The Long Trek Out of Tibet

Thousands of Tibetans fleeing repression in their own land take one of the world’s most harrowing paths to freedom.

They climb across the Himalayas.

Each year, Tibetans trying to escape the vise of Chinese rule set out across the world’s highest mountains--and into blizzards, crevasses and ice--hoping to reach Nepal.

The unlucky are captured or turned back by Chinese authorities. Or they die in the snow.

The rest wander into this city frostbitten and starved, often missing fingers and toes.

“Everyone was fainting, falling. The snow was at my chest, and I could not see,” recalled Taga, a 22-year-old man who left his Tibetan village in December with a dream of studying English in India.

Weeks after he left home, Taga staggered down from the peaks and into a Nepalese settlement. His feet, blackened with frostbite, were removed.

“It would have been better to die,” Taga said, staring down at the stumps of his legs.

While exact numbers are impossible to verify, officials with Tibet’s India-based government-in-exile say the number of refugees going over the Himalayas into Nepal doubled last year to 2,639--about seven people per day.

The refugees say they are fleeing Chinese repression that has worsened since 1996, when Beijing stepped up its efforts to reeducate Buddhist religious leaders and launched a “Strike Hard” campaign against dissent.

Many of the latest refugees are Buddhist monks and nuns expelled from their monasteries and nunneries by agents of the Chinese government. Others are children, sent by their parents to schools in India where they can learn their language and history, which is often suppressed in Chinese-run schools.

The surge threatens to upset the delicate and largely unspoken arrangement among China, India and Nepal to tolerate a trickle of refugees out of Tibet since the Chinese invaded in 1950. And it adds a new poignancy to the Tibetans’ struggle to secure self-rule and preserve their culture in the face of a sustained Chinese onslaught.

“What the Tibetans endure is almost unbelievable,” said David R. Shlim, an American doctor living in Nepal who has treated dozens of refugees. “They cross the highest mountains in the world, they have no tents, no sleeping bags, and they are often wearing only windbreakers and cheap Chinese sneakers.”

The Dalai Lama Inspires Resistance

The drama in the mountains is unfolding against a backdrop of Chinese-Tibetan enmity. The Chinese army rolled into Tibet in 1950, following the Communist Revolution, and crushed an uprising in 1959.

In a recent statement announced over Chinese state-run radio, President Jiang Zemin said Tibetans are now living a “happy life” thanks to Chinese economic policies. Chinese rule, Jiang said, is “bright, progressive and democratic.”

But many Tibetans resist, inspired by their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, who heads the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharmsala, 100 miles from the Chinese border. The Dalai Lama, regarded by many Tibetans as the living Buddha, urges his people to resist Chinese rule without violence, and even to return to Tibet to keep the culture alive.

In its 1997 report, Amnesty International accused the Chinese government of “continuing massive human rights violations” in Tibet, including torture, forced labor and religious persecution. The U.S. recently asserted that the Beijing government was waging an intensifying campaign of religious and political suppression that threatens Tibet’s unique culture.

The human rights reports say little about the journeys undertaken by the Tibetans to escape Chinese rule--or what happens to them along the way. The stories are recounted by the refugees themselves as they wander into the Tibetan Reception Center in Katmandu.

The tales begin in the villages of far western China, on a remote plateau that fascinated Westerners long before Hollywood’s current taste for all things Tibetan. The stories recall the epic flights of those who risked their lives to scale the Berlin Wall or float across the Florida Straits on an inner tube or homemade raft.

Nyima Dickyi, 23, was a Buddhist nun living in the Tibetan village of Nyiriku when her nunnery, Phenop Potay, was taken over by Chinese government agents. Day after day, Dickyi recalled, she and the other nuns sat listening to lectures on the rightness of Chinese rule and the follies of Tibetan pride.

Reject the Dalai Lama, the teachers said.

“It was a reeducation program,” Dickyi said.

On a sunny afternoon in a Katmandu clinic where she was recovering from her ordeal, Dickyi recalled the day when her tutors passed out note pads and pens and asked the nuns to record everything they had learned.

Dickyi remembers exactly what she wrote.

“We want to save our country.”

She was promptly expelled from the nunnery.

Everything Goes Wrong at 18,000 Feet

Within days, Dickyi was on a bus to the Tibetan town of Lhaze, having paid 1,000 Chinese yuan--about $120--to a guide, Kalsang Gurmey, who said he could spirit her safely into Nepal.

Once in Lhaze, Dickyi met 20 other would-be refugees, and in early December they began their journey on foot. Of the 21 in her group, six were monks and seven were children. She was the only nun.

