For 17 days they waded through Himalayan snowdrifts and climbed ice-covered rocky terrain, cold, hungry and exhausted. Then came the shooting.
Early on Sept. 30, as 75 Tibetan refugees were making a secret trek across the border into Nepal, moving in single file across a mountain slope near the 5,800m high Nanpa La Pass, Chinese border guards opened fire.
One woman -- a 25-year-old Buddhist nun -- was killed immediately, group members said. Chinese officials, in a statement apparently about the shooting, have said a second person also died.
PHOTO: AFP
"There was no warning of any kind. The bullets were so close I could hear them whizzing past," Thubten Tsering, a Tibetan monk, told journalists in New Delhi on Monday. "We scattered and ran."
Thubten is among 41 of the refugees who survived the shooting and reached India. The survivors said they do not know the fate of 32 others, including nine children, who were taken into custody by the guards.
"We don't know where they are or what happened to them," said Thubten, his chapped cheeks and exhausted face still bearing the scars of the ordeal.
Footage of the incident, shot by a Romanian cameraman on a mountaineering expedition, sparked an international outcry.
The footage, which was released by Romania's Pro TV, shows a distant figure that its narrator says is a Chinese border guard firing a rifle and a separate scene of a person in a line of figures walking through the snow then falling to the ground. An unidentified man near the camera can be heard saying in English, "They are shooting them like, like dogs."
The activist group International Campaign for Tibet, in a written statement, said the video proves Chinese troops fired at unarmed Tibetans and counters a statement from Beijing that its forces were attacked and fired in self-defense.
The pass is a common escape route for fleeing Tibetans.
Thousands have left for Nepal since Chinese forces occupied their Himalayan homeland in 1951. Many make their way to the north Indian town of Dharmsala, the home of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Every year more than 2,500 Tibetan refugees attempt the arduous trek, said Tenzing Norgay of the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy, which arranged the Monday news conference for the survivors.
When asked about his life in a monastery in Tibet where the monks are under the constant watch of Chinese security forces and under pressure to denounce the Dalai Lama, Thubten said simply: "It was stifling."
"Being a monk who has taken a vow to live by the faith, we were always under threat from the Chinese political authorities," he said.
Dolma Palkyid, a 15-year-old novice nun, was a close friend of Kelsang Nortso, the nun who was killed.
"I had walked ahead and we got separated. Then the shooting took place and we fled. It was four days later that I heard Kelsang was the one who was shot," she said, speaking haltingly and tearfully, through an interpreter.
Once in India, the friends were hoping to join another Buddhist nunnery together, said the red-cheeked teenager dressed in a traditional ankle-length gown.
The group of Tibetan refugees had each paid 5,000 yuan (US$625) to a guide to arrange the trip. They set off around the middle of last month, assured that the 10-day trek would deliver them to Nepal.
There have been instances of refugees being shot at by border guards in the past, but this was the first time in recent years that troops killed any, Tenzing said of the human rights group.
"This is the first time that the world has seen evidence of what Tibetans are subjected to by the Chinese," Tenzing said.
"Kelsang's death cannot go in vain. We will use this incident and the video footage to bring international pressure on China and press for Tibetan freedom," he said.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS