By TERRY DATE
Democrat Staff Writer
EXETER — Proclaiming the words “Free Tibet” at a Lhasa, Tibet, marketplace in 1994 cost the soft-spoken and diminutive nun Passang Lhamo dearly — five years in prison.
But not so dearly as the 33 years of shackles and deprivation endured by Tibetan monk Palden Gyatso after he demonstrated peacefully in his homeland in 1959.
Wrapped in red robes and speaking through a translator Wednesday, Gyatso, Lhamo and another Tibetan nun, Chuye Kunsang, told a hushed Phillips Church audience at Phillips Exeter Academy how Chinese authorities have starved, beaten and killed dissenters for decades.
About 1.2 million Tibetans have died as a result of the Chinese occupation and 6,000 or 98 percent of the country’s monasteries have been destroyed since the 1949 Chinese invasion of Tibet, said event moderator Kalia Lydgate, a Phillips Exeter senior.
The visit was the Tibetans’ first stop in a six-month tour of the United States during which they will relate their experiences with the hope that resulting public pressure will persuade China to stop persecuting Tibetans.
Gyatso told the audience of mostly students how tormentors tied up, scalded and burned him and other prisoners when they refused to comply with the authorities’ demand that they say Tibet is part of China.
Why, a student later asked, did Gyatso not comply with the demand as a means to end his suffering.
“My very existence is that of being a Tibetan,” Gyatso answered through the translator. “By doing this, I would be giving away my whole existence.”
The 72-year-old monk was freed at the age of 61 in 1992 after Amnesty International pressured the Chinese government to release him. He said authorities applied electric cattle prods to prisoners’ bodies as part of a continuing re-education of the “rightness” of Chinese communism and “errs” of the prisoners’ political and spiritual beliefs.
While the shocks succeeded in blinding some and knocking out all of Gyatso’s teeth, it failed in shaking their beliefs in Buddhism and independence.
Those beliefs remain strong in the minds of many Tibetans, said Gyatso, who is living in exile along with the nuns and 130,000 countrymen.
The nuns, Lhamo, 26, and Kunsang, 27, were imprisoned at the infamous Drapchi Prison in Lhasa.
Like Lhamo, Kunsang was arrested by Chinese authorities when as a teen-ager she spoke out at a marketplace.
Kunsang uttered the phrases, “Long live his holiness,” a reference to the Tibetan spiritual leader the Dali Lama, “Religious freedom for Tibetans,” and “Free Tibet.”
Authorities sought to reform Kunsang during her four-year imprisonment through mental re-education, physical labor and beatings, she said.
Kunsang said some prisoners “were beaten up so much they thought they would never be alive again.”
The two nuns were released in the late 1990s through international humanitarian efforts.
Lhamo said authorities nevertheless kept a close eye on her, frequently stopping by her home.
Whenever political problems arose in the country, authorities interrogated her and others.
Finally, Lhamo and others escaped to India, fleeing under the cover of darkness and hiding during the daytime, she said.
Lhamo said she fled sustained by the hope of being able to tell the story of nuns who had died and are still languishing in prison.
During a question-and-answer session at the end of the event Wednesday, Phillips Exeter senior AJ Kumar asked Palden if he believed in violent resistance or a violent intervention by another country as a means to end persecution.
Palden said the Buddhist faith does not allow believers to think about violence.
“So we are hoping that any country that will help us, will do this through nonviolent means,” said Palden, who has testified before the United Nations and Congress.
One way supporters can lend a hand, advocates say, is to write the United Nations and ask that attention be given to negotiations with China to prevent further persecution and assaults on Tibetan culture and the country’s environment.
Letters may be addressed to the High Commissioner for Human Rights, United Nations, One United Nations Plaza, Room S-2914, New York, N.Y., 10017.
Democrat Staff Writer Terry Date can be reached at 778-8585 or tdate@fosters.com
