Before witnessing China’s use of lethal force to suppress the nationalist demonstrations in Lhasa in the fall of 1987, I had no idea that I would spend much of the next six years investigating human rights violations in Tibet. Although this has often been a gruesome undertaking, I feel privileged to have met so many Tibetans I can characterize only as noble, and to have shared in their struggle for freedom.
On February 22,1992, Champa Tenzin was found dead in his room in the Jokhang Temple. The police claimed it was a suicide. Tibetans in the Jokhang claimed he was murdered. One of Champa Tenzin’s attendants found him in the morning with a rope tied around his neck, covered with blood. The other end of the rope was tied to the leg of the bed. Neither the bed nor the room were disturbed. The Lhasa PSB officials who examined the body declared it a suicide and made the head of the temple sign a document to that effect.
Under Chinese law, the case would be investigated, but none of Champa’s relatives or the Jokhang monks were interviewed. When I learned all of this from a report by the Tibet Information Network in London, which never made it onto the international wire or into any papers in the United States, I immediately suspected that the Lhasa police had murdered Champa Tenzin. The most obvious sign of a police cover-up is the near impossibility of self-strangulation, which for that matter also would not lead to blood loss.
For me, Champa Tenzin’s death epitomized the Tibetan people’s plight. Although China’s brutal repression of independence demonstrations throughout Tibet have awakened the world to Tibetan nationalism, the free world continues to prefer doing business with China rather than hold China accountable for its atrocities in Tibet, and on the mainland. If China’s colonization of Tibet and enforced family-planning policies continue, the world will lose one of its most peaceful cultures. China and the West have much to learn from Tibet; but there is little time left.