The Philadelphia Inquirer

Sunday, December 8, 1996

Forty-seven years after seizing control of Tibet, China continues to jail and torture thousands of Tibetans in a campaign to erase Tibet's culture and its independence movement.

VICTIMS TELL THEIR STORIES:

1. Drablha - Engineer. Raised the Tibetan flag for a day.

2. Kelsang Pelmo - Nun. Was among four others chanting for freedom.

3. Tashi Gyatso - Monk. Spoke to American journalists.

4. Passang - Seamstress. Joined a demonstration.

5. Dorjee Tseten - Monk. Chanted the slogan "Free Tibet."

6. Dawa Kyizom - Student. Helped stitch a Tibetan flag.

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1. Drablha - Engineer. Raised the Tibetan flag for a day.

Inside Tibet: Country Tortured

To Tibetans, the concrete box in a prison cell is known as a "Chinese coffin." Chinese call it a jinbi.

For 22 hours a day over a three-month period, this box the size of a coffin confined a 40-year-old Tibetan man named Drablha (like many Tibetans, he has only one name). He was confined to the box while imprisoned for the crime - in Chinese-occupied Tibet - of raising the Tibetan national flag one day in 1988.

During the two hours a day that he was taken out of the box by Chinese police, Drablha said in an interview in India, he was often hung by his thumbs and beaten with iron bars.

Drablha, a former engineer for the Chinese government, spent his life in Tibet but was educated in Beijing. He was jailed for 11 months. He believes he was stuck in the box for so long because he was unwilling to say what the Chinese police wanted to hear: that Chinese rule in Tibet was good for Tibetans.

He decided to raise a flag for Tibetan independence because he discovered, through his work, that the Chinese used Tibet as a colony. "I'd have to design a bridge to a forest, or a mine," Drablha recalled. "The Chinese always calculated in advance what they'd get out of Tibet."

Inside the box, he said, "there wasn't even a hair of light. I was in there day and night, and I couldn't tell when it was day, when it was night."

It was only as wide as Drablha and barely as long, with an iron door at one end. Some air could enter, Drablha said, but breathing was difficult.

The only thing inside was a small bucket. By contorting himself, Drablha used it as his toilet.

"I couldn't move in there, and it was very hot; I'd be sweating," Drablha said. "I'd rather be tortured than stay in there. Sometimes I wished they'd take me out and execute me."

He said that most of the time, he meditated, reciting the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum of the patron deity of Tibet, who symbolizes compassion. "I dreamed that I was moving, always moving, in a jeep, going to China."

When he was taken out, Drablha said, he was hung - either by his thumbs, or upside down, his feet near the ceiling.

"They'd suspend me for 15 minutes, then take me down, then put me back up because they'd say I wasn't confessing" to advocating independence for Tibet, Drablha said. "Sometimes I'd be naked while suspended. Then they'd ask me: `Where is your independence for Tibet?' If I didn't answer, they'd spray me with a hose. It was winter and the water was very cold."

He remembers the name of the Chinese policeman who tortured him: Xiao Li.

"Xiao Li twisted my arm behind my back so that it made a noise - Crack! and he pulled it off the track" - out of its socket, Drablha said.

In India, Drablha pulled up his sleeves to reveal his elbows. The right elbow is out-of-joint, at a different angle than the left. "This is the most I can straighten it," he said, bringing his arm to a 45-degree angle.

An X-ray of Drablha's arms shows that his elbows are at odd angles, according to Ellie McDougall, a New Zealand doctor who examined him in India in June. She also said that imprints on his fingers showed that he had been locked in finger cuffs. His thumbs had line-thin horizontal scars at the joints.

McDougall also said Drablha had scars from cigarette burns on his legs. X-rays of Drablha's hands suggest that his thumbs were subjected to unusual pressure, McDougall said.

During the examination, Drablha pulled up his right pants leg to his knee to reveal five dark round circles, each about a half-inch in diameter. "Police did this while interrogating me," he said.

Each day, Drablha said, police opened the metal door once or twice to give him a small piece of bread and black tea. He said he was always hungry.

Earlier this year, Drablha and his wife decided to leave Tibet and flee to India. They made the trek through the Himalayan mountains. Now Drablha is hoping to find a job - any job.

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2. Kelsang Pelmo - Nun. Was among four others chanting for freedom.

