Cold reality of Chinese occupation

A few minutes of jerky video footage shot by a Romanian cameraman on a mountaineering trip brought the plight of Tibetans under Chinese rule into Western living rooms this month.

For once, the world was able to watch the cruelty of occupation as it played out. In the video, a Chinese border guard calmly opens fire from a mountain ridge on a group of unarmed, defenceless Tibetans below, as they struggled through the snow to escape from occupied Tibet.

Two figures drop to the ground.

"They're shooting them like, like dogs," says an incredulous voice, one of the other mountaineers standing beside the cameraman. And then the camera trains on the dead body of one of the Tibetans in the distance.

It was a moment that changed the way the world looks at China. In recent years, all the talk has been of a liberalised China, the world's fastest growing economy that has put the worst excesses of its totalitarian past behind it. But this was a rare glimpse of another China, and of a modern-day Iron Curtain.

For once, there were witnesses.

Now the full story of what happened that day in the Himalayas has emerged. Survivors have spoken out in Delhi this week, and their accounts can be pieced together with those of the mountaineers who witnessed the shooting.

The group whose members were casually picked off as they struggled through the snow by the Chinese border guard had already been walking for 17 days. They had waded through deep snow and struggled over ice and rock. They had gone without food or sleep, and they were exhausted - all to escape the Chinese occupation of their homeland. It is a journey that is made by thousands of Tibetans every year as they continue to flee the occupation.

"There was no warning of any kind," Thubten Tsering, a Buddhist monk who was one of the group of refugees that day, said. "The bullets were so close I could hear them whizzing past. We scattered and ran."

There were 75 of them in the group when they left. Only 41 made it across the border into Nepal, and on to India. Two are believed to have died. There are 32 others still unaccounted for.

"We don't know where they are or what happened," Thubten said.

The dead body in the footage is that of Kelsang Nortso, a 25-year-old Buddhist nun. She was on her way to India with her friend Dolma Palkyid, a 15-year-old novice.

"I had walked ahead and we got separated," Palkyid said, struggling to speak through her tears.

"Then the shooting took place and we fled. It was four days later that I heard Kelsang was ... shot."

"We were walking in line," said another witness, who did not wish to be identified to protect her relatives still in Tibet. "Before the shooting we knew the soldiers were after us so we started to walk quickly. They warned us to stop, and then they started shooting. We were running. The bullets were landing near us. The nun who died was 100 metres ahead of me. I saw her fall down. I was lucky. A bullet tore my trousers, but it missed me."

She and some of the other refugees had to run past Nortso's body as it lay in the bloodstained snow.

The story gets worse. There were children among the group when the Chinese border guard opened fire on them. Nortso, the dead nun, was looking after a group of children who had been sent with the party by their parents to be educated in exile. There are reports a 13-year-old boy was killed.

And there are also nine children among the missing. They have been seen - by a British police officer on a mountaineering trip who witnessed them being led terrified through the advance base camp at Cho Oyu peak, where he was staying.

The place where it happened, Nangpa La, is a soaring mountain pass almost 5800m above sea level. It is a bleak, inhospitable place, but it witnesses hundreds of similar crossings every year by Tibetans desperate to escape the occupation. In all, between 2500 and 4000 Tibetans flee across the border into Nepal every year - one of the toughest borders in the world to cross, since it runs along the line of several of the highest mountains on earth, including Mount Everest.

They cross at Nangpa La and a few other passes, following in the footsteps of the Dalai Lama who made his own escape through the Himalayas in 1957. Most follow him from Nepal into India.

The crossings at Nangpa La are generally made during the night to avoid Chinese border patrols, but the one that was attacked was attempting to cross in the morning - possibly because of the large number of children in the group.

As to why Tibetans are prepared to take such risks to escape their homeland, it says a lot about the degree of repression that continues there. Most have to pay guides around 5,000 yuan ($957) to guide them through the mountain passes - serious money in impoverished rural Tibet.

Every refugee has their own reason. For many, it is the Dalai Lama.

After the incident, the surviving refugees who had escaped capture regrouped in the mountains, then headed down into the lowlands of Nepal. It took them another eight days walking. In total, they walked for 25 days across some of the highest and most inhospitable mountain passes on Earth.

- INDEPENDENT