The Philadelphia Inquirer

December 10, 1996

By Jeffrey Fleishman and Loretta Tofani

INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS

Prime targets: Monks and nuns

Religious orders nurture Tibetans' deep devotion and, China fears, their hopes for independence.

1996 The Philadelphia Inquirer

Lhasa, Tibet The monk stepped inside the whitewashed monastery, pulled back the curtain to his dim room, and whispered his worst fear: that the Chinese will scorch him with electric cattle prods if he does not betray his belief that Tibet is a free country and the Dalai Lama its rightful leader.

The monk, who goes by the single name of Nyandak, has watched as fellow monks who share his beliefs were rustled into Chinese army trucks and delivered to prison torture rooms. Thousands have died over the years. More have been left scarred, lame or blind.

Nyandak, who any day now will face his Chinese interrogators, must answer the question that will determine his fate.

Do you renounce the Dalai Lama?

``The Chinese can kill me, but I won't say that, I won't speak against the Dalai Lama,'' Nyandak said one October afternoon, dipping his face into his palms and weeping onto his saffron shirt. ``If I speak against him, I speak against myself and all I believe. But the Chinese have made it very bad. . . . I am very worried, very worried. . . . What will I do?''

In its 47-year quest to obliterate Tibetan culture, the Communist Chinese government has repeatedly targeted Buddhist monks and nuns while destroying more than 6,000 monasteries. The campaign has intensified in recent months as Chinese troops and authorities have marched into monasteries and threatened monks with ``the examination.'' Simply put:

Monks among the most educated members of Tibetan society must either renounce the Dalai Lama in writing or face prison and almost certain torture.

The devotion monks and nuns hold for the Dalai Lama, their exiled spiritual and political leader, has unnerved China for decades. Monks and nuns, some of whom have escaped from Tibet, said in recent interviews that ``the examination'' is China's most fervent push in years to crush Tibet's religious orders as it also seeks to silence any lay Tibetans who have hopes for Tibet's independence.

A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said yesterday that official Chinese policy is to allow Tibetans to practice Buddhism.

Last month, the top Chinese official in Tibet accused monks and nuns loyal to the Dalai Lama of ``using their religious influence and the Western media . . . to spread ideas of `Tibetan independence,' splitting public opinion and creating turmoil.''

The official, Chen Kuiyuan, told a Communist Party meeting: ``Religious idealism is the main obstacle to the development of [ socialist ] spiritual civilization in Tibet, and we must never allow the resurrection of feudal privileges in monasteries.''

Buddhism is so intertwined in Tibetan life that Chinese authorities believe Tibet's religious and political identity will evaporate if monasteries are under siege and the Dalai Lama is discredited. The Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet in 1959 and won the Nobel Peace Prize 30 years later, has been frustrating China by gaining support and attention from world leaders and movie stars.

Unlike a foe with armies and tanks, Tibet resists China as a peace-loving adversary, one whose strength comes from a religion based on suffering and reincarnation. Tibetan monks and nuns who were tortured say Chinese interrogators were stymied when they were unable to shake the spirituality of their prisoners. Buddhists believe that life is suffering, but that through compassion and empathy one gains an enlightenment as he or she continues in the eternal cycle of birth and death.

Although most Tibetans carry prayer wheels and scriptures instead of guns and knives, the battle between religion and communism does get bloody on the streets and in the prisons of Tibet:

[ * ] Palden Gyatso, a 64-year-old monk, has spent 33 years in Chinese prisons in Tibet, usually on charges of putting up freedom posters. He recalled prison police tying his hands while he was naked, then throwing hot water on his head. ``This happened countless times,'' he said in an interview in India. He was locked in a concrete box the size of a coffin for up to five months at a time, he said. The ``Chinese coffin'' was large enough for Gyatso and a small bucket, which he used as a toilet.

[ * ] Ngawang Dorjee, a 23-year-old monk, was arrested at an independence demonstration. In prison, he said, police interrogated him for hours at a time and savagely beat him with sticks.

[ * ] Tenzin Yangzom, an 18-year-old Buddhist nun, was arrested for hanging a Tibetan flag. She said police beat her on her head with knotted wooden sticks. In jail, police tortured her with electric cattle prods. They also kicked her and trampled on her. Today Yangzom suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, according to an American doctor who examined her two weeks ago.

