Sentinel Source
Barbara Demick Los Angeles Times
September 6, 2015
KODARI, Nepal — Tsomo escaped Tibet last year on a zipline that carried her into Nepal over a chasm of jagged rocks and a river.
The 23-year-old student remembers she was numb with terror as the smugglers fastened a thick rope through her legs and across her chest in a harness. It was the dead of night, but still she could hear the river roaring below her.
“It was like something out of a bad dream. I was so scared I peed in my pants,” said Tsomo, who is now a student majoring in English at a Tibetan school in India.
She was among the lucky few.
For decades, Nepal was the main station on an underground railroad for Tibetans fleeing China, which claims sovereignty over Tibet. After a long trek over the Himalayas, evading Chinese security, refugees would seek asylum in Nepal or move onward to India, where the Dalai Lama, their spiritual leader, lives in exile.
Now the doors are slamming shut, as Nepal falls under the sway of China’s power and money.
Nepal is a case study in how a rising China has come to exert itself over its neighbors. Landlocked and impoverished, with a chaotic political system and recovering from natural disaster, Nepal has capitulated easily to Beijing’s will — and nowhere has that been more strongly expressed than in the fate of would-be immigrants from Tibet.
From 1991 to 2008, an average of 2,200 Tibetans came across annually, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Only 171 made it in 2013, and fewer last year.
One reason is that a booming Chinese economy has persuaded many Tibetans to remain at home. Some are even returning to Tibet after years of exile. But the dwindling number of Tibetan immigrants to Nepal also suggests strongly that the once-welcoming Nepalese government has been pressured by China to shut the door.
“Nepal has a weak government and the Chinese are able to exploit that,” said Yubaraj Ghimere, a Nepali political commentator and columnist.
Responding to demands from China, the Nepalese have installed heightened security on the border. A phalanx of undercover police and informants now makes it almost impossible for Tibetans to cross into Nepal, except by extraordinary means such as the zipline.
Tibetans already in Nepal — many of them born here — are facing new restrictions on getting refugee certificates, jobs, drivers licenses and even exit visas to leave the country.
Beijing quadrupled its foreign direct investment in Nepal to $128 million in 2015, up from $24 million in 2014. China rushed in with a 62-person rescue team after the April 25 earthquake, supplying tents, food and search and rescue teams.
Lobsang Sangay, the prime minister of the Tibetan government in exile, says China is in effect buying Nepal.
“All this financial aid to Nepal is because of Tibet,” he said in an interview in the exile government’s headquarters in Dharamsala, India.
The extent to which the long arm of China is reaching across borders is evident in the Nepalese town of Kodari, about 50 miles west of Mount Everest. It has become a popular hangout for hippies and hikers, as well as the main customs entrance to Nepal for truckers bringing China-made jeans, rice cookers, telephones and sneakers across what is called the Friendship Bridge.
The smell of spicy Sichuan cooking wafts from a construction site where a crew — all of them, including the cook, imported straight from China — works on a road project.
Chinese police officers patrol the dusty main street lined with tea shops, and though they don’t wear uniforms, they speak so loudly in Chinese that it is clear they don’t need to disguise their presence.
“There are Chinese secret police crawling all over here. They aren’t supposed to be; this is the land of Nepal, but they wander around and do whatever they like,” said Shunu, a Tibetan monk at Liping Monastery, perched high on a windy bluff over the customs checkpoint.
Monks pointed out the many closed-circuit cameras attached to trees and rocks along the banks of the Sun Kosi River, which forms the border.
“When I came out, there were no cameras, no checkpoints, no police,” said another monk, Jangpo, who crossed from Tibet as a teenager in the mid-90s to study Buddhism.
In response to restrictions by the Nepalese government, the monastery has adopted stricter rules for the monks, Jangpo said. The monks may not publicly criticize China. They may not participate in Tibetan independence activities. They also are forbidden to display large portraits of the Dalai Lama or celebrate his birthday in public.
In front of the monastery, a large portrait of the Dalai Lama was taken down a few years ago, replaced by a wallet-sized black-and-white photograph tucked discreetly between butter lamps.
“That is all we have. We are not supposed to do anything to provoke the Chinese,” Jangpo said.
