Then again, he may be elsewhere in Dharamsala,
employing the teaching skills and legal knowledge he acquired in Repkong,
the prefectural capital of the Huangnan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in
Qinghai Province.
Lama Kyap is proud of his legal skills, and credits them with keeping the time he spent in detention to a minimum and reducing the extent of the brutality he experienced there. But he is also convinced that career opportunities for him in Amdo disappeared after he decided to "exert himself in the cause of Tibet." That began in 1984. Ten years later, on September 28, 1994, Lama Kyap arrived in India, four months after the arrival of his wife, Dorje Tso, and one of their two daughters.
Lama Kyap was born in October 1962 in rural Tsanmo, Repkong county, the second oldest child in a family of four brothers and three sisters.# Although his father did some woodworking, the family's livelihood depended on the wheat,barley, potatoes, radishes, and greens they grew as subsistence farmers. LamaKyap spent six years, from 1970 to 1976, studying math and Tibetan in thevillage before moving on to middle school. After passing an exam at the end of twelfth grade, he began to teach.
The first time Lama Kyap came to the attention of the police was on October 12, 1987 when, in response to demonstrations in Lhasa, he and two friends organized a protest of students and staff from the Repkong County Nationalities Middle School, a boarding school where he had been teaching Tibetan, math, and geography since 1982.# As he recounts with a great deal of pride and pleasure:
There was local agitation against the official family-planning policy and for Tibetan independence, so we decided to organize a similar affair. I was the main speaker. Most of the students in the eleventh and twelfth grades participated, and some from the ninth and tenth grades. The student population was 1,080, and 400 students participated. Part of the success was that I was in charge of one of the grades. We assembled at school, marched past government and Party offices, and finally rallied in front of the main government building. We were carrying banners and shouting, "Long live the Dalai Lama!" "Tibetan independence!" "Chinese out of Tibet!" The local officials called out allthe security forces: public security, state security, the army, the People's Armed Police. They didn't interfere with us, but surrounded the marchers. The whole incident lasted five hours.
At the rally point, officials asked Lama Kyap and his friends to explain why they had demonstrated. As spokesperson, Lama Kyap explained that it was becauseof the great differences between the experiences of Chinese and Tibetans.When asked how they were different, he replied:
We have a boarding school; you don't. You have five to six buildings: we have one very old building. You have a cement floor: we have a dirt floor thatmuddies up in the rain. We have a hearth only in the kitchen. In the winter, ourhands and feet freeze. You have wood stoves in the classroom. We have onekitchen for one thousand students. Why are there such differences? And, why, since this is a Tibetan area, is everything in Chinese, in the offices, hospitals,markets?
Lama Kyap went on to talk with his interrogators about the official family- planning policy. "There are few Tibetans in a large area," he said. "Why do weneed a family-planning policy? Besides, we have many monks and nuns."(Many Tibetans argue that the large numbers of celibate monks and nuns in Tibet make for "natural" family planning.)
Two days after the demonstration, Lama Kyap's troubles really began. For two months, he was placed under house arrest, banned from the classroom, andconfined to his living quarters at the Repkong County Nationalities MiddleSchool. Government officials and police officers questioned him daily.
Their primary interest was in whether there was a connection between the Lhasa demonstrations in September and October 1987 and ours. One otherteacher and four students also were under house arrest. The students weregiven demerits and told they would be expelled if they did it again. County,prefectural, and Public Security Bureau officials-not the highest-ranking ones-came to school to talk to the teachers and staff. My friend and I werecriticized at the meeting. Everyone was sitting down but the two of us. Oneofficer said, "You were wrong; you opposed the government." I was twenty-fiveyears old and I wasn't scared. I said, "I'm right." They told me, "If you do it again you'll wind up in prison."
From then on, state security kept Lama Kyap under surveillance.
In May 1989, following massive demonstrations earlier that year in Lhasa, there was another incident at school. This time, the protest occurred at a celebrationto which students and staff were to wear their best clothes. But instead ofarriving in local traditional dress, participants came in Lhasa-style dress. When government and police officials accused them of supporting the rioting in Lhasa,the organizers replied, "The Chinese leadership wears Western clothes. Dothey support the West?"