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The five young nuns from the Shugseb Nunnery outside Lhasa were prepared for beatings when they and eight others chanted freedom slogans and distributed leaflets for a few minutes in the city's Barkhor Market area in May 1988.

But the nuns were not prepared for the particular type of torture they said was administered by prison guards: Electric cattle prods were repeatedly rammed in their rectums, and nightsticks were thrust into their vaginas. Two of the nuns, Ugyen Dolma, then 18, and Kelsang Pelmo, then 22, said police also rammed electric cattle prods in their vaginas, rectums and mouths.

"I felt unconscious," Dolma said. "I couldn't bring my voice up. I felt I was about to die."

The nuns said the assaults began in public, as army officers grabbed them and hit some of them with gun butts while they were walking in a circle in the Barkhor, Lhasa's central market area.

Tenzin Choedon, one of the five nuns, was 22 when she was arrested.

She recalled: "Three army officers caught me, handcuffed me, and dragged me into the police van. Tibetan women nearby tried to pull me away from the Chinese. I told them, `I have demonstrated, I already have made my decision."

A monk, Rinzin Gyadhen, was severely beaten on the head with a gun butt as he was dragged into the police van, recalled Pelmo, who said she also was hit with a gun butt on the back. "He was bleeding so much that he was very pale," Pelmo said. Blood poured from the monk's head, arms and chest.

On the lawn of the Gutsa Detention Center, photos were taken of the five nuns the day they were arrested. Then, police tortured them with electric cattle prods on the nuns' faces, arms and necks, each one said in interviews recently in India.

In separate rooms, they said, they were interrogated and tortured further with electric cattle prods. One police officer switched the electricity of the cattle prod on and off repeatedly before applying it to Pelmo's face and neck, shocking her, she said. "The sound was terrible," Pelmo recalled.

Dolma said police repeatedly beat her on the face with a ruler, and then tortured her with an electric cattle prod. "I had trouble breathing," she said.

Another nun, Rinzin Kunsang, then 20, recalled the police asking her: "Why did you demonstrate? Why did you shout slogans? Who told you to do this? Did you get a letter from the Dalai clique [Tibetan government in exile in India] asking you to do this?"

Each of the five nuns said they recalled similar questions. Each gave the same response: She had decided to demonstrate on her own.

"I did not commit any crime," Pelmo said. "I just want my country back."

Apparently that was not the reply desired by the police.

"Now we will feed you to the dogs," Pelmo recalled the police saying.

Pelmo was taken outside, where at least 10 officers interrogated her. When she did not provide an answer they liked, they sent an attack dog, which sank its teeth into her ankles.

"The dog understood Chinese; he was very big, tan-colored, and his ears stood up," Pelmo recalled. The dog bit three of the nuns, the nuns said.

Today, Pelmo's ankles have scars from the bites.

James A. Litch, an American doctor who examined Pelmo last month, found puncture wounds consistent with dog bites on both ankles. He said some of the scars were from "repetitive and quick bites," and one long scar appeared to be from a dog that "grabbed and held her for a minute, and then pulled away."

Choedon said: "The dog bit me on my thigh and hands." After the dog was finished with her, Choedon said, it was taken to attack another nun.

That night, Pelmo said, she was taken to a room near the detention center's main gate. About 30 prisoners, most of them men, stood outside the room's windows and peered inside. These were not political prisoners; they were ordinary criminals - people arrested for robbery or assault.

Three policewomen inside the room - Pelmo remembered their names as Pema, Chungdak and Mei-yi - ordered her to remove her clothes. Slowly, Pelmo took off her chuba, the traditional Tibetan woman's dress. The policewomen ordered her to remove her underwear. "I felt deep shame, deep embarrassment," she said; she had never taken off her clothes in view of any man - much less 30 of them staring at her through the windows.

First, Pelmo was ordered to lie on her stomach, she said. Two police beat her with knotted sticks, she said. Then a policewoman repeatedly rammed the stick into Pelmo's vagina.

"You will not get freedom, you will not get independence, not even in your dreams," Pelmo recalled the policewoman scolding her.

"It was so painful," Pelmo said. "I was crawling, rolling on the floor."

Immediately afterward, Pelmo said, the policewoman thrust the stick into Pelmo's mouth. Then she inserted an electric cattle prod into Pelmo's vagina and rectum, she said.

"I became senseless," said Pelmo. "I felt like a drunk; I couldn't even walk."

Police carried Pelmo into her cell.

