IV. DOLKAR KYAP

Dolkar Kyap, a twenty-eight-year-old nomad from Gansu province, arrived in Dharamsala for the second time in January 1999. He had grown up in the high grassland area of Ngulra, a township in Machu county, Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Gansu province, near the border with Qinghai. In 1994, Tibetans constituted the overwhelming majority of the county's population and at least half that of the prefecture. Dolkar Kyap's family used the children's labor to supplement adult work as did other large nomadic households. In his case, in 1981, at age ten, with only two grades completed, he left the township school to help his family care for livestock they had come to own with the abolition of the commune system the year before.

For the nine years he remained at home, Dolkar Kyap was able to learn to read and write Tibetan with the help of his mother's brother. As is the case with many Tibetans who have little formal education, he studied on his own, reading stories and novels. In 1990, at the end of the summer, aware that a few students from Machu had taken advantage of educational opportunities in Dharamsala, Dolkar Kyap made the trek to India. He was then nineteen. He reported that it was during his almost four years there, first as a student and later as a teacher, that he truly began to understand the Tibetan struggle. But in March 1994, notified that his father was seriously ill, he abruptly left India and returned home.

Once home, Dolkar Kyap faced two days of questioning by the Machu County Public Security Bureau, He did have difficulty finding work, hardly unusual for Tibetans returning from India. His solution, with his parents' financial support, was to enroll in a special two-year program of Tibetan Studies at Northwest Nationalities University in Lanzhou, Gansu's capital. Anyone who had completed lower middle school and had 4,400 renminbi (approximately U.S.$630) to cover tuition, room, water, and electricity, plus additional funds for food and supplies, could enroll. Although Dolkar Kyap never even went to middle school, he obtained a certificate indicating he had graduated.

School began on September 10, 1994, but Dolkar Kyap did nor complete his first year. For the few months he was enrolled, he took part in political discussions among his fellow Tibetans, passed around books and documents about the Tibetan cause which he had obtained from nearby schools and monasteries, and finally involved himself in a pro-independence poster campaign.

At 10:00 p.m. on March 27, 1995, four officers from Gansu province's security unit picked Dolkar Kyap up for two days of questioning at a mountain "guest house" on the outskirts of town. Some seven officials queried him about his political activities:

They asked, "Do you know what you have done? You aren't a robber or a thief. You're a political suspect. So if you confess, there will be leniency, but severe punishment if you don't." I replied, "I visited India once. Except for that I haven't done anything against the government." I was not beaten that night, but I was given a lot of political education.

When they released me, they said, "For the time being you can study at the university. We will go there if we have more questions." They also told me, "It would be good if you didn't tell anyone about your arrest. If you want to continue your studies, don't tell anyone."

I was arrested again on the afternoon of March 31. I was sleeping in my room during Chinese language class. I had a stomach ache. That time, three people from the prefecture police and security bureau came. They took me to a hotel on the outskirts of Lanzhou for interrogation. It was not the same as before. I had to hand over all my belongings. They said, "You know what you have done. You should tell the truth. Don't think you can work against the government. We have worked on many such people, and they all confessed. So if you confess when the interrogation starts, it will be better for you. We know a lot about you already."

Dolkar Kyap said he was badly mistreated during this second round of interrogation. Some eight hours after he arrived, he was tied by the wrists to the iron water pipe on the ceiling so that he was standing flat on the floor with his hands above his head. "I was kept that way for one night. The next day they told me I should carefully think over what I had done... At 1:00 [p.m.], both my hands were again tied to the ceiling." He said that for six days he spent part of each twenty-four-hour period in the same position.

Interrogation followed the usual pattern of attempting to elicit a confession partly through gentle persuasion, partly through more violent means. One official told him, "So far, we mainly observed your actions and behavior.I tell this to you out of sincerity. Later, if we become angry, you will be beaten and forced to tell the truth like we squeeze out toothpaste." Dolkar Kyap went on:

After about a week, they showed me a copy of a two-page letter I had written. It was about a meeting in New Delhi about Tibet attended by [representatives from] twenty-five countries. A friend of mine kept the copy for me, and they found it. They said they knew this was only a small part of what I had done. An official with a Labrang accent told me, "You are a tool of the Dalai Lama. I also have faith in him religiously. But politically I have no faith in him. If he is a religious person, he should concern himself only with religion and should not interfere in political matters. Just look at the differences between the old society and the new society." Then he told me, "You think you are a ball of iron. But we have special sharp tongs to take care of iron balls." That night I was handcuffed behind my back for six hours with three beer bottles forced between my hands. Then I was chained to the ceiling again and beaten.

