Nangpa Pass Update: Refugees Freed After Torture, Hard Labor

Yesterday we had an exciting update. One of the Nangpa Pass detainees, a 15 year-old boy named Jamyang has safely reached Dharamsala, India. According to him, several other detainees have also been released. He further describes how he and over twenty others were captured following the shooting at Nangpa La and subjected to torture, harsh interrogations and were forced to do manual labor while in prison for forty-eight days.

Nearly three dozen Tibetans captured by Chinese troops as they tried to sneak out of their homeland were tortured with cattle prods and forced into hard labor, a teenager who identified himself as one of the former detainees said Tuesday, in the first reported account of the fate of the group.

Jamyang Samten, 15, said he was one of 75 Tibetans who were making their way over a 19,000-foot-high Himalayan pass on Sept. 30 when Chinese border guards opened fire, killing a 25-year-old Buddhist nun and another person.
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Samten said his group was taken from an army camp to a police station four hours away. There they were questioned over a three-day period during which they were repeatedly hit with an electric cattle prod, he said.

“It went on until I fainted,” said Samten, adding that police repeatedly asked him to identify the dead nun.

Seven members of the group who were under 15 years old – including a 4-year-old child – were not questioned, he said.

After three days, they were taken by truck to a prison in Shigatse, Tibet’s second-largest city, Samten said.

They were questioned again while chained to a wall, he said. “A guard wearing a metal glove would hit us in the stomach,” Samten said.

They were held there for 48 days during which they dug ditches, built fences and tilled fields, he said.

Samten said he was released alone but had heard from other Tibetans that the others were freed a day later.

Samten also said that when they were first captured they were put in a military truck with the dead body of Kalsang Namtso and another Tibetan man who had been shot in the leg. It’s unclear whether other Nangpa refugees have attempted to escape Tibet, but clearly the desire for freedom did not die at Nangpa Pass.

Unfortunately the International Campaign for Tibet has confirmed that a similar shooting of Tibetan refugees by Chinese border forces took place over a year ago at Nangpa Pass.

New information has been obtained about the circumstances of the shooting of a second group of Tibetans escaping into exile, a year before the September 30 incident on the Nangpa Pass. In mid-October 2005, a group of more than 20 Tibetans fleeing into exile suffered beatings and interrogation after they were fired upon and then detained by soldiers in Dingri county, en route to the border with Nepal.

According to the new reports, a group of around 50 Tibetans had traveled by bus towards the border from Lhasa, and then walked at night for several days. As the group arrived near the Nangpa Pass, at around six in the evening, they were spotted by PAP personnel at a distance who opened fire. One of the group, who is now in exile, told ICT: “The Chinese opened several rounds of gunfire on us. We thought they were just trying to scare us by shooting in the air. But then we realized the shooting was serious. Our group scattered and I have no idea about where the others are, maybe they went back where we had come from, or managed to escape. After continuous shooting for some time, many of us stopped running away and 23 of us were arrested by the Chinese soldiers.” According to the same source, none of the Tibetans detained were injured by the shooting.

There’s much more detail at the link above; all of it bears great similarity to what we know happened on September 30th, 2006. When the Nangpa Pass shooting first came to light, we suspected that this sort of illegal attack on refugees was common – why else would Chinese soldiers shoot to kill with such impunity? Now we know the sad truth and we were right.

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