[ * ] Lobsang Gyatso (no relation to Palden), a 35-year-old monk, was arrested for distributing pamphlets about Tibet to children. He said police repeatedly scorched his stomach with a red-hot shovel, and then shocked with an electric cattle prod for 19 consecutive days, usually 20 times a day.

Tibetan Buddhism has historically been more than just a system of belief. Buddhism has for centuries defined Tibetan society, and has been its central and most important feature. But increasingly, China has been reaching into Tibetan religious life. In most monasteries, according to monks and nuns, China has planted informants who dress like monks and are paid 300 yen ($37.50) per head to turn in persons suspected of ``counterrevolutionary'' activities.

China has continued its campaign to disgrace the Dalai Lama, sometimes branding him as a ``rapist'' and a ``thief.'' It also stepped squarely into the Buddhist process of selecting the next Dalai Lama. In 1995, Chinese authorities rejected the Dalai Lama's choice of an 8-year-old boy as the Panchen Lama, the second-highest-ranking spiritual leader. China has placed the boy, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, and his family under house arrest in Tibet.

The Chinese chose their own Panchen Lama and enthroned a 6-year-old boy at a ceremony attended by Communist officials. Protests broke out against the Chinese selection and, according to the State Department, 27 people were arrested. This type of intrigue, according to Tibetans, further disrupted centuries of tradition that has revolved around religion and monasteries.

Before the Chinese occupation, virtually every city and village across Tibet was home to a monastery, nunnery or temple. Some monasteries with as many as 10,000 monks were like small cities cut into the mountainsides. It was on those mountains that monks painted huge orange and blue Buddhas that looked down over the valleys.

When China invaded in 1949, there were 6,259 monasteries and nunneries in Tibet, according to the Tibetan government in exile, which is located in Dharmsala, India, and is recognized by the U.S. Congress as the legitimate representative of Tibet. By 1976, the Tibetan government said, only eight of those ancient and sacred monasteries and nunneries remained. The rest had been destroyed by the Chinese. Since then, about 2,000 have been either built or reconstructed, but many of those lack teachers, have small numbers of monks, or exist mainly for tourism and public relations for Westerners.

One of the ancient monasteries left standing was Sera. Founded in 1419 at the foot of a mountain on the outskirts of Lhasa, Sera now contains darkened doorways of former monks' rooms. With whitewashed walls, tiny windows and swooping golden roofs, the monastery is rife with rats, rotting wood, cobwebs and the smell of urine from wandering animals. Sera was once home to thousands of monks, but it has become a testament to the Chinese occupation: Only 300 monks remain. Earlier this year, according to Tibetans in Lhasa, seven monks were arrested after refusing to sign ``examination'' statements.

The monks who roam the dirt paths meandering through Sera's grounds are reminded of Chinese occupation whenever they scan the valley of Lhasa below: It stretches flat except for two hills. On one sits the Potala, the former palace of the Dalai Lama, which was gutted and closed by the Chinese. On the other hill is a Chinese television tower that frequently broadcasts programs attacking Tibetan independence.

It is the decaying of monasteries such as Sera that have saddened Jampa, a 57-year-old monk who fled Tibet two months ago carrying with him ancient Buddhist scriptures because he feared the Chinese would contaminate them. He said wherever he went in Tibet he saw the maroon robes of monks become lost against the tide of olive-green uniforms of soldiers, who years ago cut off his hair and beat him.

``The world is a big circle of suffering,'' he said. ``I've seen this world since I was a child, and it's all suffering.''

The monasteries were the economic and social hub of Tibetan life. Merchants hoping to earn good karma donated robes and saffron shirts to monks. Farmers donated barley flour and butter tea, and in return the monks prayed for plentiful harvests. Monks would routinely go to Tibetan homes to join in prayer. Villagers, in turn, would visit monasteries almost daily.

``When the monasteries were destroyed, the structure of life was taken away,'' said Lobsang Gyatso, a monk who helped to rebuild a monastery in 1985.

