For some reason the latest of many stories I keep up with from Tibet, where I have travelled, prompts me to share it with you. Maybe it’s the contrast with the case of wrongfully convicted Steven Avery, the subject of ‘Making a Murderer’ (did you hear that Brendan Dassey’s conviction has just been overturned?). Maybe it’s that I too have a 6-ish year old, whose school is forever receiving delegations of kids from China who, and their parents before them, have likely been fed exclusively propaganda about Tibet which they no doubt consider to be a fractious and backward, quaintly religious outpost of neo-feudalists, a wild west. Maybe it’s the people smuggler angle. Maybe it’s the amazement at finding a story which causes the Don Dale saga to pale into comparative insignificance. Maybe it’s a frustration with the self-censorship about China which is so pervasive, and the near-complete control by the Communist Party of China of even Australian media (Chinese language media, to be precise). Maybe it’s that this case has been thoroughly investigated by New York’s Human Rights Watch, whom I trust absolutely, and whose 108 page report forms the basis of much of what follows.
Who knows? But here goes with the short version (I’m going to assume the Tibetans’ suspicions are correct, which seems fair to me, given the Chinese authorities’ lack of enthusiasm for sharing and enthusiasm for repeatedly cremating details of the case). The Chinese framed one of the most senior supporters of the Dalai Lama still in Tibet, Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, himself a venerated lama with a philanthropic flair. They charged him with financing a terrorist bombing, sentenced him to death in a mockery of a trial along with a co-accused whom they probably procured to implicate Tenzin Delek by torturing him. Delek’s, but not the co-accused’s, sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.
The Chinese tortured Delek for 13 years, beating him, starving him, throwing boiling or freezing water over him, all the while sarcastically suggesting he use some of his magic lama powers. They hurriedly cremated him inside the prison without an autopsy after his death in jail, locked his grieving sister and her daughter up without charge for weeks and released them only after trying to have them promise they would not publicly suggest he was poisoned, and harassed or detained 60-80 supporters at around the same time 100 human rights lawyers and activists were thrown into jail. All of which prompted the super-cool looking niece Nyima Lhamo, pictured, to pay people smugglers $10,000 to trudge her across the Himalaya to Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama’s place of exile in the Indian Himalayas, to tell the story, leaving to the depravities of infuriated Chinese officials her ailing mother and 6 year old daughter.
And guess what? Since I started this post, news has reached me that the mother and daughter have gone missing after being detained by Chinese police. And news has also come to my attention of the propaganda video with a purported confession of a prominent lawyer arrested in the 2015 arrests. As the Washington Post put it, ‘Wang rips apart her entire career of human rights law. Speaking in mellifluous tones while sitting underneath a tree, she denounces her former colleagues and refuses to accept a prestigious human rights prize awarded to her by the American Bar Association.’ The op ed explains how this is achieved: ‘… the authorities might move to physical torture, including chaining detainees to a “tiger bench” in excruciating positions for days and sometimes weeks, applying electric shocks to their genitals, jolting and beating them with electric police batons, or placing them in long solitary confinement, to name a few. Some activists have been so traumatized as to be unable to speak after being released from detention …’.