Dickyi carried a blanket, about $200 in Chinese currency and a small sack of sampa, a Tibetan staple made of toasted wheat. She wore a traditional Tibetan dress, a nylon jacket and a pair of rubber shoes.

By day, Dickyi recalls, the group hid in rocks and caves. By night, they traveled in silence.

“We did not want to alert the Chinese,” Dickyi said.

Eight days later, the group was high in the Himalayas, at the Nangpa La pass on the Nepalese border--18,000 feet up and 30 miles from Mt. Everest.

That’s when everything went wrong.

First, Dickyi said, the group ran out of food. Then a blizzard swept in.

Shlim, the American doctor, recalled how the same storm had dumped rain on Katmandu for three days.

“We knew that it was probably bad up in the mountains,” Shlim said. “I remember thinking, ‘Anyone up there is going to be in trouble.’ ”

Carrying Those Who Collapsed in the Cold

One of the group’s members was Taga, the young man whose feet later had to be amputated. When the children began to collapse, Taga picked one up, an 11-year-old girl named Shilok Dolma, and threw her on his back. He carried Shilok for a day but finally set her down.

“She was dead on my back,” Taga said.

Then Taga, his feet going cold, collapsed himself. His sweetheart, Chemi, picked him up and carried him. She walked like that for two days. Taga remembered that his dangling feet hurt so much that he bit into Chemi’s back.

“I held Taga’s feet close to my chest to keep them warm,” Chemi said.

When the storm let up, five members of the group were dead--four of them children. Three had collapsed in the storm, and two had frozen to death in their sleep.

“We put blankets over the dead,” said Dickyi, the nun.

Like many of the Tibetans interviewed for this article, Dickyi harbored an almost ethereal desire to see the Dalai Lama. She said a vision of the Dalai Lama helped keep her alive.

“I was senseless,” Dickyi said. “I kept thinking, ‘I am going to die, and I will not live to see His Holiness.’ ”

Eight days after the blizzard had begun, and more than two weeks after the group had begun its hike, the 16 survivors limped into Namche Bazar, a Nepalese town at 11,000 feet. Dickyi, who had by this time wandered off alone, was discovered by a pair of Scottish hikers.

In addition to the five dead, six of the survivors suffered such severe frostbite that doctors had to amputate their toes or feet. Dickyi lost seven toes.

One of the surviving children was Dadon, 10, who had been sent by her parents to study in India. She lost all her toes.

“I have seen my friends die in the snow,” said Dadon, who now walks on her heels. “Compared to that, my toes are nothing.”

The toll this winter: 15 Tibetans requiring amputations and six dead. (In December, a 3-year-old died just after a group of Tibetans had crossed into Nepal.)

Workers at the Tibetan Reception Center worry that there might have been disasters they’ve heard nothing about.

“So many die in the snow. We just don’t know,” said Tsering Lhamo, a nurse.

Recently, there have been other complications. Since 1989, Tibetans entering Nepal have been allowed to stay only as long as it takes to recover and move on to India. Many go to Dharmsala.

Last fall, refugees coming from Nepal say, it began to become increasingly difficult to gain entrance into India. Late last year, Tibetan officials say, a bus carrying Tibetan refugees from Nepal was turned back by Indian border guards. By December, so few Tibetans were getting into India that the population at the Katmandu reception center, designed to hold 100, had swollen to 600.

“It was difficult to get anyone through,” said Samdup Lhatse, secretary of the Dalai Lama’s office in Katmandu.

A few weeks ago, the Tibetans started moving again. Tibetan officials say India began easing up on its border restrictions once national elections ended.

The Tibetans say they have also had some success in moving refugees by bus using alternative routes through areas where security is less strict and, when the need arises, paying larger bribes to the Indian police.

Dickyi, whose feet are still healing, is hoping to get on one of those buses soon. She wants to join other Tibetans in a Buddhist nunnery in Dharmsala.

Taga is waiting, mostly in bed, to be fitted with prostheses. His brother, a monk, has come from India to care for him. Taga says he would like to marry Chemi, but he isn’t sure what kind of a husband he would make.

“How could I provide for her?” he asked.

Dadon is probably heading to Dharmsala, home of the Tibetan Children’s Village, which provides homes and schooling to 2,200 children--most of them refugees with parents still in Tibet.

And she is hoping to see her parents again. When she arrived in Katmandu, Dadon wrote them a letter, and they have since responded, happy that she is safe.

“I didn’t tell them about my toes,” she said.