When China first occupied Tibet in 1949, the Chinese government wrote:

``The Chinese Communist Party considers that its ideology and that of religion are two forces that cannot coexist and occupy the same spot at the same time.''

Mao Tse-tung, the Chinese Communist chairman at the time, said: ``Religion is poison. It has two great defects: It undermines the race . . . [ and ] retards progress of the country. Tibet and Mongolia have both been poisoned by it.''

Along with the Buddhist temples, the Chinese destroyed almost all of the ancient religious scrolls and artifacts that had been passed down through the centuries. Chinese flags were raised over monasteries and pictures of the Dalai Lama were outlawed.

In addition, the Chinese set strict limits on the numbers of monks and nuns allowed in Tibet, and on their activities. Records of the Tibetan government in exile show that by 1976, more than 110,000 monks and nuns had been tortured and killed, and more than 250,000 were ``forcibly disrobed'' no longer allowed to be monks or nuns.

The Inquirer reported Sunday and yesterday that monks and nuns today are routinely arrested, beaten and tortured as part of a Chinese campaign to crush Tibetan independence and religious freedom. In April 1995, Chinese authorities cut in half the number of Tibetan monks permitted at the Jokhang in Lhasa, Tibet's most sacred temple, according to the U.S. State Department.

In October, Nyandak, the son of a barley farmer, sat in his monastery room, wondering when the authorities will bring him the ``examination.'' He said he may follow the path of his brother, also a monk, who escaped last year to India. His mother, he said, wants him to leave the monastery and come home.

``I don't know what I'll do,'' he said, tears still in his eyes. ``I am very, very worried.''

[ * ]

Thirty-seven years ago, Palden Gyatso chose to stay at his monastery when he heard the rumble of tanks and the thud of artillery.

``Tanks shot at my monastery and the higher monks surrendered,'' Gyatso said, recalling the events of 1959, when China consolidated its control of Tibet following an uprising. ``The military arrested all of the monks,'' he said, adding that the Chinese turned his country ``upside down, turned heaven into hell.''

Gyatso's private hell was to spend 33 years in Chinese jails since 1959. In all that time, he did not want to leave his homeland. Instead, he stayed there, and often put up posters calling for Tibetan independence. He was repeatedly arrested and jailed and always, he said, he was tortured.

His sentencing record, issued by the Lhasa Middle Court on April, 19, 1984, notes that he was convicted of ``spreading counterrevolutionary propaganda.'' In 1987, in Sangyip Prison in Lhasa, he said, police poured hot water on his head after stripping him naked and tying his hands.

Things got worse on Oct. 13, 1990, when Gyatso stepped into the interrogation room of Drapchi Prison. Handcuffs, chains, ropes and electric cattle prods hung from the walls. On the tables, and below them, were more chains and handcuffs. Alongside these instruments, he said, he recognized one of the most notorious torturers in Tibet's prisons: Paljor, a Tibetan prison guard he knew from an earlier stay at Drapchi.

``Why have you come to prison?'' Gyatso said Paljor asked him, as the officer held up an electric cattle prod, an instrument about the size of a police nightstick. At one end was a pointed tip that delivered an electric shock powered by batteries.

Gyatso said he had put up posters demanding Tibet's independence.

Paljor began toying with the cattle prod, Gyatso said, pushing the button on and off. The instrument made a whirring sound. Then silence. Then another whirring sound.

Paljor thrust the prod into Gyatso's mouth, took it out, and inserted it again, Gyatso said. Gyatso's mouth burned.

Then, Gyatso said, Paljor again forced the cattle prod into Palden's mouth and left it there. Gyatso said he fell to the floor, unconscious.

When he regained consciousness, he was back in his cell, with a piercing pain in his mouth. Blood was everywhere, he said.

Gyatso was released from prison on Aug. 25, 1992.

After 33 years in prisons, suffering from malnutrition, all his teeth were missing. He said he was not given medical attention while in jail.

Unable to return to his monastery, he fled to India.

James A. Litch, an American doctor who examined Gyatso in India last month, said he found scars on the monk's head that are consistent with beatings with sticks and nails. Litch also found lesions on Gyatso's upper sternum that were consistent with shocks from an electric cattle prod. Litch, who for the last five years has treated refugees, also found a ``sharp scar'' on Gyatso's right forearm that was evidence of a nail being scraped across his skin.