Three months later, in August 1989, Lama Kyap and a friend were effectively demoted, sent off to teach at a two-hundred-pupil day school in Mepa, a poordistrict some thirty kilometers away. Conditions there were even worse than atRepkong County Nationalities Middle School. A year later, Lama Kyap wasmoved again, this time to Repkong Elementary School Number Two. "I felt they were pressuring me," he said.
In December 1990, Lama Kyap took an exam that earned him a substantial promotion, despite his history of political activity. He had prepared for it forseveral years by using school breaks to take courses in Chinese, Tibetan,Buddhism, and pedagogy at the Qinghai Province Education College. Of the seven who competed, he was the only successful examinee. In January 1991,Lama Kyap was assigned to the Qinghai Province Judiciary Institute, whichtrained people who were already procuratorate, court, and police cadres. It waslocated in Xining, the capital of Qinghai province and its largest city. Two other schools shared the campus, one for Tibetan students and the other for cadresstudying law. In addition to his regular duties (teaching Tibetan and translatingChinese law into Tibetan for those students), Lama Kyap was able to acquiresome legal training. According to him, "The authorities couldn't prevent the promotion because I hadn't broken any laws. The other teachers and studentswould testify that I hadn't done anything illegal."
On June 4, 1993, the fourth anniversary of the crackdown in Tiananmen Square, and two years and five months after he had moved to Xining, LamaKyap and a friend opened a Tibetan nursery school with the goal of expandingit by one grade every year. "Actually, my friend established it and I helped. I was the headmaster and decided on the curriculum, books, and teachers. We hadfive or six students. The school was in Xining, and it was free of charge. Theauthorities didn't catch the significance of the opening date."
A month later, on July 2, 1993,
The Qinghai security police came to where I taught. The watchman told me that someone was waiting to see me. I thought, "What's happened?" That man toldme "You will go to the central translator'soffice" [a provincial office that handles translations of documents into several of the languages in common use in Qinghai]. I said, "But they have manytranslators, why me?" We walked about thirty meters and the man showed me aletter that said I had conducted counterrevolutionary activities. We went to a car, and another man suddenly came out and hustled me into the car, and thenhandcuffed me. I sat in the back, between two men. A driver and another manwere in front. The man who showed me the letter left. I said, "I am a Chinese citizen. I have i.d. I am a law-school teacher. What you are doing is illegal." They showed me another paper from state security that said I was fangeming, a counterrevolutionary.They took me to the Huzhu County Detention Center [a first stop for allegedpolitical offenders] in Haidong prefecture. I'd never been to that [non-Tibetan]area before. It's maybe fifty kilometers away. First we went to the police station. The driver and the security men remained in the car with me. One person wentinto the office for about half an hour. When he returned, he told the driver to continue on. When we got to the detention center, they gave me a completebody check, took my belt and shoelaces and watch and put me in a cell with a hole for a toilet-no light, no window, a peephole in the door. I was alone. After about half an hour, two policemen came to take me to another room and left me there. All the instruments of torture were on the wall. There were five men sittingat a table. I was facing them in a straight chair with a piece of wood across the front. One of my hands was handcuffed to it. Three men were from the provincial level Public Security Bureau . One was thesecond-highest-ranking officer in the prefecture's State Security Bureau, and one acted as secretary. A man named Hu, deputy chief of a PSB branch, wasclearly in charge.
Lama Kyap said that despite the strange silence, he wasn't afraid. He tried using his legal knowledge and verbal skills to foil his interrogators, but with little success. From the beginning of the questioning, which lasted over two hours, Lama Kyap feigned confusion, insisting that he did not know why he was indetention and that he had done nothing to oppose the government. He insisted,"I'm a law-school teacher. I know what is legal and what is illegal. I've studiedfor twenty years, and I've taught for about twelve years, so I'm clear about the situation." And he added that he had a wife, a child, and parents, all with healthproblems, whose security he would not put in jeopardy. His interrogators let himknow that despite his slyness, they would make him confess.
In a further attempt to stall, Lama Kyap asked for a translator, but the request was denied because of his knowledge of Chinese and his own work as atranslator. Again he was insistent, arguing that although he had translatedbooks, there might be questions he wouldn't understand and should he answererroneously, he would not be able to correct himself. His interrogators accepted the argument in principle but refused to allow a translator on the grounds that the proceedings were secret.