In addition, Dolkar Kyap reported, he was thrown against a cement wall and made to stare at a strong ray of light which damaged his eyes.

As the interrogation progressed, it became clear that the Public Security Bureau was very familiar with Dolkar Kyap's activities. They even reminded Dolkar of an earlier incident when he had photographed trucks transporting lumber, and they had given him a choice of paying a fine of 500 renminbi (approximately U.S.$70) or having his camera confiscated. He said two PSB officers had grabbed him by the shoulder then and told him, "These timbers are being transported by the government, and no one is allowed to photograph them. This is in violation of the law."

After six days, during which he was moved from place to place, Dolkar Kyap confessed to what the Chinese authorities already knew. He admitted that at 3:00 a.m. on August 19, 1994, at a time a horse racing competition was being held in Machu, he put up one hundred posters all over the market, reproducing a speech by the Dalai Lama. He also acknowledged that on February 11, 1995, during the New Year school vacation, a few hundred of two different leaflets were distributed in six monasteries in the county, one announcing a peace march from New Delhi to Tibet beginning on March 10, later canceled, and another a copy of a speech by the Dalai Lama. He explained further:

My friends helped distribute the leaflets in the different monasteries. We had formed a small organization in 1994 called the Snow Eye Group, and when we distributed the leaflets, the stamp of the organization was on the back. Our stamp had a drawing of three mountains representing the three provinces of Tibet. In the middle there was an eye with tears flowing to form a big river. Our organization had six members. Later, one person informed on us to the authorities.

Dolkar Kyap went on, "The people in our region are so educationally backward, they don't even know the Tibetan cause... They are ignorant about the political situation. So we had this aim of distributing tapes and showing video films of the Dalai Lama's speeches. We also hoped to distribute political literature."

On April 17, 1996, seventeen days after his detention, Dolkar Kyap was moved from Lanzhou to the Gannan Prefecture Detention Center. After four months he was moved again, this time to the county detention center in Machu. Three months later, he was returned to the prefecture facility and formally arrested. It was only after this last move that Dolkar Kyap's family finally found out where he was. Later, even though family members could not visit, they could send food and clothes.

Dolkar Kyap's arrest was part of a pattern of arrests from May through August 1995. Some thirty people from Machu were detained, including all members of Dolkar Kyap's organization. Most were held only a few days, primarily, he said, because he claimed total responsibility for the political activities and for "tricking" all the others into joining his organization. Nevertheless, a few others were formally indicted and sentenced.

Some of the activities that brought about charges of "counterrevolution" against Dolkar Kyap included making a timetable of Voice of America broadcasts and possession of the dissident magazine China Spring. In addition to the arrests and repeated interrogations, some with government jobs were demoted.

On September 19, 1996, a year and a half after he was first detained, Dolkar Kyap was tried by the Gannan Intermediate People's Court on charges of counterrevolution and sentenced to a three-year term and two years' subsequent deprivation of political rights. While the trial was attended by some thirty observers, they were all officials from the public and state security bureaus, and for all practical purposes, the trial was not public.

Two other men were tried with him, Jigme Gyarak and Konchok Jigme. The latter, also known as Jigme Jamdrug, was a monk at Labrang monastery with whom Dolkar Kyap exchanged audio and video tapes and political books and other literature, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Guidelines for Future Tibet's Polity and the Basic Features of its Constitution.7 Jigme Jamdrug received a two-year sentence but with little time left to serve, remained at the detention center. Jigme Gyarak, who Dolkar Kyap said had been tortured, was released after one month in detention, then called back for the trial and sentenced only to deprivation of political rights. The court session for all three trials lasted some five hours; the verdicts were delivered after a twenty-minute recess.

The heart of Dolkar Kyap's defense was related to his educational level. According to the charges, he met the educational standard of a university graduate. However, his lawyer argued that since Dolkar Kyap left school when he was very young, he was educationally backward and ignorant of politics. There was no mention of Dolkar Kyap's home study or of his schooling in India. The procurator retorted that although Dolkar Kyap did not admit it, he had, in fact, attained sufficient literacy in school to be able to write and make posters. No witnesses were produced although the procurator alleged they existed. "The only evidence was the book and the documents found in my room and the posters I had pasted up." As for his right to counsel, Dolkar Kyap met his lawyer for the first time just before the court proceedings actually started. They spent approximately a half hour together within earshot of the guard who escorted Dolkar Kyap to the courtroom.

A month after sentencing, Dolkar Kyap was sent to Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture Prison No.2, also known as Gansu Province No.2 Prison, "Muslim" prison, and Yanya Factory. He said he was the only Tibetan political prisoner there, although the prison housed several prominent Chinese political and religious dissidents.

