Attack on Tibetans caught on film

NEW DELHI – They waded through Himalayan snowdrifts and climbed ice-covered rocky terrain for 17 days, cold, hungry and exhausted.

Then came the shooting.

As 75 Tibetan refugees were making a secret trek across the border into Nepal, moving in single file across a mountain slope near the 19,000-foot-high Nanpa La Pass, Chinese border guards opened fire.

One woman – a 25-year-old Buddhist nun – was killed immediately in the Sept. 30 shooting, group members said. Chinese officials, in a statement, have said a second person also died.

“There was no warning of any kind. The bullets were so close I could hear them whizzing past,” Thubten Tsering, a Tibetan monk, said in New Delhi on Monday. “We scattered and ran.”

Thubten is among 41 refugees who managed to reach India after the shooting. The refugees said 32 others, including nine children, 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.

Thousands of Tibetans flee Chinese rule in Tibet every year. Unable to get passports, many trek over Himalayan passes to reach Nepal and then India, where the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, lives in exile. Reports of arrests and mistreatment by Chinese authorities are common.

What separates the Sept. 30 shooting is that international mountaineers, on an expedition, saw the gunfire and filmed it.

Footage of the incident, shot by a Romanian cameraman, has sparked an international outcry.

The video, 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 Chinese government, in a report released two weeks ago by the official Xinhua News Agency, said the border guards fired in self-defense after clashing with about 70 people trying to leave the country illegally. It said one person died in the shooting and another died later. The statement didn’t say whether those involved were Tibetans.

The activist group International Campaign for Tibet, in a written statement, said the video proves the Chinese troops opened fire on unarmed Tibetans and not in self-defense.

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 news conference Monday.

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.

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, said Tenzing 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,” he said.