By MARIA MOHEDANO
El Nuevo Herald
Tibetan nuns Choeying Kusang and Passang Lhamo experienced first-hand the horrors of prison and torture in their campaign to wrest Tibet’s freedom from China.
They and the story of their Buddhist sisters will be honored at a Miami ceremony scheduled for Saturday in observance of International Women’s Day.
Despite their youth, Choeying, 26, and Passang, 25, spent more than five years in the harsh Tibetan prison at Drapchi, where they were taken with several companions after demonstrating for human rights and shouting slogans demanding autonomy for Tibet. China invaded the country in October 1950, and the Tibetans surrendered the next year.
Inside Drapchi prison, considered among the toughest for political prisoners, the nuns saw five of their women friends beaten to death by Chinese guards. Badly fed and tortured, Choeying and Passang managed to survive without medical care.
The two women, part of a group known as the Drapchi 14, defied the authorities by recording songs of freedom. The defiance earned them longer sentences.
”It was horrible,” they told members of the organizations that now help them. “We watched some of [our friends] being beaten and given electric shock treatment. Afterward, they couldn’t even move. Then they died.”
Since their release in 1999, the nuns have toured the United States, serving as witnesses for the situation in their homeland. The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s top religious leader, fled into exile in 1951 and has been Tibet’s most ardent opponent of Chinese rule.
”Taking advantage of their sojourn, Amnesty International in Miami realized the need to honor them [the nuns], and what better opportunity than the day when women are most talked about?” said Silvia Sarasua, Amnesty’s spokeswoman in South Florida.
According to Amnesty, 26 percent of all political prisoners in Tibet are women. Of these, 80 percent are nuns.
According to the Tibet Information Network, based in Jackson, Wyo., one of every 20 women in Chinese prisons dies.
The nuns, Sarasua said, “know that, because they have no family, because they are single women, they have the least to lose if they struggle for the rights of their people. They also suffer the most.”
Further information about civil rights in Tibet can be found in www.tibetjus tice.org/news, the website of the Tibet Justice Center. The Tibet Information Network can be accessed through www.tibetinfo.net.
