. Thank you. TS][In this last of a four-part series, Inquirer writer Loretta Tofani tells the story of Lobsang Choedon and three young nuns who were arrested and jailed for singing freedom songs and died after the torture.]
By Loretta Tofani - INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
The Philadelphia Inquirer, Wednesday, December 11, 1996
In tale of three deaths, the story of a struggle They were young nuns who suffered, then died, at the hands of jail guards. In the land they had hoped would be free, theirs is not an uncommon fate.
Sherab Ngawang, Phuntsok Yangkyi and Gyaltsen Kelsang died in the last two years the way no young women should: worn down inside Chinese prisons in Tibet, where they had been beaten with sticks, kicked with boots, and shocked with electric cattle prods.
It was a few simple words that doomed them. At a Feb. 3, 1992, rally to protest the Chinese occupation of their country, Ngawang, 15, and Yangkyi, 17, chanted slogans: ``Independence for Tibet,'' ``May peace prevail on Earth,'' and ``Long live the Dalai Lama.'' The police closed in quickly.
The following year, in June 1993, Kelsang, 22, chanted freedom slogans at another rally, and also was arrested.
While in prison, each of the three young Tibetan Buddhist nuns was tortured repeatedly, according to former prisoners interviewed in India this year.
All three died within a year of each other. Ngawang was 18 when she died in May 1995; Yangkyi, 19, in June 1994; Kelsang, 24, in February 1995. Their names were added to the list of 173,221 Tibetans who have died after being tortured in Chinese prisons in Tibet, between 1949 and 1979, according to the Tibetan government in exile.
Since Tibet was invaded by China in 1949, China has effectively outlawed freedom of speech, assembly and religion. Authorities continue to crack down on Tibetans who question Chinese rule, relying on imprisonment and torture in an attempt to eradicate Tibetan religion, culture and nationality.
The Tibetan government in exile, located in India, is the only organization to keep detailed records of deaths in Tibet at the hands of the Chinese. It says death by torture and other means has been a fact of life in Tibet since the Chinese occupation.
According to its records, 1.2 million Tibetans died between 1949 and 1979 as a result of the Chinese occupation. The statistics show:
173,221 Tibetans died after being tortured in prison.
156,758 Tibetans have been executed by the Chinese.
432,705 Tibetans were killed while fighting Chinese soldiers.
342,970 Tibetans have starved to death.
92,731 Tibetans publicly tortured to death.
9,002 Tibetans committed suicide.
The U.S. State Department says it does not have exact numbers; it reports that ``tens of thousands'' of Tibetans were killed by the Chinese in the 1950s. The International Commission of Jurists a Geneva-based group of judges and lawyers ruled in 1959 that China had committed ``genocide'' in Tibet.
Since 1990, Amnesty International says, it has documented the deaths of 24 Tibetans as a result of torture. This comes at a time when the Clinton administration has dropped its demands that China improve its human-rights record in return for winning most-favored-nation trade status, which allows China to export goods to the United States with low tariffs.
The U.S. State Department's 1996 human-rights report on Tibet, which concluded that arbitrary arrest and torture are common under Chinese rule, cited the death of Kelsang. The report noted that the scope of human-rights abuses in Tibet was difficult to determine ``because the Chinese government strictly controls access to and information about Tibet.''
While the report expressed concern about China's attacks on Tibet's ``unique religious, cultural and linguistic heritage,'' the U.S. government has not taken punitive measures to curb ongoing torture in Chinese prisons in Tibet.
Both the United States and the United Nations consider Tibet a part of China. The U.S. Congress passed a resolution in 1991 recognizing the Tibetan government in exile as the legitimate representative of an independent Tibet.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington said Chinese policy forbids the torture of prisoners, but a spokesman, Lu Wen Xiang, acknowledged that it sometimes happens. The embassy did not respond to inquiries about the deaths of the monks and nuns named in this article.
Monks and nuns have been particularly targeted by China because they are the best educated of the Tibetans, and the most outspoken against Chinese rule in Tibet.
Since 1979, when the United States began a new diplomatic and economic relationship with China, the number of Tibetan deaths at the hands of Chinese government soldiers and police has dramatically decreased. But the deaths haven't stopped.
On May 6, a 19-year-old monk named Sangye Tenphel died in Drapchi Prison in Lhasa, the capital, according to Tibetan witnesses. The Tibetan government in exile said Tenphel died as the result of beatings by prison guards.
