gunpoint.

Our Tibetan driver leaned through the window and removed the keys. "Sorry, sir. I need the keys to open the rear," he explained. The Chinese officer sulkily pulled a Gameboy out of his pocket and began to play his beeping little game with feigned concentration. But his eye was on my camera, resting on the seat between us. Lucky, the driver called me back to open up a crate and I was able to slip the camera into my pocket. The officer went back to his Gameboy, peeved. Maybe all he wanted was to show off his electric toy to someone in this desolate outpost. There was nothing but a bridge, a river and agate-coloured mountains, polished smooth as fly the weight and terrible proximity of the hard blue sky.

As we sped off from the checkpoint, our driver said: "At night, it is more dangerous. These Chinese police carry guns. They shoot Tibetans who are tying to cross the river and escape to India to see Dalai Lama."

A few miles back, an old Tibetan hitchhiker had tried to flag us down. Our driver did not want to stop. Maybe he was thinking ahead to the two Chinese police at the bridge. The hitchhiker did not look like a farmer; he was a longdistance traveller, with a heavy coat, a bedroll and a cheap plastic sports bag. His big, goldtoothed smile faded as our car left him in a whirlwind of dust.

At least 5,000 Tibetans escape from their Chinese-occupied land every year. Most of them cross the Himalayas in winter; the blizzards keep the Chinese patrols huddled in-doors. My companion pointed out the route the fleeing Tibetans take, if they survive the river crossing. They go across a broad valley of haystacks until the reach the Everest range. There, they tread along glaciers and 19,000ft mountain passes. Even without the danger of being shot by Chinese border guards, they risk dying of frost-bite.

Anyone who breaks a leg is left behind. Sometimes a guide takes his fee, abandons them during the night, and they must make their way directionless over the tallest mountains in the world. And yet this ordeal is often braved. For most Tibetans, it is worth it to meet the Dalai Lama in exile in Dharmsala, northern India. Other Tibetans send their children over the Himalayas for schooling; the Chinese are trying to eradicate the Tibetan language and culture. At a Tibetan refugee centre in Kathmandu, Nepal, one 11-year-old girl who had trekked over the Everest passes was desperate to get word back to her parents in Lhasa that she had made the journey safely. Not all Tibetans who cross the Himalayas remain in India. some make the equally arduous return journey. If they are caught coming back by the Chinese, as many are, they face interrogation and torture as "spies of the Dalai clique". Yet, for many Tibetans, the pull of this landscape, where every rock, lake and tree is imbued with spirituality, is inescapable

. In exile, many are miserable in India's torrid, crowded cities.

Outside the Jokhang temple in Lhasa, ringed by thousands of Tibetan pilgrims and fires of burning juniper incense, my companion heard a familiar voice: "Well, ignore me, why don't you?" She looked down and saw a beggar-monk who had crossed the Himalayas to have a bone of his dead mother blessed by the Dalai Lama. My friend remembered that this beggar-monk had stolen the watches of two Tibetan girls in his trekking party. The begging, apparently, was better in Lhasa than in Dharmsala. My friend gave him a few yuan, and a woman who was squatting next to the monk, selling plastic combs and sandals, piped up; "Don't give him any money. He's not a monk. He's a thief."

Some Tibetans return from exile, attracted by China's economic reforms. They open hotels and become travel agents. But they never cease to worship the Dalai Lama and openly display his photograph at shrines in their homes. After China passed law banning Tibetan civil servants from sending their children to schools in India, many students were forced to come back.

Others return to track down jailed relatives. One woman I met was anxiously searching for her brother who was a monk, arrested after the police found a photograph of the Dalai Lama in his monastery quarters. He had been transferred to several different prisons and now the Chinese would not tell her where he was being kept. A fervent Buddhist, she spent much of her time praying at the Jokhang temple. Sometimes she would go out to the slaughtering grounds and slip pills into the mouths of the yaks slavering with terror of the butcher's cleaver. She believed these magical pills would improve the yaks' chances of better rebirth in the next life.

As we headed towards the Nepal border, dropping from the barren plateau into canyons of mist and rainbows, I thought back to the Chinese policeman with his Gameboy: he was not any good at zapping electronic aliens and I hoped his aim was no better shooting at the Tibetans passing across the Himalayas.