Another climber said:
For many people in the camp, the most important thing was to be able to come back again. They decided not to tell what happened because of this.
Kate Saunders, the spokeswoman for the main Tibet support group, stated: ‘They just got on the plane and went home’.
Wholly predictable was the official Chinese announcement on what had happened. The Tibetans had been ordered by the border guards to go home, claimed Xinhua, Beijing’s wire service:
But the stowaways refused and attacked the soldiers … the frontier soldiers were forced to defend themselves and injured two stowaways … One injured person died later in hospital due to oxygen shortage on the 6,200-metrehigh land.
The Chinese might have got away with this lie. But a Romanian journalist climber, Sergiu Matei, had risked filming the murder of Kelsang. His footage was shown on Romanian television, and soon BBC and CNN were broadcasting it internationally. The US ambassador in Beijing issued ‘the highest form of diplomatic protest’ to the Chinese government.
For many Tibetans, Green says, even though Matei’s film was banned in their country, news of it had the effect of the man standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Lodi Gyari, leader of the Dalai Lama’s negotiating team in China, said:
Not just as a Tibetan but as a human being it was very sad. But it was also inspiring. It gave Tibetans a sense of courage and self-respect.
Green has a somewhat cliched style (‘painfully quiet’, ‘perfect foil’, ‘mulishly stubborn’, ‘rippling mountains’), and a weak grip on some facts (there were no Red Guards in China before the Cultural Revolution). But in this book he shows himself to be a first-class reporter who managed to speak to Tibetan survivors of the ill- fated tripas well as to Western witnesses. He reserves his greatest admiration for the two best friends, Dolma, who survived and spoke to Green, and Kelsang, who died alone in the snow. The girls were determined to escape from Tibet at all costs, meet the Dalai Lama, and ‘untainted by the great evil of our age, cynicism’, which afflicts so many doing business with China, tell the world what they knew.
To see Matei’s film and interviews with the Tibetan escapees, Google Tibet: Murder in the Snow.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.