On July 5, a 49-year-old monk, Kelsang Thutob, also died in a Chinese prison in Tibet. The government in exile said Thutob had been in jail for seven years, suffering injuries from torture and malnutrition while receiving no medical care.
On Sept. 14, a 27-year-old monk, Tenchok Tempel, died in prison in Tibet. The government in exile said Chinese authorities told Tempel's family he had committed suicide. His body was cremated before his family could see it.
What follows are firsthand accounts of the lives and deaths of the three young Tibetan nuns Sherab Ngawang, Phuntsok Yangkyi and Gyaltsen Kelsang.
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`It made her angry'
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Sherab Ngawang, who died at 18, grew up the second of six children in a remote village near Meldrogongkar, Tibet. Her parents are farmers.
Her cousin, Phuntsok (his only name), a monk who now lives in India, said in an interview that Ngawang had wanted to become a Buddhist nun since her early childhood. She joined the nunnery when she was 12.
When she wasn't praying, her friends said, she played with the teenage nuns. ``We skipped rope, bounced feathers [ tied to a coin ] on our feet, and played aup-do,'' a game played with pebbles, said Thinley Choezom, a nun.
``We splashed each other in the stream,'' said Lobsang Choedon, also a nun. Both Choedon and Choezom were arrested in 1992 with Ngawang and Yangkyi.
Phuntsok, Ngawang's cousin, said she told him that Chinese officials came to her nunnery and warned the nuns not to demonstrate for independence or they would be kicked out. ``This made her angry,'' Phuntsok said. ``It made her want to fight for freedom.''
The nuns imprisoned with Ngawang and Yangkyi said in interviews that they were all tortured and given inadequate health care while incarcerated. The nuns who were witnesses said that they, too, were tortured in prison.
A doctor and a polygrapher, both commissioned by The Inquirer, last month in India examined three nuns who provided the accounts of torture. The physician James A. Litch, of the University of Washington School of Medicine found that their injuries were consistent with torture. The polygrapher William Anderson, of Glenmoore, Chester County also verified their accounts and found that their descriptions of what happened to the three nuns who died were truthful.
On the day of their arrest in 1992, Yangkyi, Ngawang, Choedon, Choezom and a fifth nun, Lobsang Dolma, were taken to the Gutsa Detention Center in Lhasa.
One by one, they were led into a room for questioning, according to Choedon, then 16, and Choezom, then 17. Each was severely beaten, according to Choedon. ``They were very angry, demanding to know why I demonstrated,'' Choedon said. ``They kicked and punched me on the stomach, my chest, and my legs.''
Choezom added: ``There were six police in the cell; they took turns beating me with heavy sticks and slapping me. They demanded to know if my parents sent me. They said, `What do you think you will get when you get independence?' ''
The nuns said the beating lasted for more than an hour.
They later exchanged notes, according to Choedon. The notes indicate that each had undergone the same type of beating, Choedon said.
Without going to trial, both Ngawang and Choedon were sentenced to three years. Choedon said a police officer handed her a sentencing document more than a year after she had been arrested. Dated Sept. 16, 1993, the document said Choedon had been convicted of saying ``counterrevolutionary'' words, such as ``Independence for Tibet.''
(The document, issued by Lhasa's Reform Through Labor office, said Choedon would be freed Feb. 2, 1995.) She served the full three-year sentence.
One day in the summer of 1993, Choedon said, the guards asked the nuns to count from one to 100 in Mandarin each prisoner counting one number. But Ngawang did not speak any Chinese.
``When it was her turn, she didn't know the number,'' recalled Choedon.
The police became angry, she said. Ngawang, Choedon and four other nuns were taken to the greenhouse and ordered to stand in the same spot all day, from 8 a.m. until sunset, without food or water, exposed to the sun. ``Our legs were hurting us, and we tried to sit down, but the police shouted at us that we couldn't,'' Choedon said.
A young Tibetan prisoner, passing them, handed one of the nuns tingmos steamed bread. He was caught by police, who beat the prisoner, Choedon said.
``Please don't beat him,'' Choedon said the nuns begged. ``We asked him to give them to us. We're very hungry.''
A police officer replied, ``Don't worry, we're also going to beat you.''
Shortly after that, Choedon said, eight police officers six Tibetans, two Chinese emerged with electric cattle prods. They used the prods on the nuns' faces, necks, mouths and arms, Choedon said.
The police also grabbed the nuns' hair they were not allowed to shave their heads while in prison and kicked them and slapped them for a half-hour, Choedon said.