William Anderson, a polygrapher commissioned by The Inquirer, found that Gyatso was telling the truth in all details of his arrest and torture.

Today, in the Buddhist spirit of compassion, Gyatso says he feels ``no hatred, no anger'' against his torturer, Paljor. ``As a Tibetan under Chinese rule, he has to depend on the Chinese,'' Gyatso said. ``By his own free will he wouldn't hit me. This is the game the Chinese are trying to play, trying to say Tibetans are beating Tibetans.

``My enemies are Chinese officials, not people like him who work for the Chinese.''

He paused. ``I survived because of my Tibetan Buddhist religion,'' he said. ``Whether they poured boiling water on me or shocked me with electric cattle prods, I prayed to His Holiness.''

[ * ]

Throughout his childhood, Ngawang Dorjee, now 23, heard from family members about his two uncles who were monks. Dorjee never met them. They were killed by the Chinese during the 1960s.

Dorjee, the oldest of six children, decided to become a monk. ``I wanted to serve mankind,'' Dorjee said. ``And my family felt it was important to have a monk in the family again.''

Dorjee developed a political consciousness while watching 1987 and 1988 independence demonstrations in Lhasa. He witnessed officers of the People's Liberation Army shooting monks, nuns and lay Tibetans.

``They even shot an old woman; Tibetans put her in a wheelbarrow and took her to the hospital,'' Dorjee recalled.

Dorjee decided that he wanted to stand up for Tibet's independence, for Tibetans' right to self-determination.

During a demonstration in August 1992, Dorjee said, two monks held the Tibetan national flag, while he and others held pamphlets and shouted slogans. ``Tibet belongs to Tibetans!'' Dorjee shouted. ``Free Tibet!''

After a few minutes of demonstrating, police caught Dorjee and four others. Dorjee said that he and the others were taken to a Public Security Bureau office. There, at different times over a period of three hours, Dorjee said seven to 30 police officers hit them with nightsticks, kicked them, and stamped on them.

``They were playing with us like we were footballs, kicking us back and forth,'' Dorjee recalled. ``They hit the nuns a lot, especially on their breasts.''

He said that one Chinese police officer told them: ``If you were shouting `Long Live Mao Tse-tung,' we wouldn't be doing this!''

Dorjee said police covered his head with the Tibetan flag used in the demonstration and hit him over the head with their fists.

``They hit me on the joints with a stick,'' he said. ``I couldn't straighten my arms or move my hands for two months afterward.''

Dorjee said police took him and the other demonstrators to Gutsa Detention Center. There, Dorjee said, he was interrogated and tortured three to five hours every other day for five months.

One day at Gutsa, Dorjee said, a police officer told him: ``Two men died.'' The officer held up a pair of pants. ``These pants belonged to one of them,'' he quoted the officer as saying. ``If you don't tell the truth, this will be your destiny.''

``Who sent you to the demonstration?'' the officer asked. ``What the are names of the demonstrators who escaped?''

Dorjee told the officer that no one had sent him; he went of his own will.

He said he didn't know the other demonstrators.

The officer hit him with the butt of his pistol and kicked him, Dorjee said, causing him to fall off a bench. Then, he said, the officer kicked him again and trampled on him.

``I was alone, I could have fought with him, but that would have been against His Holiness' wishes,'' Dorjee said, referring to the Dalai Lama.

Dorjee said another Chinese prison guard ordered him and five other prisoners to put their feet on a ledge, about four feet from the ground, and place their hands on the floor. Dorjee said he was forced to remain in this position for four hours. In that time, he said, he was beaten with sticks. Several of the sticks broke as they crashed onto his back, he said.

After the beating, Dorjee said, he was taken outside and was forced to bend down over a canal, one foot on either side of it. He said an officer hit him with sticks on his back. When he fell forward, other police kicked him in the groin and in the stomach, Dorjee said.

``When I went back to the cell, my cell mates said, `Your face is all red; your ears are all red,' '' Dorjee recalled. ``That was nothing. I had big black-and-blue patches and bruises all over my back and chest. I lost all sensation in my back for a while.''

