Tibetan Uprising

Ngawang Tendol, 38, is the daughter of Tibetan subsistence farmers in Maldol outside Lhasa. She “always wanted to be a nun” and so she joined the Nichung Nunnery in Lhasa. When the nunnery was destroyed by the Chinese, Ngawang solicited donations from local supporters and carried dirt and rocks to help the construction. It took 90 nuns over two years to rebuild it.

Ngawang did not know about Tibet’s political situation until she reached the nunnery because under Chinese occupation, her teachers and her parents were forbidden from mentioning it. She learned about Tibet’s independence as she saw her fellow nuns arrested for “agitation” after protesting against Chinese rule. They inspired her to protest in the name of religious freedom.

At the beginning of April 1989, Ngawang went to Norbulingka, the summer palace of the Dalai Lama, with seven other nuns. In the middle of a cultural dance, they started shouting “Free Tibet” and “China get out of Tibet.” Within two minutes, two police officers approached her, handcuffed her and led her to a waiting police jeep. They took her to Gutsa Detention Center in Lhasa, about which she said, “I wasn’t afraid. Just sad.”

As soon as she arrived at Gutsa with the other nuns, they got off the jeeps and all of the police started beating them. They spent the next several minutes being punched and kicked by the many officers while still being held in their handcuffs. Then they spent the next two hours with their hands on their heads as the police forced them to stare at the sun. Before any questioning, the officers separated the nuns in small groups for more calculated beatings. As she stood there, Ngawang could hear the others screaming in pain and felt very nervous. When her turn came, the police used thumbscrews to lock her arms behind her back and then hung her from a tree with ropes around her body. Two guards beat her with sticks until she was unconscious and woke her with a splash of cold water. Ngawang says, “I can never forget what happened that day. I will remember the whole scene.”

After the beatings, Ngawang was put into solitary confinement with only a bucket for a toilet and a small amount of food and black tea. The questioning began the next morning when a guard brought her to an interrogation room with one male officer, two female officers and a young Tibetan girl to serve as a translator. They asked her about who led the protests, who shouted first and who pushed her to do it. Ngawang answered honestly and repeatedly said they were shouting for the religious freedom that the Chinese government had taken away. One officer called her a liar.

They called in two more officers and laid her face down on the ground as the new arrivals stood on her arms and legs. They put an electrode in the middle of her neck and turned it on for several minutes of agonizing pain. She knows that a few more minutes of such torture would have killed her. That was the end of the first day but the beatings continued for eight more days. The questions never changed but the method of beatings did. The interrogators beat her with springs and sticks, punched, kicked and finally had a loaded gun pointed at her heart. They said they would kill her if she didn’t tell them the truth. Some friends were tied to trees and threatened with the release of large hungry dogs. After each day of questioning, doctors performed a medical checkup on the nuns, but only those unable to lift their head received pain killers.

Ngawang never changed her story and eventually the questioning ended. She spent the next four months in solitary confinement, and she could only leave her cell to empty her toilet bucket. It took a long time to fill up because she received little water or food. During that four month period, she saw only the toilet attendant.

On August 20, 1990, the guards led her to a waiting police van to be reunited with her friends from the protest. So overjoyed to see each other, they could only cry in delight the entire ride to the Lhasa courtroom. They filed into the courtroom and all sat in a row. No one had the right to speak during the sentencing. Ngawang received four years in prison while some of her friends received up to seven. The court told the nuns they had committed a crime against their country and shamed their nunnery and families.

After their sentencing, a police van took the nuns to the notorious Drapchi Prison in Lhasa. The first day consisted of a medical checkup that simply recorded identifying features and an explanation of the rules at the Prison. They could not pray, wear their nuns robes or shave their heads. The guards told them they needed to change the way they think. Then they put them into cells of 12 prisoners each, with no more than three political prisoners like Ngawang together in a cell. Two criminal prisoners acted as trustees for the guards and reported any breach of the rules such as talking in the cell.

Ngawang received a job in the greenhouse where she worked ten hours a day. During lunch breaks and for three hours after dinner, she had to sit in her cell on a stool knitting sweaters for sale in town. At dinner, a monitor would read the news and praise all of the good things the Chinese brought to Tibet. Ngawang said they could hold their peace at that but any slur on the Dalai Lama would be too much for them. Any disagreements resulted in beatings and electric shocks applied to the tongue.

The most dramatic period of her detention and imprisonment started on December 10, 1989, when the Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize. The nuns decided to retrieve their robes from the storeroom and wear them to celebrate the day. The guards beat them for this but all of the political prisoners rose up and no amount of beating could keep them down. They spent three days resisting the guards and the prison administration removed the criminal prisoners. The paramilitary was needed to quell the prison uprising. It took another week of beatings before calm was completely restored.

On August 21, 1994, the Chinese authorities released her from Drapchi Prison. Forbidden to return to her nunnery, Ngawang stayed with her sister in Lhasa. The police made her and her family nervous by coming once or twice a month to check up on her. After a year of preparations, Ngawang walked across the Himalayas in 27 days with a group of fellow Tibetan escapees. She reached Nepal on November 25, 1996, and soon settled at Dolma Ling nunnery in Sidhpur, Himachal Pradesh, India.

When Ngawang read about the March to Tibet in a newspaper, she “thought it’s a great opportunity.” After the first wave of marchers were arrested in Dehra on March 13th, Ngawang set out with the second wave of marchers to start from where their comrades had stopped.