During the beating, a female Tibetan police officer, Passang Dolma, taunted them, saying: ``You are religious people; today you didn't get food for a whole day. Where are your lamas [ religious leaders ] now?'' Choedon said.
Several nuns who were interviewed named Dolma as one of the officers who often punished the prisoners.
The prisoner who had given the nuns the food was ordered to bring them three huge buckets of tingmos. The nuns were ordered to eat every tingmo, Choedon said. Within an hour, the nuns were vomiting. Police kicked them again, Choedon said.
Then police ordered the nuns, again, to count from one to 100 in Chinese. When a nun didn't know a number, the police beat and kicked her. Ngawang suffered the most during the count, Choedon recalled.
``She was beaten a lot,'' Choedon said. ``The police kept giving her electric shocks on her face, and they kicked her with their boots and slapped her. This went on for a long time.''
Choedon said the torture and beatings took a visible toll on Ngawang. ``At first, she had chest problems; she had trouble breathing, and couldn't eat anything, and she cried,'' Choedon recalled.
After a year and a half, Ngawang and Choedon were transferred to Trisam Prison, another Chinese prison in Tibet.
At Trisam, Choedon said Ngawang seemed fragile, and her health continued to deteriorate. ``She often had trouble standing,'' recalled Choedon, who said she was in the cell adjacent to Ngawang's. She added that other nuns at times tried to help her stand.
It was in the summer of 1994 that the nuns at Trisam got news from another nun, who was visiting the prison. She told them that Yangkyi, who had been arrested two years earlier in the small group at the market place in Lhasa, had died on June 4 in a police hospital while serving her sentence at Drapchi Prison.
``Sherab Ngawang was very angry,'' Choedon recalled. ``She cried, she cried a lot; she was very sick for four days. She couldn't stand, couldn't eat and couldn't work.''
Ngawang recovered, but after six weeks became very sick again, Choedon said.
``That time, she couldn't stand, lift her legs, or go to the toilet without help,'' Choedon recalled. ``She couldn't eat properly. We pleaded with the Chinese to let her see a doctor. Finally the prison doctor looked at her, but he gave her only a painkiller. After 15 days of this she finally was taken to the Mentsekhang Tibetan medical center,'' Choedon said. Eventually, Ngawang was sent back to do prison work.
On Aug. 10, 1994, Choedon said, the nuns in three cells including Ngawang's and Choedon's cells sang Tibetan independence songs. As the police approached, Ngawang and the nuns in her cell stopped singing. But Choedon and the nuns in hers continued.
The police dragged Choedon and the four nuns out of their cell to another cell, she said. Choedon recalled hearing Ngawang shouting, ``Where have you taken them?'' Within minutes, Ngawang was pulled from her cell and thrown into the cell with the other nuns, Choedon said.
The police took the nuns to a large room and forced them to kneel on a concrete floor, Choedon said. About 50 police had arrived; three were Tibetans, the rest were Chinese.
``They kicked us, punched us, and beat us repeatedly,'' Choedon recalled. ``Our hands were handcuffed so tightly we were swelling. We could hardly breathe or talk after the beating.''
The police then dragged the nuns to the prison's main interrogation room and beat them again this time with heavy sticks, Choedon said.
The police also shocked the nuns with electric cattle prods and beat them with plastic rods filled with sand.
It was a cold night. The nuns were wearing thin chubas, the traditional Tibetan dress. The police, meanwhile, sat down with blankets after the beating and drank thukpa, a Tibetan soup, in front of the nuns, she said.
``We had nothing to eat,'' Choedon explained. ``We had to kneel there, on the concrete floor, in deep pain and shivering, while watching the police eat; they had blankets on their laps.''
She said Ngawang told the police: ``I have to go to the toilet, please help me.''
The police responded: ``You are speaking; you can't,'' Choedon recalled. ``They gave her another beating.''
At midnight, police dragged Ngawang, Choedon and the other nuns to the filthy toilet, Choedon said, and forced them to remain there for five hours. ``We were all vomiting, and my head was spinning,'' Choedon said.
Finally, each of the nuns was dragged into a dark, solitary-confinement cell. ``Urine and stools were in the cell from the previous prisoners,'' Choedon said.
Ngawang remained in isolation for five or six days, she later told Choedon. When she was allowed out, she was ``beaten a lot by the Chinese'' before she was sent back to the regular prison cell, Choedon said Ngawang told her.