Choedon, meanwhile, was led toward the room with the three big windows. She said she felt great foreboding. As she was led in, she saw two police carrying Pelmo. "She seemed unconscious," Choedon recalled.

The prisoners on the other side of the windows were leering at her, she said. Inside, three policewomen ordered Choedon to take off her clothes and lie on her stomach, she said. "They beat me from head to toe with huge sticks," Choedon recalled. "The thieves and robbers [looking through the windows] were shouting and laughing, `You didn't beat her enough on the legs! Beat her there!'

"After they beat me over the whole body, about four times, I could hardly feel anything."

Then she felt an electric cattle prod rolling over her body. An officer stuck the prod, electricity surging, into Choedon's rectum. "I couldn't believe the pain," Choedon said. "It was as if my heart was broken."

She said police threw water onto her and pulled her to her feet.

"I was standing near the wall," Choedon said, "when they put the stick in my vagina."

Thupten Yonten, then 20 - the fifth nun in the group - said that she, too, was sexually assaulted that day by police using electric cattle prods and sticks. She said she did not want to describe the details of the assault.

The next morning, policemen visited each of the nuns in their cells. They asked each one the same question.

"They asked me if I had changed my mind about wanting Tibet's independence," Pelmo recalled. "I said no."

Pelmo said police dragged her into another cell. One of them beat her with a stick until it broke, she said. Another police officer used a belt. A third twisted her arms and legs behind her, as though trying to break them, she said.

One officer asked a question: "Have you changed your mind about wanting Tibetan independence?" Pelmo said no.

Pelmo said police dragged her to yet another room.

Again, she said, she was tortured with electric cattle prods and sticks.

Meanwhile, in other rooms, the other nuns also were tortured, they said.

When the nuns were released from jail, they were unable to return to their nunnery because of Chinese policy; they made the trek to India in 1989 and 1990.

Litch, the doctor, found that the nuns' physical and psychological conditions were consistent with their stories of torture. He examined four of the nuns;

Yonten was in Nepal at the time.

Today Kunsang suffers from serious depression because of the torture, Litch found. And Choedon worries that she will not see her parents "until Tibet is free."

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3. Tashi Gyatso - Monk. Spoke to American journalists.

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Tashi Gyatso, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, said he was arrested and tortured from May through July of 1992 for speaking to two American journalists in the Tashi Thunchuklong Monastery in Tsolochul, in eastern Tibet.

Gyatso, then 17, said that he and nine other monks were in the kitchen, making bread from barley, when the first journalist took photos and asked:

What do you eat every day? How often do you bake bread? Are you happy under Chinese rule?

Gyatso - now a refugee in India - and several other monks said the Chinese had taken their precious religious objects to China, and were subjecting monks to rules about when and how they could pray. They said they wanted independence for Tibet.

The following morning, the village police officer, Ulan Thar, a Tibetan, visited the monastery, Gyatso said. He asked who had spoken to the journalist. Gyatso and two other monks said they had.

Gyatso said he was mildly surprised by the officer's visit. Many of the monks believed there were at least two informants among them, he said.

One month later, in May, police came for the three monks. They were taken to Tsolokhi Prison, near Qinghai Lake.

While in prison, Gyatso said, he was taken to a room about nine by six feet. About four inches of water covered the floor. Police stood outside the room, which had a raised doorway.

A police officer told Gyatso, who was wearing his burgundy monk's robes, to take off his slippers. The water was higher than his ankles, he recalled.

Gyatso said a police officer thrust the electric prod onto his left hand. "My body shook," he said. "I fell down, and I was lying in the water on the floor."

Gyatso said he heard the police laughing. His robes wet, he slowly stood up.

He said a police officer shocked him again.

Laughing, the police officer then thrust the electric prod into the water, Gyatso said. The monk said he felt electricity surging throughout his body.

Gyatso was tortured in this way for 20 minutes, he said. Meanwhile, he heard the screams of the two monks who were arrested with him.

Six weeks later, the three monks were released.

In May 1993, Gyatso was imprisoned again, for nearly two months. He was accused of putting up wall posters calling for Tibetan independence - a charge he denied.

When Gyatso returned to the monastery, he was told he was no longer allowed by Chinese authorities to be a monk in Tibet.

Gyatso didn't want to spend the rest of his life as a criminal suspect. And he wanted to be a monk. So he trekked through the Himalayas and arrived in India in November 1994.

Gyatso said the two monks who were arrested with him are still in Tibet.

