VI. GYALWA GYATSO

Gyalwa Gyatso, thirty-four years old, had been in Dharamsala a little over a year when we first met him in 1998. He told us then that he was "finally ready to tell my story in detail." Until then, he said, his concern for those still in Tibet made him unwilling to speak. In the following account, names have been changed to protect those still in Tibet.

Gyalwa is from a farming and trading family in Kharo, in Chamdo in the Tibet Autonomous Region, but as far as he is concerned he is a Khampa, that is he comes from historical Kham, an area that today is divided between the Tibet Autonomous Region and the western part of Sichuan province.

A concern for Tibetan causes was always a part of Gyalwa's home life. His family's resistance to Chinese rule, he said, was no different than the resistance of other families in his village and in other villages. In many cases, he said, his generation is the third to protest what he called the Chinese occupation of Tibet. His family did suffer, he continued, but other village families suffered even more. His wife's family, according to Gyalwa, was decimated.

Gyalwa's own active involvement in what he called the struggle for freedom began in 1985, but even in school, he said, "I realized the importance of individual liberty." Because his family belonged to a "property-owning" class and because the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) was not quite over, Gyalwa's schooling was cut short. He had started his formal education when he was six, an education, he said, that even at that age was mostly political. Students were taught to oppose Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi and to love the Communist Party.9

After five years in the township school, five students were chosen to go on to the county middle school. Although Gyalwa's teacher selected him as one of the five, the township Chinese Communist Party secretary vetoed the choice. Instead, from the age of thirteen on, Gyalwa began to work in the people's commune. At sixteen, he married and went to live with his wife's family, then began to spend most of his time in Chamdo, the most important city in the T.A.R. portion of Kham. By then the "new responsibility system," which dismantled the commune system and allowed families considerable leeway in managing their own resources, had been promulgated, and Gyalwa could improve his family's income by selling first fruit, and later tea leaves and clothing in Chamdo.

In 1985, Gyalwa and some Chamdo friends began to discuss finding a solution to the "unbearable oppression" in Tibet. He explained:

I knew very clearly we had the truth to fight the Chinese. We decided to fight by nonviolent methods. We were not fighting against the Chinese people and their country, but we wanted the international community to know the facts about how much Tibetans were suffering in their own country. So we began by putting up posters in different parts of Chamdo, "Long live independent Tibet," "Long live individual liberty," "Long live the Dalai Lama."

In early 1989, Gyalwa, all alone, shouted slogans in Chamdo during a festival. Following the incident he fled, first to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, and later to Lhasa, but escaped detection for only four months. In July 1989, after he had been in Lhasa barely a month, eight or nine plainclothesmen from the Public Security Bureau (PSB) picked him up and returned him to Chamdo. They had been actively looking for him and one day found him near the PSB hospital on his way to the Jokhang temple, the most important pilgrimage site in Lhasa.

An officer called out my name, and I turned around. They told me to face the fence, then frisked me, handcuffed me but didn't rough me up. Then they put me in a jeep and took me to Seitru [ a state security detention facility in the northeastern suburbs of Lhasa].

They put me in with six or seven political prisoners, but I wasn't handcuffed or in leg irons. I was never beaten in Seitru and interrogated only once by four people. I was asked to confess what I had done, and I told them I shouted slogans. They wanted me to tell how many people were behind me, and I repeated thatI had only shouted slogans. They told me they knew everything and that if I didn't confess clearly, they would see me again in Chamdo.

Later on, when he was back in Chamdo, Gyalwa's interrogators showed him a picture of himself taken when he was in Chengdu and told him, "You were traveling by motor, but we were traveling by telephone and telegraph. You could not escape from us forever."

Gyalwa talked at length about what happened to him after he was sent back by jeep to Chamdo accompanied by three PSB officers and one soldier:

I was handcuffed and in leg irons and tied to the seat of the car. The journey took three days. We spent one night in the Nagchu prefecture prison, one in the county jail in Bachen and one in the jail in Tengchen. I was kept cuffed and in irons, and the soldier who was with us was in the cell to watch me.

When he arrived back in Chamdo:

Four or five PSB officials came to take me from the jeep and right away started kicking me. They took me to the prison in Chamdo-there is only one. I was kept in a separate cell in the corner of the prison, and I was also isolated from the staff. I spent one year and four months in that cell; for the first four months I was continuously handcuffed. I never saw any papers.

I was interrogated thirteen times over a period of ten months, most of the time late in the evening until midnight or sometimes from midnight until dawn, five or six hours each time. Sometimes when there was an all-night session, the officers would take a break, relax, make tea, and leave me in the interrogation room. There were six people, two Chinese and four Tibetans, some from Chamdo and some from Dayab, whose duty was to torture people. They took me to the interrogation room secretly and used three different size cattle prods, a wooden stick, and a wire switch to beat me. I had to kneel on sharpened wood. Most of the time, I could feel the taste of blood in my mouth.

Gyalwa's interrogators sought information on the number and names of his co-conspirators. They asked him who was behind his slogan shouting and about his relationship with the Tibetan "government-in-exile." He was asked to turn over videotapes and documents from the exile community. Often he said, "They tried to frighten me by saying my friends, my wife, my parents were already in prison and had confessed. So tell all, they said, before it is too late." Gyalwa said he knew it was not true. He hadn't told anyone in his family about his activities. Sometimes, he said, his interrogators would tell him that one of his three children was seriously ill in the hospital and might die, so he had better confess quickly so he could see his child.