After Ngawang's sentence was up and she was released, her family took her to a hospital near their home, according to Ngawang's cousin, Phuntsok. At Meldrogongkar County Hospital, doctors told the family she was in critical condition, apparently with severe kidney damage.
They said they were unable to do anything to save her.
A nun who grew up in the same village as Ngawang said she visited Ngawang at her home upon Ngawang's release from prison. ``She was very thin and her face was yellow,'' said the nun, Dolkar, 17, who was interviewed while she was fleeing Tibet for India.
Dolkar visited Ngawang in Meldrogongkar County Hospital weeks later, in May 1995, bearing a gift of boiled yak meat. ``She was writhing;
she kept saying, `I'm in pain, I'd rather be dead.' Her mother and father and her younger brother were in the room; her parents were crying.''
When the physician, Thubtenla, came in the room, Dolkar asked him what was wrong with her friend. ``He said her kidneys had been shattered; they weren't functioning,'' Dolkar said.
A few days later, she died.
In Tibet, the traditional funeral is performed by a monk who is also a ``medical examiner,'' although he does not have training as a physician. The monk cuts the dead body into parts, and throws the parts off a mountain top, and the body is eaten by vultures. The ritual is called a Tibetan sky burial.
Phuntsok said the monk who cut open Ngawang told the family that the 18-year-old's kidneys were severely damaged and were black and blue;
there was a wound inside her chest, the monk said, and ``her internal organs looked like she was a hundred years old.''
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Toxic chores
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Phuntsok Yangkyi, who died in prison at age 19, had been strenuously beaten, both in Gutsa Detention Center and Drapchi Prison, according to three nuns who were imprisoned with her: Ngawang Tendol, Lobsang Choedon and Thinley Choezom.
Yangkyi grew up in a family of farmers in a small village. She became a nun when she was 12.
``She was always very jolly, very funny,'' said Ngawang Tendol, a nun who joined the same nunnery as Yangkyi, the Michungri Nunnery outside Lhasa. ``She liked joking around and singing.'' Tendol said that the young nuns worked to rebuild the nunnery, which had been destroyed by the Chinese in 1959. ``She worked like a man,'' Tendol said in an interview in India.
At Gutsa Detention Center, Yangkyi was severely beaten, along with Ngawang and other nuns who were interviewed. Choezom recalled that Yangkyi's eyes were swollen nearly shut. ``She told me she had been beaten severely,'' Choezom said. Yangkyi and Choezom were transferred to Drapchi Prison about eight months after they arrived at Gutsa.
Tendol said that Yangkyi was routinely and harshly beaten at Drapchi Prison during morning military marching exercises. The prisoners were forced to swing their arms and march in perfect step with one another while yelling such Chinese slogans as ``Become a changed person!'' ``Protest counterrevolutionaries!'' and ``Preserve the laws!''
Her health also apparently was diminished from the job she held at Drapchi for two years: She had been ordered to apply human excrement to the vegetables. She did so with her bare hands. At least once a week, Yangkyi also sprayed chemicals in the greenhouse; the windows and doors at Gutsa were closed while she sprayed. She did not wear a mask or gloves while spraying, according to Tendol, who was also in prison with Yangkyi.
Yangkyi was also sent to the septic tanks of Lhasa, under armed guard, to remove human excrement with her bare hands and place it into tubs that were taken to the prison. Litch, the American physician, who has treated refugees and has examined many of the imprisoned Tibetans interviewed by The Inquirer, said that such handling of excrement could lead to infectious disease.
``We weren't allowed to wear gloves,'' said Tendol, adding that she occasionally helped Yangkyi. ``We'd get the excrement on our shirts, but we couldn't show our distaste to the guards or we'd be beaten,'' Tendol said, recalling a trip to the septic tanks.
Tendol was in an cell adjacent to Yangkyi's.
``When we were in the nunnery together, Phuntsok Yangkyi always seemed very smart, very cheerful; she never was depressed. She seemed the same when she first arrived at Drapchi,'' Tendol said.
By the end of 1992, she appeared very thin as though she had been in a concentration camp, said Tendol, 26, who was a longtime friend of Yangkyi's. ``In the nunnery, Phuntsok's face was round, a little fat; but when she arrived at Drapchi, you could see her bones.''
After one year at Drapchi Prison, Yangkyi's health further deteriorated. ``She became very sick, very weak, and she complained that she was in terrible pain,'' Tendol said. ``Normally she walked very swiftly. But she was walking very slowly at Drapchi, like she was an old woman.''