Lama Kyap tried another tack, suggesting that his detention came about through a case of mistaken identity. The paper ordering his arrest, he said, usedthe wrong character for one of the characters in his name. At this point, LamaKyap's interrogators grew impatient, ordering him to "stop his tricks." They thenturned to the heart of the questioning: the people he knew. Again Lama Kyap tried to buy time, saying, "My social relationships are quite wide. I've been a teacher for ten or eleven years. I've had more than a thousand students. I know their parents, their friends, their neighbors-do you want me to tell you about all of them? Do you want me to discuss whom I know in Repkong, or whom I know in Xining?"
When his interrogators suggested he talk about Xining, Lama Kyap avoided discussing the people he knew through his clandestine Tibet support work there. Instead, since he had been careful not to mix his school responsibilitieswith this other work, he talked about all the Chinese, Tibetan, and Hui contactshe had at school. But his interrogators were not fooled and narrowed the focusonce more, this time to the Qinghai Nationalities College.
Again, Lama Kyap went into a lengthy monologue, talking about all the people he knew at the college, naming many of them when asked. His friend withwhom he had opened the Tibetan nursery school was a research student at thecollege and as soon as Lama Kyap mentioned his name, Samdrup Tsering, theinterrogators wanted to know everything about their relationship, and if Lama Kyap knew everything Samdrup Tsering was doing. Lama Kyap told them:
We had three different relationships: teacher/student, classmates, and we're from the same country so we're friends. When I was in teacher-training schooland he was in elementary school, a former Repkong monk became the cook atthe school; he was a friend of my father's and he knew Samdrup Tsering'sfamily. After school, the former monk taught us about Buddhism. As for our friendship, we have a saying in Tibetan: friends are friends, business isbusiness. . . . You two men are asking questions; this is business. . . . ButSamdrup Tsering and I are friends.
Chief Hu grew impatient and accused Lama Kyap of lying to cover up the truth, saying that the two men had formed a counterrevolutionary group. "And now,"the chief said, "we stop the questions. Go back to your cell and think. And when we start again, tell us about the counterrevolutionary group." Lama Kyapcountered that he had no need to think and warned Chief Hu about the trouble he could get into for arresting an innocent person, particularly one who knewthe law. Chief Hu was clearly not intimidated, and only replied, "You'd betterthink it over well. If you aren't honest, we are going to hand you over tosomeone else." Lama Kyap answered Chief Hu, "Under no circumstances can you beat or torture me. It's in Chinese law. Guilty or innocent-it's not allowedby Chinese law. If you beat me, if you torture me, one day when I get out of prison, I'll take it to court."
The second interrogation session, three days later, lasted more than two hours. Lama Kyap was prepared with a new approach. Following a strategy he and hiswife had devised when they worked as a team on pro-Tibetan activities, heimmediately said he was not feeling well, that his heart was bothering him andthat his stomach felt bad. Should his wife get caught, she was to be sure to tell her interrogators that her husband had a bad heart and stomach. (He actuallydoes have a mild heart disorder and a stomach problem.) To add to the story'scredibility, he had consulted a doctor who gave him documentation confirminghis condition, all of which had been seized when he was detained.
Once more, success eluded him. Lama Kyap's captors readily agreed to allow him one pill a week, starting immediately, and then took up the interrogationwhere they had left off. What was his relationship with Samdrup Tsering? Whatwas the goal of the school the two had founded? Where had the money comefrom? Who else had helped them? Lama Kyap protested that he had been a Chinese Communist Party member since 1993, and was a responsible familyman, conversant with the law, and not a liar. He told them:
As to the goal, there are no facilities in Xining from elementary school through college that are all in Tibetan. In Xining we have Tibetans who don't know thelanguage and don't know Tibetan script because they have to study in Chinese.We wanted to have English, Tibetan, Japanese, and Chinese classes. There isno other goal. The money came from Tibetan associations in different areas in Qinghai. The school is legal. The Qinghai Education Ministry gave formaldocuments.
His interrogators came up with a different scenario, accusing him of trying to foment counterrevolution with money from the Dalai Lama clique. When LamaKyap vehemently denied any such intention, he was told bluntly, "You are nottelling the truth. What happens to you when you don't tell the truth is not ourbusiness."