At the end of each session, Gyalwa had to sign a transcript of the session and affix his thumbprint indicating he had read the transcript and agreed with its contents. But the transcript was in Chinese, and Gyalwa cannot read Chinese.

After the interrogation phase of the investigation was over, Gyalwa was left alone for some six months. Once during that period, he was presented with alleged evidence of his "crime," a slogan that had been put up as a poster on the gate of a government building in Chamdo several years earlier. Gyalwa's signature on the interrogation record provided the needed handwriting comparison.

Toward the end of Gyalwa's sixteen-month incarceration in Chamdo, the procuracy twice reviewed the record with him and finally showed him the indictment papers. Gyalwa still isn't really fully certain of the charges, which were written in Chinese and never explained to him. All he understood were the generalities "counterrevolution" and "counterrevolutionary propaganda."

According to Gyalwa, he never had a trial. A Tibetan judge and a female officer of the court came to tell him he had received a five-year sentence and three years' subsequent deprivation of political rights. The judge asked if he was satisfied with the sentence; Gyalwa asked if he could appeal; the judge, "a good Tibetan," told him honestly he wouldn't "get any profit from an appeal."

Less than one month after he was sentenced, Gyalwa was transferred to Powo Tramo, now officially called Tibet No.2 Prison, located in the southeastern part of the Tibetan Autonomous Region. Just before the move, he was able to see his wife and parents for the first time since his detention. His parents lived close by; for his wife it was a seven-hour bus trip each way. The visit lasted five minutes. His father, who had managed to find out Gyalwa's whereabouts, had tried several times to visit him or at least to leave food and clothes. Not only did his father's efforts fail, but at one point, a guard even struck him. And despite Gyalwa's best efforts to keep his activities secret, his family suffered considerably from their relationship to him. Over a period of years, some relatives were detained, some beaten, and at least one sentenced. Family members also found their educational and employment opportunities restricted.

At Powo Tramo, Gyalwa worked ten hours a day on the 1,300 mu (approximately 214 acres) prison farm which was expected to produce 41,000 jin (one jin = .5 kilogram) of barley a year, and helped care for some 300 pigs, 400 chickens, and 500 sheep. Sometimes, in addition to a day's work, prisoners were sent to the hills at night to collect mushrooms. Some of the produce was sold, and the prisoners usually got the worst of what was left. During the winter, prisoners gathered leaves for decomposing into fertilizer; and they collected night soil.

Gyalwa said:

It was common for prisoners to be beaten. The officials [probably from the People's Armed Police] were young and strict. I was in solitary once for three days. I had a stomach ache and couldn't work, so I went to the office to get excused. There were seven people asking for excuses that day. I was first in line. One Chinese office, the team leader (dui zhang), said, "You are all pretending. Actually you are avoiding work." And he ordered us to come with him to collect night soil. But I really was sick and repeated my request. The office got angry and kicked me. The soldiers came and handcuffed me and took me to solitary.

His family visited rarely, three times in all as the trip took even longer than the one to the detention center. For his wife, a one-way trip took a day and a half, for his parents, two days. According to Gyalwa, there were no rules about who could visit a prisoner, but any potential visitor needed to get two recommendations from the county-level Public Security Bureau. Regulations at Powo Tramo prison provided for a fifteen-minute visit every forty-five days, but the actual length depended on the soldier-guards. "It could last a half hour or even forty minutes," he said.

After his release in mid-1994, Gyalwa went directly to Chamdo to meet his parents. His plan was to wait two weeks before traveling to his native village to see his wife and children. The day before he was to leave, at 1:00 a.m., public security officers came by and told him not to go. They said they needed to speak with him. At 9:00 a.m., they returned to escort him to the police station for a two-hour interrogation and discussion session. Part of the officers' agenda was to persuade Gyalwa to accept his guilt and apologize, but he was adamant. He "would not," he said, "accept that he had made a mistake." Much to his surprise, he was permitted to leave for home, as planned, the following day. For the next several years, Gyalwa not only helped operate the family farm but visited Chamdo regularly to manage his revived business operations there. His interest and engagement in Tibetan independence activities went on.

On six other occasions, strung out over twenty-three months, Gwalya was picked up for brief "interrogations." All the interrogations took place in Chamdo. At the second session, Gyalwa was asked what his future ideological direction would be, and he was instructed to write out the details of his travels from Chamdo to Chengdu to Lhasa.He replied that he did "not know what his future political direction would be." He said his intent was to "follow the masses."

Sometimes, Chamdo PSB officers came by at 2:00 a.m. or 3:00 a.m. to check on whether his family had unregistered guests. (Families housing guests, whether long- or short-term, must register them with the police.) And before major holidays or anniversaries, such as the anniversary of the June 4, 1989 crackdown in Beijing, or when posters appeared in Chamdo, Gyalwa said, he could expect a PSB visit.

By early 1997, Gyalwa came to know that he could be rearrested at any moment, and although he did not want to leave home, he quietly began to plan his escape. By spring, the trek had begun. With fifty others, he reached Nepal where Nepali police officers caught up with them. Fortunately, a Tibetan shopkeeper living in Nepal had the telephone number of the Tibetan "government-in-exile" office in Kathmandu. When that office asked the Nepali police not to return group members to China, the police complied.

Gyalwa arrived in Dharamsala in May, leaving behind a pregnant wife, two children, and parents already in their seventies. His wife, he said, has to take care of them, the baby, and the two other children while managing the family farm. He said he knew he was needed at home, but to return would only add to his family's difficulties. For now he studies English in exile in India, and waits.