James A. Litch, a doctor from Seattle who examined Gyatso last month, said Gyatso is "suffering psychologically" and is "clinically depressed."

"Being in exile is another form of torture," the doctor said.

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4. Passang - Seamstress. Joined a demonstration.

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There have not been many large protests by Tibetans against the Chinese. But there was a major one in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, in March 1989.

Passang (she has only one name), then 26, a seamstress, carried the Tibetan flag during that demonstration for independence. During the next two days, Passang said, she helped other protesters stave off police tear gas. She passed out wet towels for demonstrators to cover their faces.

"When the tear gas was released, I saw people suffering," explained Passang, who had thought she would spend her life in Lhasa, taking care of her parents. She had one brother, a monk.

On the third day of the demonstration, while she was passing out wet towels, Passang said, a police officer hit her hard in the back with his gun butt. She went home, in pain.

There, the pain worsened: She had trouble getting out of bed.

Still, Passang felt fortunate: Two of her friends, Tsering Lhakyi and Choesang Dolma, had been shot and killed by police during the demonstration.

Ten days later, at midnight, police arrested Passang at her home, saying they had a photograph of her at the demonstration. They took her to a police substation in the Barkhor Market area. For two days, Passang said, two officers hit her with their fists and shocked her with electric cattle prods while a third officer interrogated her. The police spent a long time punching her head and her ears, Passang said.

Passang spent 10 days in jail. After her release, she was refused admission at Lhasa People's Hospital because she had been arrested. Passang spent two months, in pain, at home. Then, with help from a relative who knew a doctor at the hospital, Passang was admitted, she said.

At the hospital, a doctor told her that she had a broken rib, Passang said.

She also realized that she had lost hearing in her right ear.

A medical record, dated Sept. 20, 1995, from Delek Hospital in Dharmsala, India, shows that Passang is deaf in her right ear.

Before police beat her, Passang said, she had no hearing problems.

In 1995, Passang decided she could no longer stay in Tibet. She made the trek to India.

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5. Dorjee Tseten - Monk. Chanted the slogan "Free Tibet."

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Near the Potala Palace in Lhasa in March 1991, Dorjee Tseten chanted the slogan "Free Tibet" along with 18 Tibetan monks and nuns. He was 17 years old.

Less than a half-hour later, Tseten and three fellow monks, along with two nuns, were arrested by police.

At a police station, Tseten said, officers asked him why he had chanted the slogan. Tseten replied that Tibetans had no freedom under Chinese rule, and that he wanted the Dalai Lama to return to Tibet.

In response, Tseten said, six officers beat him with sticks and electric prods for about two hours each day.

After two months he was transferred to Drapchi Prison. There, police kicked him in his stomach and back with their boots, he said. They also beat him with sticks and shocked him with electric cattle prods.

He said he was beaten three to four hours every day during his six weeks at Drapchi. Several times, Tseten said, he could not stand up or walk by himself afterward. He said he was knocked unconscious four times.

"I was thinking they would beat me to death," he said. "But I had no regret because I was dying for my country."

Tseten, unconscious, was taken to a police hospital in Lhasa. When he awoke, he found a patch on his eye and a long surgical scar on his abdomen.

Doctors told him that they operated because he had been unable to urinate.

In India last month, two doctors - James A. Litch and and Barry Kerzin - examined Tseten.

His failure to urinate, the American doctors found, apparently resulted from a rupture of the urethra - consistent, they said, with the beating he described at Drapchi prison. The operation was an attempt to repair Tseten's urinary tract, they said.

Litch and Kerzin also found that blindness in Tseten's right eye was the result of trauma from a severe beating. The doctors found a pattern of scars over the eye that also resulted from beatings, they said.

The operation restored Tseten to health. But Tseten says he has lost much of his mental sharpness - a result, he believes, of police repeatedly stunning his head with electric cattle prods.

Restoring the sight in Tseten's right eye will be virtually impossible, Litch said.

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6. Dawa Kyizom - Student. Helped stitch a Tibetan flag.

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Dawa Kyizom, then 17, a high school student, recalls walking from her home to Gyudmey Monastery in Lhasa one day in September 1990. A paper Tibetan flag was hidden in her chuba, the traditional Tibetan woman's dress.

At the monastery, after saying some prayers, she ran into the room of her friend, a monk named Tsering Topgyal, then 21.