That night, three young men from the People's Armed Police (PAP) came to Lama Kyap's cell. They handcuffed him with one arm extended over his shoulder and down his back and the other behind him extended upward; to thisday he still experiences pain in that shoulder. They punched him in the stomachso that he had trouble breathing, and announced, "You're a counterrevolutionary; you're a liar; if you don't tell the truth, we'll beat you." Andthey did, with a club. He still has scars from the beatings, from near his anklesup past his knees. He thought the beating lasted more than an hour. WhenLama Kyap lost consciousness, his torturers threw water on him. Then the process was repeated, again and again. After a third round, the handcuffs weretaken off and the PAP officers left him alone. Lama Kyap's pants were wet withblood, and he hurt all over. The worst pain was in his knee, and he couldn'tmove his shoulder.
During the next four or five days, PAP officers "visited" him three times. In addition to being beaten and hit on the head, he was shocked with electriccattle prods and held in an airtight room sprayed with insecticide.
Once the beatings were over, the series of interrogations resumed. Lama Kyapimmediately showed his scars and protested his beatings. His interrogators notonly professed ignorance-saying they had been away at Xining during theabuse-but even denied he had been beaten. They offered to investigate "and deal with the matter seriously." When Lama Kyap argued that he was in dangerof dying from being hit in the two places he was most vulnerable-his heart andstomach-he was given a pill and told, "If you want to get out of here quickly, tellthe truth."
At his next interrogation, when Lama Kyap asked if they had investigated his beating, the reply was terse. "You weren't beaten severely. The wounds werenot caused by the PAP. You passed out and fell. We complained to the PAP, butthey said they didn't beat you and we told them not to-it's not allowed."
They then began to ask him about his views of the Dalai Lama. He understood that they knew he had a copy of the Dalai Lama's autobiography, becausewhen he first arrived at the Huzhu County Detention Center, officers there hadconfiscated everything he was carrying, including his keys. He knew they hadsearched his room at school and had opened his locker. So he replied:
I have two views: I am a member of the Chinese Communist Party and I must hold the views of the Party. The Dalai Lama says Tibet is independent. TheCommunist Party says Tibet is an inalienable part of China. I must uphold thatview. My mother and father are Buddhists; I've been much impressed withBuddhism and a faith was born in me. After the Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize, I read My Land and My People.
He says that his interrogators became furious.
For some three weeks the sessions continued with little change in tenor. During that time, Lama Kyap's wife, Dorje Tso, was trying to locate him. At the time of his arrest, she had been away from her teaching post at Repkong County Nationalities Middle School making plans for an upcoming summer vacation in Beijing. When she could neither find her husband nor get answers from hisfriends, Dorje Tso went to the director of Lama Kyap's school, who told her Lama Kyap had gone to Sichuan "for a school job." She knew then thatsomething was amiss and finally managed to get reluctant friends to tell her what had happened. It took Dorje Tso twenty days to find out that much.
Lama Kyap's ordeal ended almost as abruptly as it began, when prisonauthorities moved him to a traditional Tibetan hospital where he remained under the eyes of security officers. He had been told he would not be allowed toreturn to his home town, but Lama Kyap was surprised when he received permission to return to teaching, and even more surprised to find that the schoolhad paid his hospital bill. But once back at work, Lama Kyap learned quicklythat his career in Amdo was over. School authorities told him his attitude wasbad; security followed him everywhere. He began to form an escape plan for himself and his wife and daughters.
By February 1994, six months after Lama Kyap left the Huzhu County Detention Center and while he was still at the Qinghai Province Judiciary Institute inXining, Dorje Tso began to tell her Tibetan and Chinese friends, acquaintances,and colleagues at the Repkong County Nationalities Middle School that herhusband was a bad person. And Lama Kyap began to tell his own friends that he was having problems with his wife. Word began to spread that the couplewould get a divorce. The husband and wife even drafted a letter saying, "Wedon't get along, we live in two different places. . . . We have two daughters: you take one, and I'll take one." Dorje Tso alone signed the letter and sent itregistered mail to Lama Kyap from a third location. If Dorje Tso were to escape,he had the letter saying their relationship was over. He took the oldest child; she kept the five-month-old baby with her. Then, in March, she told schoolauthorities she wasn't feeling well and was going to Xining for a couple ofmonths for medical treatment.
Dorje Tso, the baby, and Lama Kyap's sister managed the journey to India with a great deal of help and very little difficulty. When they were jailed in Nepal for three days, the offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and of the Tibetan government-in-exile managed to have them released. Whenshe finally arrived in India in May 1994, Dorje Tso, taking no chances, toldeveryone but the Tibetan government-in-exile's security office that she had lefther husband. Once word reached Lama Kyap in Xining that the three were safe, he put the rest of the plan into action.