After five months, he was transferred to Drapchi Prison. While there, he said he was routinely beaten while marching with other prisoners and chanting required Communist slogans: ``Obey the constitution! Become a changed man! Accept your crimes! Protest counterrevolutionaries! Cherish Communist ideologies!''

``To the outside world, the marching seemed like exercise,'' Dorjee said.

``But the real purpose was to make us suffer.''

Dorjee was sentenced to three years in prison by the People's Intermediate Court in Lhasa for ``counterrevolutionary crimes against the government,'' according to a document dated Aug. 16, 1993.

After his release from jail in 1995, Dorjee fled to India.

To look at him today, it is not obvious that he has been tortured. There are no apparent scars on his body.

The medical tests tell another story: He has a ruptured eardrum.

``Tympanic membrane rupture and perforation'' in the right ear, Paul Rapagay, an Indian ear-nose-and-throat specialist, wrote in a letter to another doctor. ``He got blow injuries on the right side in Tibet two years before.''

Litch, the American doctor, also found that Dorjee has two broken front teeth, which are consistent with beatings to his face.

The polygrapher, Anderson, found that Dorjee told the truth in all answers about his arrest and torture.

[ * ]

Tenzin Yangzom was one of seven children in a farming family living in the Lhoka area of Tibet. As a teenager, she recalled, she would watch as Chinese arrived in large numbers to build army bases near her farm. Shortly after the construction began, she said, the Chinese ordered her family to give them half their crop.

One result was that her family did not have enough to eat. Another was that she became very angry at the Chinese. At age 17, she decided to become a nun. She felt that might help her to express her frustrations. That decision was difficult: The Chinese charged her almost $600 to join the nunnery.

When she joined the Chubu Nunnery in Lhoka, she said, the Chinese prohibited her from praying in groups with fellow nuns for two years. She, and other nuns, believed the Chinese were afraid she might learn ``counterrevolutionary'' ideas.

By the time she turned 20, she said, she had become completely frustrated by the Chinese rules in her nunnery and in Tibet.

On the night of June 9, 1994, Yangzom and two other nuns decided to hang a poster and a Tibetan flag on the main government building of the Lhoka district. The poster said, ``Tibet is an independent country.'' At the bottom, in black ink, were their signatures: Tenzin Yangzom, Ngawang Choedon and Tenzin Choenyi.

The following evening, six police officers came for Yangzom at her parents' home. They put her in handcuffs, she said, and drove her in a truck to the Tsethang Detention Center, beating her on the head with sticks along the way.

``There was blood all over,'' she said. ``I felt pain and burning. I felt like my whole body was burning.''

When she reached the detention center, Yangzom said, a police officer pushed her and she fell on large, jagged stones, injuring her head. Today, Yangzom still has a V-shaped scar on her head from that fall.

Inside the detention center, Yangzom said, she was led to a cell that smelled like a public toilet. Feces and urine smeared the floor; Yangzom described the scene as ``mental torture'' to a Buddhist nun, for whom cleanliness is extremely important. There was no sink in the cell only a bed and a bucket.

Yangzom said she spent five months in that cell. Her only time out was a two-minute walk in the morning, when she dumped a bucket of excrement into a vegetable garden.

Once each week, usually on a Sunday or Monday, she said, three police entered her cell: a Tibetan and two Chinese. The Tibetan acted as interpreter. The Chinese beat and tortured her, she said. She said the police repeatedly shocked her with electric cattle prods on her stomach, breasts, back, face and arms.

They punched her and kicked her with their boots, she said, forcing her to fall to the ground. Then they trampled on her smashing her head, stomach, back and legs.

Every day, she said, a Chinese police officer walked into her cell, holding an electric cattle prod. He glared at her for five minutes, then walked out. ``It was to threaten me,'' Yangzom said.

More police returned. She said they asked: ``Why did you put up the poster?'' Then they applied electric cattle prods and stamped on her. ``Who gave you the [ Tibetan ] flag?''

Yangzom gave evasive answers, she said.

After five months, she was taken to Tsethang People's High Court, where she was convicted of being a ``counterrevolutionary,'' an act of treason against the Chinese government. She was sentenced to three years in prison.