Kyizom told Topgyal that she wanted to unfurl the Tibetan flag as a display of independence. The Tibetan flag, used by Tibet until the Chinese occupation of 1949, is red, yellow and blue, with the sun's rays over two snow lions.

Topgyal said that he wanted to help, according to Kyizom.

That evening, Kyizom, Topgyal and another monk, Ngawang Kyungpo, sat on the floor in Topgyal's room. With needle and thread, they stitched the flag onto a large cloth of red silk brocade, hoping to make it look bigger and more beautiful, Kyizom said. When they had finished, the entire flag and cloth was about a square yard.

Above the flag, on the red silk brocade, Kyizom wrote: "Long live His Holiness the Dalai Lama."

Below the flag, on the red silk, the two monks wrote, "Chinese leave Tibet" and "Tibet is an independent country."

Kyizom left the monastery, taking the flag with her. She planned to hoist it in Lhasa's Barkhor Market area the following day. But the Barkhor was full of uniformed and plainclothes police and army officers. She said she returned to the monastery, giving the flag to Topgyal. He said he would hoist it.

For the next 30 days, Kyizom led a normal life. She went to school, returned home, ate dinner with her parents, and studied.

On Oct. 26, at 9:30 a.m., she said she was visited at home by two police officers. Her parents and a neighbor were home at the time, she said.

Kyizom said the police had questions: Did she know a monk named Tsering Topgyal?

She said no.

The police replied, "This monk told us you helped stitch the flag he hung outside his monastery."

Kyizom felt surprised, she said. She thought that Topgyal was reliable, that he wouldn't get his friends in trouble.

"You have to think about your future life," one of the police officers continued, Kyizom recalled. "You're in school, and there's no hope of gaining independence. If you engage in political activity, it will be a problem for your future."

The police asked Kyizom to come to the police station for questioning. They promised she'd return the following day, Kyizom said.

Kyizom spent five days and nights in the police station, and then three years in prison.

Kyizom said four officers beat her nearly every day during eight months of interrogation in a Chinese jail. The jail, which had six cells, was in a military camp in Taktse County, just outside Lhasa.

A police officer punched Kyizom repeatedly on her face and head, she said, and four officers took turns cracking sticks over her head. When one grew tired, another quickly took his place, so that the beatings on her head lasted for 30 to 45 minutes at a time.

"I could feel vibrations on my eyes, on my cheeks, and throughout my head," Kyizom said.

During the summer of 1991, Kyizom was transferred to the Gutsa Detention Center. From her cell there, Kyizom spotted her monk friend, Topgyal. She said she pointed him out to her cell mates. He was in solitary confinement, in a cell down the hall from their cellblock. Once a day, they could see him as police led him out of the cell, apparently for interrogation. After one month he was transferred to a different section of the detention center.

"He seemed like he was sick and very thin," said Phuntsok Lamdol, 27, a nun who was one of Kyizom's cell mates; she was sentenced to three years for saying "counter-revolutionary words," according to her sentencing record.

After serving her term, Kyizom fled to India. She is still suffering physical problems: James A. Litch, a doctor from Seattle, found that she suffers from "significant trauma" and psychogenic amnesia, in which she sometimes cannot remember periods of her time in jail. He also found she has "significant depression."

Since the beatings, Kyizom said, she also has suffered from recurrent, severe headaches. She said she did not have headaches before the beatings.

In an interview, Lamdol - also now a refugee in India - said Kyizom was suffering at the Gutsa Detention Center. "She had a lot of head pain and also back pain; her eyes weren't working; she couldn't see very far," Lamdol said.

Another cell mate, a nun named Phuntsok Zomkyi, said in an interview that Kyizom was always "putting her hand on her head, and complaining about a big bump on her head and terrible headaches."

Both nuns said Kyizom told them about the constant beatings police had given her before her arrival at Gutsa.

Before Kyizom left Tibet, she said, she visited her friend Topgyal, who had also been released from jail. No longer allowed to be a monk, Topgyal was working as a farmer in Meldrogongkar, east of Lhasa.

Previously in perfect health, Topgyal now walked with a severe limp, she said. He told her that he had hung the flag they made outside the top floor of his monastery. He said he had been severely tortured during his imprisonment at Gutsa Detention Center. He said he was beaten repeatedly, for hours, during interrogation sessions; he was shocked with electric cattle prods and was hung from the ceiling by handcuffs and feet cuffs.

They did not discuss his telling police her name. She understood. She knew what it meant to be tortured.