Monks defy China, flee to India refuge

DHARAMSALA, India — Lobsang Gyatso and his fellow Tibetan monks had been biding their time, walking around the main square of the monastery nestled in the barren hills of northwestern China. Now the moment had arrived.

As a group of 20 foreign and Chinese journalists climbed out of minivans, Lobsang and the other monks unfurled banners they had wrapped inside the folds of their crimson robes and held aloft the banned flag of Tibet.

"We have no human rights now," one monk told reporters in Chinese.

That daring protest, in April 2008, was transmitted around the world by the journalists on the government tour, putting a dramatic face on Tibetan defiance. Chinese officials had brought the journalists to the sprawling Labrang Monastery, in the town of Xiahe, to show that Tibetans were content under Chinese rule, despite the widespread Tibetan uprising the previous month. The enraged monks, about 15 in all, punctured the official narrative.

"If we monks hadn't seized the opportunity to express our feelings, which are feelings in all Tibetan monks, then we would have missed a chance to tell the world," said Lobsang, 24, a squat man with a thin goatee who now lives in India.

For Lobsang and two other monks, it was the start of a harrowing year of flight from the Chinese authorities that ended only last month, when they arrived in this Himalayan hill town where the Dalai Lama lives in exile.

Over that year, the monks slipped out of their monastery, trekked into the mountains, slept in nomads' tents and crossed a raging river to Nepal.

The monks' story opens a rare window into the deep resentment that bloomed last year into the largest Tibetan uprising in decades.

Chinese officials insist that the protests were orchestrated by the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetans. The monks from Labrang say harsh Chinese policies sparked the tinder, especially limitations on Buddhist practice.

"I and my friends decided on our own to protest," Lobsang said. "The protests were caused by human-rights issues and Chinese policies toward Tibet. We couldn't tolerate it anymore."

He added, "I joined the protests with the idea of saving Buddhism, which is endangered by Chinese policy. I want His Holiness the Dalai Lama to return to Tibet, but the Chinese don't even allow us to display his picture."

Labrang Monastery is one of the most important centers of religious study in the Tibetan world, a white-walled labyrinth dating from the 18th century. It housed about 500 monks before last year's protests.

Chinese policies in this frontier land called Amdo, at the nexus of the Tibetan, Hui Muslim and Han Chinese worlds, have traditionally been less strict than in central Tibet. But even in Amdo, the Communist Party employs heavy-handed methods to control religious practice, said the three monks and two others who fled with them to Dharamsala.

The government limits the number of monks allowed to live in the monastery, they said. Officials cracked down on festivities honoring the Dalai Lama. When the Chinese-appointed Panchen Lama visited Labrang several years ago, monks were forced to stay indoors, to prevent disturbances.

Last year, when monks in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, began leading peaceful protests on March 10, word spread quickly to Labrang.

Thousands of monks and lay people in Xiahe marched to government offices demanding the return of the Dalai Lama. Some protesters broke into buildings and threw stones at riot police.

From then on, the government tightened the screws on the monastery, the monks said. A curfew was imposed. Security officers arrested several monks each night. The monastery began to empty out.

One day after the protest in front of the journalists, monk Jamyang Jinpa, 24, slipped into the mountains in the night. Lobsang and Jigme Gyatso, 22, also fled in the days after Jamyang left. The three stayed apart. After nearly a year in hiding, they learned of a guide in Lhasa who could smuggle them into Nepal.

With fake ID, they boarded the new high-altitude train to Lhasa. A driver sneaked them past checkpoints to the Nepal border, where they crossed a river on logs.

Of the 15 monks who took part in that protest in front of the journalists, only these three have escaped to India. That they made it here is considered extraordinary given how tightly Chinese authorities clamped down on Tibet. The refugee center here usually gets 2,500 to 3,000 Tibetans per year, but that dropped to 550 last year. By the end of May, only 176 refugees had arrived, said Ngawang Norbu, the center's director.

The monks say they have no regrets about the protest — to them, there was no other way to show the world their true feelings about Chinese rule.

"I miss my friends and family in Tibet, but I try to bury my feelings," Jamyang said. "At the moment, I can't return to Tibet, and I don't know about the future."