When he first arrived at the prison, Dolkar Kyap said, he had to learn the prison's fifty-eight rules and regulations by heart and also a few patriotic songs that the prisoners might be called on to perform. He said that inside the prison, inmates could use money to buy better treatment, such as lighter workloads. One division within the complex made carpets; another did metal work which included melting and molding iron into desired shapes. Other divisions manufactured leather shoes, did carpentry work, or made gloves. Dolkar Kyap was assigned to glove manufacture. He explained:

We had six machines. For that we needed only six people. The rest had to stitch the gloves together [by hand]. Then the gloves had to be nailed and stretched on a plank of wood. First, I was in the stitching section. After that, because of my failure to finish my task, I did the work of stretching the gloves...They had to be made into shape so we would put them on a plank with nails... The ones who stitched gloves had to stitch 700 pairs a month. I couldn't stitch more than 200.

A work day for the glove makers lasted twelve hours and forty-five minutes and included a two-hour lunch break, Sundays included.

According to Dolkar Kyap, health problems were endemic in Gansu No.2 Prison:

Prisoners get medical check-ups when they first come to the prison. The prison authorities would pass sick prisoners as fit. Those who are sick have to pay their own medical bills. That's because they are told that they brought the diseases from outside. Once eighteen of us were taken for check-ups. Except for six, all had gotten TB. Among the prisoners making gloves and mattresses, the number of TB patients was increasing day by day. The hospital wouldn't give the proper medicines.

After his release, on March 31, 1998, Dolkar Kyap had to report to the Machu security office once a month on the "usefulness of the thought reformation that I underwent in prison." Because he could not travel outside the area without permission, he lost the opportunity for further study and because he was unable to find other work, he felt he added to his family's burdens. As far as Dolkar Kyap was concerned, he had no choice other than to emigrate to India.

Before he could do so, however, Dolkar Kyap became involved in fighting that had erupted in 1997 over 33,000 mu (5,437 acres) of disputed pasture land in the border area between Qinghai and Gansu provinces.8 The conflict had its origins in the Chinese government's policy of promoting permanent settlement of Tibetan nomads and parceling out to families the land that had previously been available to the community for grazing.

Dolkar Kyap explained:

The policy of fencing pasture land was first introduced in 1989, but was not put into practice for many years. Afterwards, when the government declared that if you put a fence around your pasture land, a house would be built for you, it spent some money in some areas building houses. Then many nomads said they would put up fences. But after the fences were put up, the government stopped building houses.

"The fencing," Dolkar Kyap said, "brings many benefits to the government" but harms Tibetan communication and cooperation and exacerbates tensions. His family, he said, was lucky in that there was water on their property. But others had no water, especially in winter. With the government making no moves to help, the unlucky ones had to buy from the lucky ones, and quarrels mounted up. The fencing was costly and, according to Dolkar Kyap, paid for by the individual families. His family spent some 50,000 renminbi (approximately U.S.$7,140) to fence 4,400 mu (725 acres) and to divide it internally into summer and winter pasturage. Dolkar Kyap did admit that with fencing, herding was a little less arduous.

The Gansu-Qinghai dispute erupted after the Ngulra township nomads and Gansu officials refused to accept a decision that awarded a large unfenced pasturage area to the Qinghai province township of Nyintha. According to Dolkar Kyap, repeated petitions to central authorities asking for clarification of ownership went unanswered. Instead the provinces were left to settle the dispute, and they, in turn, left it to the nomads to fight it out. As he explained, "From both provinces, no effort was made to stop the fighting. We could buy any number of guns and bullets. Officials from [our] province taught us how to dig trenches and throw hand grenades."

At first, the Ngulra nomads began abducting people and cattle from Nyintha; later the fighting escalated to skirmishes fought with smuggled automatic and semi-automatic weapons. At the height of the tension, some 2,000 fighters on both sides were on call, Dolkar Kyap among them. Between August 3, 1997 and October 15, 1998, a total of twenty-four people died. On October 15, just before dawn, twelve people from Ngulra, including Dolkar Kyap's cousin, were killed and another five wounded in a grenade attack. Two from Nyintha died. Officials arrived as the survivors were casting the bodies into the river, but, according to Dolkar Kyap, no one was arrested and the prefectureauthorities were ordered to settle the dispute themselves. After the incident, both parties retreated to again "prepare their defense."

On November 29, 1998, a month and a half after the fatal fight, Dolkar Kyap left Gansu, arriving in Kathmandu on December 24 and in India on January 17, 1999. As he explained his decision, "I always wanted to do something for the Tibetan cause. I also realized that I would have a greater impact if I did something at home, but under the government's eye, I really couldn't do much. I was living constantly in a state of fear."