On her return to the Tsethang Detention Center, she was placed in a cell with the two nuns who had helped her make and hang the poster and flag. Both had been repeatedly shocked with electric cattle prods, according to Yangzom. Each woman had been sentenced to two years, Yangzom recalled. Yangzom believes she received a longer sentence because she had obtained the Tibetan flag from a Westerner visiting Tibet.

Yangzom spent six months in the prison hospital, recuperating from tuberculosis, she said.

A doctor at the Mentsekhang Hospital in Tibet told prison police that Yangzom might die if she returned to prison to finish her three-year sentence, she said. In December 1995, Yangzom was released. She returned to her nunnery to visit her teachers. But she knew Chinese policy prohibited her from resuming her life as a nun.

This year, Yangzom made the dangerous journey through the Himalayan mountains to India. She is now at a nunnery in southern India.

She said she still suffers from chronic headaches every day often lasting half a day and severe back pain. As a result, she has great difficulty sleeping.

Litch, who examined her in India last month, said she has three scars on her head that are consistent with ``someone repetitively hitting her, and her repeatedly ducking.'' The doctor said a fourth V-shaped scar on her head appears to have resulted from ``falling on a large stone.''

The scars are consistent with her account of torture, he found.

He also said that Yangzom exhibited all major symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, and is ``seriously'' depressed. ``She re-experiences the events almost daily,'' the doctor said.

[ * ]

Lobsang Gyatso is a 35-year-old Buddhist monk who believes deeply in nonviolence. The monastery he belonged to in Tibet was destroyed by the Chinese in 1958, before he was born. For his first several years as a monk, his monastery was actually a tent.

In 1985, Gyatso and other monks began to rebuild their monastery. He felt, in his own small way, that he was helping to rebuild his country.

In 1988, Gyatso walked for two months to India to see the Dalai Lama. He returned to Tibet, bringing pamphlets he distributed to schoolchildren. They read: ``Tibet belongs to Tibetans'' and ``Free Tibet.''

``These students were born after the occupation,'' Gyatso said. ``I wanted them to know the Chinese are illegally occupying their country.''

Shortly afterward, he was arrested by four plainclothes police officers at a monastery near Xining, where he was hiding.

At the police station, he said, his hands were tied behind his back and he was interrogated.

``Why did you escape from Tibet?'' he said police asked. ``Why did you get those papers from India? Don't you believe that Tibet is part of China?''

Gyatso said he didn't answer. He said a police officer went to the room's coal-burning stove, pulled out a shovel and heated it on the flames. Two officers held him, he said, while another thrust the shovel onto Gyatso's stomach. Each time Gyatso refused to answer, the officer burned his stomach with the shovel.

``I thought: `Whatever I'm suffering, I'm suffering for a cause,' ''

Gyatso recalled. ``I have to suffer for the Tibetan people.''

Then police placed Gyatso's arms around the stove, handcuffing his hands.

He remained there, embracing the hot stove, for about four hours, he said.

``It was unbearably hot,'' Gyatso said.

``I felt very sorry for the Chinese man,'' Gyatso said, referring to the officer who placed the burning-hot shovel onto his stomach. ``He had orders from the Chinese government to torture me. He would have lost his job if he didn't do it. The Chinese people are not so bad, but the government is very evil.''

After his arrest, Gyatso said, police tortured him with an electric cattle prod for 19 consecutive days, about 20 times each day.

Gyatso was taken to a court and sentenced to five years in prison. His crimes: illegally visiting India and distributing ``counterrevolutionary propaganda.''

Gyatso was released after one year because of health problems resulting from his torture, Gyatso said. His heart beat too quickly, and he suffered from numerous infections that weakened him. He later fled over the Himalayas to India, where he now lives.

Anderson, the polygrapher, found that Gyatso told the truth about his arrest and torture.

Litch, the physician, examined Gyatso in India last month. He found numerous scars on his stomach, which, the doctor said, were burn marks from the shovel.

Litch said the size and angles of the scars indicated that Gyatso had been burned on his stomach by a ``torture device.''

``This is a real branding with a torture device,'' Litch said. ``It's not a shovel for a stove.''