NEW DELHI: Now that the Chinese Premier Li Peng has returned to Beijing the Tibetan nuns who with several of their brethren were in police custody and released only on Tuesday morning can till of the torture that they were subjected to in Lhasa and the indignities heaped on them despite their robes of renunciation.
Kelson Pelmo Tenzin Wongmo Sherab Choden and Phudren all in their mid-twenties were in the nunneries of Lhasa leading the peaceful life of ascetics. All of them were arrested for taking part in the demonstrations against the Chinese government in 1988 and imprisoned for two to three months. When released they were kept under surveillance and not allowed to go back to the nunneries. They escaped and came to India between September and December last year.
They arrived in Delhi from Dharmashala a few days before the visit of the Chinese premier so that they could protest about the treatment meted out to the Tibetans and give the media firsthand account of the torture they were subjected to but all of them were rounded up and kept in police custody till Tuesday morning.
The Tibetan Women’s Association which is seeking to focus attention on the harassment that the women in particular were subjected to point out that it was the monks of Gaden who led the first demonstration in September 1987. In 1988 it was the nuns who led the demonstrations against the Chinese. About 500 of them were imprisoned and tortured. Some of them have been in prison for seven years now.
Pelmo Tenzin Phudren and Sherab are among the four who have seen and experienced the entire gamut of torture and are here to tell the world what is happening in Lhasa. Many of them were stripped naked beaten senseless and had “at the prods” inserted in their private parts. The two nuns who were raped by the Chinese soldiers have had to give up life of renunciation since a raped nun has no place in the Tibetan nunneries.
Pelmo recalls how the Chinese soldier’s took turn in beating them up using leather belts the broken leg of a chair rifles and sticks Wangmos hands were strapped and she was given electric shocks. When she recovered consciousness it was to find a Chinese soldier sitting on her neck. Sherab Chodon was not only stripped naked and beaten but was forced to wear a urine pot on her head
Their hearts sill seethe with anger but the nuns tell of their humiliation almost with a stoic indifference. It is because they were not allowed to go back to the nunneries or practice their religion in the villages that they were confined to that they decided to escape from Lhasa and tell the world what is happening to them Sonam Lhamo vice president of the Tibetan Women’s Association says 6000 monasteries were reduced to rubble and their jewelry and artifacts stolen. Though the Chinese signed the UN convention against torture in 1986 they continue to contravene the agreement. It is estimated that there are still 1000 political prisoners in the five jails of Lhasa.
In an attempt to curtail if not finish the Tibetan population Sonam says the Tibetans are forcibly sterilized and have been forced to abort. Officially the one child policy does not apply to the minorities in China. Official permits are required before a woman can give birth in Tibet. But they are generally withheld.
Genocide has not ended in Tibet says Sonam Lhamo.
Article extracted from this publication >> February 7, 1992