During Yangkyi's last three months at Drapchi, ``she was complaining of pain on her right front side, and she was limping,'' Tendol said.
``She had a lot of pain in her back, at the kidneys, and she ate very little food. She didn't talk much.''
Even so, Yangkyi was forced to continue working, spreading human excrement around the vegetables.
Finally, in late February 1994, Yangkyi was physically unable to work.
``It was impossible,'' Tendol recalled. ``She lay on her bed, and she didn't have the strength to get out of bed. The police told her: `This is your negligence; you must not have taken your medicine properly.' ''
Tendol said that she and another nun pleaded with prison authorities to take Yangkyi to the hospital. ``We told the police, `Keep her here only if you want her to die in prison.' '' Tendol said she made her request to Penpa Bhuti, a Tibetan police officer who was head of the women's block at Drapchi Prison, and Zhang Zheng, a Chinese police officer.
Police obliged, taking Yangkyi to the Public Security Bureau Hospital. A nun who was arrested with Yangkyi, Lobsang Dolma, and another nun, Sagmo (she has only one name), accompanied her to the hospital. Dolma and Sagmo are still in Tibet.
Yangkyi's parents were called to the hospital.
The two nuns who were in the hospital said that Yangkyi had black spots on her nails, lips and legs, Tendol recalled, leading Yangkyi's parents to believe that their daughter had been poisoned. Prison authorities reportedly told the parents that their daughter had a brain disease.
``The parents cried a lot; they were almost unconscious,'' Tendol said she was told.
Five days after the 19-year-old nun was taken to the hospital, the nuns who accompanied her returned to the prison. They were crying.
``We all started crying, too,'' Tendol said. ``They told us what we surmised: Phuntsok Yangkyi had died.''
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Unconscious, beaten
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Gyaltsen Kelsang grew up in a village outside Lhasa. Her parents were farmers. When she was 22, she and 11 other nuns from the Garu Nunnery were arrested for shouting slogans for independence for Tibet. It was June 14, 1993.
Thinley Choezom and Ngawang Tendol, of the Michungri Nunnery, already were at Drapchi Prison when Kelsang arrived from the Gutsa Detention Center. At the time, Choezom recalled, Kelsang ``looked happy and healthy; she was a little fat.''
Tendol recalled that Kelsang ``did great imitations of the Chinese police, the way they'd speak and the way they'd beat us. She made us all laugh.''
But Kelsang's humor and health soon dissipated.
Every day, Choezom and Tendol recalled, the female political prisoners at Drapchi about 100 of them were forced to spend 5_1/2 hours a day jogging and marching. The prison police referred to this as ``physical training.'' To the political prisoners, that term was a euphemism; the exercise was punishment.
It often was followed by two hours of standing in the hot sun during which the nuns were not allowed to talk or move, Tendol said. Kelsang often fainted.
``Gyaltsen Kelsang fell the most,'' Tendol recalled. ``She'd faint.
When she'd fall the Chinese would shout at her to stand. But she couldn't; she was unconscious. Then they'd kick her and beat her with a stick for several minutes.''
By mid-1994, Choezom recalled, the beatings and ``exercise'' had taken a heavy toll on Kelsang. She appeared very weak and thin. ``You could see the bones in her face,'' Choezom said.
``She couldn't stand erect and she couldn't walk properly,'' Tendol said. ``She walked like an old woman. But still she was forced to march, jog and stand in the sun every day.''
Kelsang was complaining of pain in her stomach, and in her kidneys.
She was given no medical care in the prison, the nuns said.
On Aug. 22, 1994, Tendol completed her prison term and was released. She smuggled out a small jar containing Kelsang's urine and took the sample to a doctor at Lhasa's Mentsekhang Hospital, a Tibetan facility.
``The doctor said she had a very serious kidney problem,'' Tendol recalled. ``He gave me pills to give her, but I wasn't allowed to give them to her when I visited. The police said there was a clinic in the prison.''
During November 1994, Choezom recalled, Kelsang was bedridden. She couldn't stand or go to the toilet by herself.
Weeks later, prison authorities took Kelsang to the police hospital in Lhasa. On Feb. 20, 1995, she died. She was at her parents' home in a village near Lhasa.
``All the nuns in my cell cried together'' when they heard the news at Drapchi, Choezom recalled. ``The Chinese saw us crying and asked why we were crying. We told them.''
The police officer, Choezom remembers, had a simple response:
``Everyone dies,'' he said.