The staff at the Qinghai Province Judiciary Institute was routinely monitored. Fortunately, Lama Kyap was friendly with the school's resident spy and deviseda way to use that relationship to further his escape plan. First, he arranged for a friend in Repkong to send a fax saying that his grandmother had died on June20. The story sounded true since she was in fact seriously ill and his school colleagues knew that. Lama Kyap left the fax where the security person couldn'tpossibly miss seeing it. Then he told school authorities that he would have totake a leave after final exams.
At 8:30 a.m. on July 7, 1994, a year after his detention, Lama Kyap arrived at the bus station with his belongings and bought a ticket to Repkong. Although hehad arranged with still another friend to buy him a railroad ticket from Xining to Golmud, about six hundred kilometers away, he actually boarded the bus, butstayed on only until the next stop, which is a major crossroads in Xining. As arranged, Lama Kyap went into a restaurant divided into dark individual rooms,where he cut his hair, shaved his beard, changed into clothes provided by afriend, and put on sunglasses. The train was to leave at 5 p.m. At 4:30, his friendhailed a taxi to take Lama Kyap to the station. Lama Kyap knew that he would not have to show any i.d. to board the train, only his ticket. He was also awarethat if he went to a registered guest house in Golmud, he would have to show some form of i.d., but in the more disreputable guest houses, no one wouldbother to check. And he knew where to find a private bus to Lhasa that used two drivers alternately, did not stop, and required no i.d. The trip took two days.Once in Lhasa, in possession of a fake i.d. and a fake pass to Dram, a Tibetan-Nepali border town on the Tibetan side, Lama Kyap became "Sonam Tashi," agarlic worker.
The next phase of the trip took Lama Kyap-now Sonam Tashi-to Shigatse, where he paid for a place in a car going all the way to Dram. At the border, hepresented his phony papers. A Nepali Tibetan arranged for a guide, obtainedNepali clothes for him, and finalized details of a 40,000 renminbi payment (approximately U.S.$5,700), half to be paid to the driverwhen he arrived back in Dram, and half to be paid when it became known that Lama Kyap had arrived safely in Nepal.
As a result of a dispute about trade in garlic over the Tibetan-Nepali border, motor traffic in that area had been blocked for a month. The delay forced LamaKyap and the five or six others in his group to wait until the beginning ofSeptember, when his friend's garlic supply, which was Lama Kyap's ticket across the border, could proceed to Nepal. Because the businessmen andmilitary at the checkpoint were well acquainted, i.d.'s sometimes were notchecked. Lama Kyap was advised not to show his false i.d. unless specificallyasked to.
At the customs and immigration post, which is about nine kilometers from the actual border by way of a twisting road, the group-dressed like workers inrubber sandals and T-shirts-were asked if they had papers. They replied theywere only transporting the garlic as far as the border and would be back in half an hour. Allowed to pass, they delivered the garlic to a storage house and left it in the care of a Nepali merchant. Their Nepali guide arrived at 8:30 p.m., and told them to wait in the garlic house, saying that he would come back at exactly10 p.m., when they would have two minutes free of any patrolling Chinesesoldiers. (In fact, the soldiers had been bribed and told to take their time changing shifts.)
Just before 10 p.m., four of the "workers" walked to the Friendship Bridge, which spans the border. Fortunately, there was a dispute among the waiting truckdrivers and consequently a major traffic pileup. The four crossed the bridge and,to avoid a Nepali police station, followed the guide down a dangerous andsteep slope to a path along the river. In Tatopani, five kilometers into Nepal, they waited for twenty-four hours until their driver arrived with a truckload of garlic. The escapees hid in the garlic all the way to Kathmandu. Lama Kyap waited twenty days in Kathmandu before finally proceeding to India andreuniting with his family.
Samdrup Tsering, the man who established the Tibetan nursery with Lama Kyap's assistance, did not fare as well. Detained at the same time and initiallyheld in the same place as Lama Kyap, he was formally arrested five monthslater on charges of counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement, and triedin camera in Huzhu county. On July 2, 1998, he completed his five-year sentence at Qinghai Provincial Prison Number Two.