London - 3 Feb, TIN - A 13 year old girl died from exposure while trying to escape from Tibet last month, her third attempt to flee to India, and a boy of the same age died in Kathmandu as a result of injuries received during the flight across the mountains. 500 Tibetan children try each year to reach India in the hope of getting Tibetan-medium education there.

The girl, whose name was Deyang or "melodious happiness", died on 19th December last year on a 5,700 m high Himalayan pass that leads from Tibet to Nepal. She was travelling with a group of 14 other refugees to Kathmandu, from where Tibetan asylum seekers are usually allowed to transit to India and join some 100,000 Tibetans living in exile.

The girl began to have difficulties walking as the group began the ascent of the Nangpa-la, the pass most frequently used by Tibetan asylum seekers some 100 km west of Everest and 150 km from the southern Tibetan town of Tingri.

By the time the escapees reached the Nangpa-la the girl was suffering from the cold and had developed a lung infection. "She became very weak and there was no means of getting medical treatment," said one of her companions, a 14 year old boy from Lhasa, after the rest of the group, who were mostly monks, reached the Nepalese capital.

"She was coughing and could not walk, so all the people in the group took turns carrying her, wrapped in a blanket," added a farmer who was with the escape group, each of whom had paid 900 yuan to the guide who led them across the mountains. The farmer had left his home in Kantse in Eastern Tibet after Chinese officials told villagers in his area to denounce the Dalai Lama and to discard photographs of the child recognised by the Dalai Lama as the new Panchen Lama.

The refugees in Deyang's group were carrying some traditional Tibetan and Chinese medicines, but these proved were ineffective in stopping her deterioration. Ten days after the group began walking from Tingri and 48 hours after they crossed the border into Nepal, Deyang died. Her body was buried by the other members of the group and prayers were recited by the monks.

She was within three days of reaching Kunde hospital, the medical facility closest to the border crossing, set up by Sir Edmund Hilary near Namche Bazaar in the Solo Khumbu region of Nepal, 140 km north east of Kathmandu.

It was the third time Deyang had tried to escape from Tibet, but she had not previously succeeded in reaching the Tibetan border. Her first attempt had failed early last year when she was arrested by police at Shigatse, 220 km from Lhasa and the first major town on the road to the Nepalese border. On her second attempt she had been arrested at Sakya, 80 km further from Lhasa but still 120 km north of the border.

Deyang's father is a worker at a small Tibetan hotel in Lhasa frequently used by tourists, including westerners. A photograph of her obtained by TIN shows a small girl dancing with her younger brother on a table in the square outside Lhasa's main cathedral cheered on by a large crowd during celebrations for Ganden Ngagchoe, the Butter Lama Festival. It was taken on 5th December last year, the night before she set off on her last attempt to reach Nepal.

DEATH AFTER FROSTBITE COMPLICATIONS -

On 28th December a 13-year old boy died in a Kathmandu hospital six weeks after reaching the capital. Tsering Phuntsog had been part of a large group of escapees who had crossed the Himalayas by the Larkya pass, which lies in the Manaslu region of Nepal, 130 km north-west of Kathmandu. The boy was one of three boys who were intending to travel to India in the hope of being educated in a Tibetan exile school.

The boys were part of a group of 111 Tibetans which was caught in a storm on the pass, 55 km north-east of Anapurna. The escapees had to walk through waist-deep snow before they reached Nepali villages where local police helped them to safety and then escorted them to Kathmandu, where they arrived on 16th November. At least 43 of the group had to be treated there for frostbite, and the three boys were the most serious cases and had to have their toes or feet amputated.

Tsering Phuntsog, who came from Meli in Kham, eastern Tibet, died shortly after a minor operation carried out at a public hospital in Kathmandu nearly a month after the amputation. The hospital is managed by foreign missionaries and is generally well regarded in comparison to other public facilities. Admission to public hospitals in Nepal is extremely difficult and the three children with severe frostbite had been admitted for treatment only after the hospital administrator overruled the normal admissions procedure.

Tsering Phuntsog suffered from secondary infection after the amputation of some of his toes, and also contracted measles. He died soon after doctors carried out a second operation, apparently intended to apply new skin grafts to his wounds and to treat the infection.

The child appears to have been severely traumatised by the experience in the mountains, even before the amputation. "He was still shivering from the cold and looked very ill," said a Westerner who saw Tsering Phuntsog the day after he was brought to Kathmandu. "He didn't want to speak to anyone, and he looked extremely disturbed and scared," she recalled.

500 Children a Year Seeking Tibetan Education in India -

About two thousand Tibetans arrived in Nepal last year on their way to seek asylum in India, of whom about 45% were children under the age of 18. Nearly 80% of these 500 or more children were sent across the mountains unaccompanied by their parents, who had entrusted them to guides or other refugees in the hope that they will be taken to one of the schools run by the Tibetan exile administration in India.

Between 20 and 80 Tibetan children arrived each month last year as refugees on their way to India, with the numbers often peaking in the winter when Tibetans expect the weather to deter police patrols from operating along the borders.

Exile officials say that between 6,000 and 9,000 Tibetans, including young adults, escaped from Tibet to seek educational opportunities in India and Nepal in the ten years after 1984, when relaxed travel conditions inside China made escapes to India possible for the first time since the 1950s. About 5,000 were said to have joined monasteries and nunneries, while some 4,000 had joined exile lay schools.

"[In Tibet] in order to send the children to school, we have to pay money, and also we need their manpower to help work in the fields," commented the farmer from Kantse who had helped carry Deyang before during her journey. The farmer was hoping to send his children to exile schools in India where they would learn "good Tibetan and English" and where there would be no tuition fees or costs.

Deyang was a pupil at Muru primary school in Lhasa, who if she had completed the final year there would have had a statistically high chance of passing the examination for entrance into a middle school. Around 80% of Tibetan children drop out of the education system before the end of primary school, leaving less than a fifth to go on to secondary education. She may have failed to complete her primary school course, or her parents may have felt unable to afford school costs. Although official fees are low, additional costs can mount up, and a survey of 45 families in Lhasa in 1994 showed an average expenditure on education of 11,000 yuan (US$ 1,375) per year, according to a Xinhua report last June.

Deyang or her family may also have wanted her to continue her education in a Tibetan medium school. All schools in the Tibet Autonomous Region switch to Chinese medium after the end of primary school, and last summer the authorities wound up a pilot project which had briefly offered Tibetan medium education at secondary level in four schools in the TAR.

In 1994 the Chinese authorities in the Tibet Autonomous Region issued orders banning government employees from allowing their children to go to exile schools in India but the flow of children from families outside the government structure appears to have continued unabated, especially from eastern Tibetan areas, which lie outside the TAR.

Children travelling illegally to Nepal face other threats besides illness and hypothermia. A survey by TIN in March last year documented 31 cases of children under 18 who had been either robbed, beaten, or deported by the Nepalese authorities, including two who were shot, wounded and then robbed of their possession by Nepalese border police in an incident in June 1993.

In a similar incident in November last year Nepali police opened fire on a group of refugees including nine children, wounding three adults and later beating one of the children. At least 20 children were repatriated by Nepali police and handed over to the Chinese in 1995, although there are detailed accounts of children being detained and beaten by police in Tibet if caught attempting to escape.