Tibetans recount being shot at by China guards

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 issued a statement saying that 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, told reporters in New Delhi on Monday. “We scattered and ran.”

Mr. 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 Chinese border guards.

“We don’t know where they are or what happened to them,” said Mr. 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 ill-treatment by Chinese authorities are common.

What was unusual about the Sept. 30 shooting is that foreign mountaineers on an expedition saw the gunfire and filmed it. Footage of the incident shot by a Romanian cameraman has provoked an international outcry.

The video, issued by Romania’s Pro TV, shows a distant figure the 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 said in a report two weeks ago by Xinhua, the official news agency, that 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 said in a written statement that the video proves the Chinese troops opened fire on unarmed Tibetans and not in self-defense.

The pass is a common escape route for fleeing Tibetans. Thousands have left for Nepal since communist forces occupied their Himalayan homeland in 1951. Many make their way to the north Indian town of Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, now lives.

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 press conference on 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, Mr. Thubten said: “It was stifling.”

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