Tibet's perilous path to liberty

Refugees risk all to flee China's grip

KUNDE, NEPAL -- As he slipped off a shoe to display a severely frostbitten foot, Pema Tsering acknowledged that he made a dire mistake at the beginning of an arduous trek over the Himalayas from Tibet to freedom in Nepal.

He forgot to bring plastic bags.

When he forded a stream with his younger brother early this year, he wasn't able to keep his feet dry in the icy water, and it seeped into his canvas shoes.

For several days and nights, his feet grew colder and colder. Tsering, 18, and his 15-year-old brother, Sonam Dhondup, couldn't stop for fear that Chinese border guards would arrest them -- or worse.

"We didn't sleep on the Tibet side. We just kept walking and walking until we crossed the pass," Tsering recalled, adding that a Tibetan nun eventually saw him limping and sent him to a tiny hospital here.

The icy Nangpa pass is a well-worn route. Thousands of Tibetan Buddhists have crossed it in recent decades, part of an exodus of Tibetans escaping Chinese religious and political control. The pass is no ordinary mountain crossing. It's 18,700 feet high, higher than any peak in North America except Mount McKinley in Alaska and Mount Logan in Canada's Yukon.

The thin air, drifting snow and occasional gunfire from Chinese guards make the flight of Tibetans a remarkable -- if little-documented -- drama that unfolds behind the headline-making journeys of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan religious leader, who tours world capitals espousing nonviolence and advocating greater autonomy for Tibet.

Some 2,000 to 3,000 refugees trek across the Himalayas each year. They take no sleeping bags, no tents, no fluffy down jackets and no maps. The lucky ones have guides and carry sheeting to use as tarps and plastic bags to wrap their feet. Most come in winter, when glacial crevasses freeze shut and Chinese border guards stick close to their heated outposts rather than roaming the frontier.

The steady trickle of refugees bedevils China's claim that all is well in Tibet.

Some Tibetans chafe that they can't pursue studies primarily in their own language, rather than Chinese. Many also revere the Dalai Lama, whom they consider a God-king, even though China considers him a "splittist" who wants to shear away Tibet from the motherland. China bans even his photograph.

Hoping to win over Tibetans, China has spent billions of dollars on roads, schools and new settlements for Tibetan herders to coax them from a nomadic lifestyle.

It also uses force, the locked and loaded version, deploying more armed guards along the Tibetan border to slow the stream of migrants in the run-up to the Beijing Summer Olympic Games.

"We've seen a real stepping up of security on the Chinese side," said Kate Saunders, the communications director for the International Campaign for Tibet, a human-rights advocacy and monitoring group with offices in Washington, Brussels, Belgium and Berlin.

The Chinese treat certain parts of China with large minority populations, such as Tibet, as autonomous regions.

Ethnic Tibetans also inhabit areas outside of what China calls Tibet, dwelling in portions of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces.

Danger from elements

On a cold, misty day in Kunde -- elevation 12,600 feet, a hamlet that's a strenuous two-day walk from the border with Tibet in eastern Nepal -- a paramedic described the travails of crossing the mountains.

"Some are unlucky. They get caught in bad snowstorms," said Mingma Temba Sherpa, the chief health assistant at the Kunde Hospital, a small facility established by Sir Edmund Hillary, the famed 1953 conqueror of Mount Everest. "They get snow blindness . . . a few get frostbite or pneumonia or gastrointestinal problems."