The story of a Tibetan monk?s appalling treatment at the hands of the Chinese has just been published in 27 countries in seven different languages. The author of Tears of Blood: a cry for Tibet met Palden Gyatso during his recent visit to London. Is there any match for the suffering we endured, the losses we felt, the cries we made, even in the eighteenth layer of Hell? This anguished cry from the heart of Palden Gyatso, a 64-year-old Tibetan monk who spent 33 years of his life in Chinese prisons and reform through labour camps, evokes an equally impassioned response. No, there is no match, nor any excuse, nor any stopping-up of the ears, nor any forgetting. In Fire under the Snow: testimony of a Tibetan prisoner, at the Dalai Lama?s insistence Palden Gyatso has told his story to the world, a story that must surely mark us for life, confronting us with the heights and depths, particularly the depths, of which human nature is capable.

Palden Gyatso, the son of a moderately prosperous small landowner in a small Tibetan village, became a novice monk at the age of 10. Like most Tibetans, he knew nothing at all of the outside world, until that day in 1949 when the People?s Liberation Army of China marched into their land and the earth and the sky changed places. For the Tibetans it was an apt description of what had happened.

Ordained a monk in 1952, of the 20 young men ordained on that day he alone remains alive. Some died in prison, some were beaten to death, some were driven to suicide during the Cultural Revolution. That he himself survived is a kind of miracle.

It was when he was 27, shortly after the Lhasa Uprising of 1959, that he was first arrested, then tortured, for refusing to incriminate his teacher, an aged, saintly Indian monk who the Chinese had decided was a spy. There followed months in handcuffs and leg-irons, while every effort was made to force him to confess. In time he came to realise that the Chinese Communists set great store by confession. It did not matter to the Party whether the confession was genuine or not. All that mattered was that it proved to the Party that one more enemy of the people had been eliminated.

Sentenced to seven years? imprisonment, and still shackled in leg-irons, Palden Gyatso was shunted around remorselessly from one prison to another. With their families too far away to provide them with food, he and his fellow prisoners were reduced to eating grass and boiling the leather from their boots into a porridge. Many died of starvation, but, as it was inadmissible that anyone should die of starvation in a Socialist country, their names continued to be read out at the daily roll-calls. Eventually, a compromise was found: when somebody replied, the breath has left him, instead of died of starvation, honour was saved and the names of the starved were expunged from the roll.

Of all the practices to which the Tibetans were subjected, the worst of all, it has always seemed to me, was the brutal and brutalising hate campaign which the Chinese Communists perfected to an art form, the practice of thamzing, or struggle-session. Thamzing, once the Chinese had launched the obligatory class war in which everyone was pitted against everyone else in a fight to the death, was meant to epitomise the wrath of the serfs. Victims were selected at random and anyone who did not participate in accusing, abusing, beating or even sometimes killing them was sure to get a visit from Party officials, either that same evening or the next day. The official, with an expression of deep concern, would say that he had noticed you had not shown . . . a pleasing face. This meant that you were a marked man. At the next meeting you would be forced to pull some innocent person by the hair and shout abuse at them, and by that you would demonstrate your love for the Party and your support for the People. Where death had not already ensued, suicide became frequent.

After trying to escape, Palden was recaptured and sentenced to a further eight years of political re-education and thought-control: reform through labour. I knew what they meant by reform. It meant accepting everything Chinese and denying every aspect of Tibetan life. I refused to give in. The cost of not giving in was high, in a world that was full of stool pigeons and informers, and where it was dangerous to speak to anyone or even to think one?s own thoughts ? a world where to express hope of any kind was a serious crime; where any act of human kindness was frowned upon and friendships were forbidden; where prisoners longed to be able to talk freely to each other, without the fear that our words would be twisted into defamations of Socialism or the Party.

When Mao?s deranged Cultural Revolution was unleashed in 1966, matters became even worse, with the destruction and desecration of all things Tibetan, the forced, mindless and interminable study of the Little Red Book, the ever-repeated mantra that there is no escape from the iron fist of the proletariat, the relentless dehumanising pressure to attack each other and to confess, confess, confess. One day, returning from back-breaking work, Palden wearily splashed water from a stream on his face, then waved his hands in the air to dry them. He was denounced as having performed a religious ritual ? and subjected to thamzing every evening (after the day?s work) for 14 days, until he was all but dead.

Then in 1976 Mao died. It would have been dangerous to show the elation he felt, so Palden forced himself to look pensive. Mao?s death, however, changed little. Although the beatings and tortures ceased for a while, they soon resumed, and when the Tibetans ? monks, nuns and then the young people, the under-20s, the darlings of the regime, who had been born under the red flag of China ? began to find their voice and the courage to revolt against the oppressors between 1987 and 1989, the savagery of the response was unparalleled. Palden, who had been briefly released, was re-arrested and interrogated after putting up wall-posters in Lhasa calling for Tibetan Independence. His tormentor pulled the electric baton from the socket and began to poke at me with this new toy. My whole body flinched at each electric shock. Then, shouting obscenities, he thrust the baton into my mouth, took it out, then rammed it in again. I felt as if my body were being torn apart. . . . I passed out, and when I woke I found myself lying in a pool of vomit and urine. Within a few weeks, all his teeth dropped out.

As the date set for his release slowly approached, Palden began to prepare himself for the return to his monastery, reciting over and over again the prayers he had learned in his youth, hoping that he would be able to return to a life of prayer. But as the political situation worsened, friends were already advising him to leave Tibet as soon as he possibly could. When he saw a copy of a Chinese government white paper on human rights in China, claiming that in Tibet there were no political prisoners, no torture, and describing his own prison, Drapchi, as a new type of socialist prison, where the prisoners are regarded as human beings . . . and where they receive fully humane treatment, he knew that he must escape and tell the world the truth. Once outside, using his contacts, he managed to acquire a number of self-tightening handcuffs, thumbcuffs and leg-irons, knives, and high-voltage electric batons of the kind that had been used on himself and his fellow-prisoners. With these damning implements of torture in his possession, in September 1992 he secretly left Tibet and made his way to Dharamsala, the seat of the Dalai Lama?s government-in-exile in northern India.

He has, he insists, no right to hate the Chinese, and he has forced himself not to hate them, even to forgive them. Compassion, patience and a sense of responsibility for one?s actions lie at the heart of Tibetan spiritual practice. But he reserves the right to tell the world what the oppressors have done. When the Dalai Lama urged him to tell his story, Tsering Shakya, a brilliant young Tibetan historian from London, went to Dharamsala for three months and recorded many hours of taped reminiscences in Tibetan. It is Tsering who has so memorably put together Palden?s story from all this raw material, although the publishers of Fire under The Snow (Harvill Press, ?17) have chosen, for understandable reasons, to describe him merely as its translator.

After Palden addressed the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, the Chinese Ambassador to London was wounded to the quick. Palden Gyatso, wrote Mr Ma Yu-zhen, was a criminal who persisted in anti-government activities. The crimes he committed include activities aimed at overthrowing the Government, escaping from prison and theft. Palden Gyatso?s story of how he was tortured by prison guards is untrue. Torture is forbidden in Chinese prisons.

I prefer to leave the last word to Palden himself. The prayer of dedication with which he begins his book and which I quoted at the beginning of this piece, ends with this powerful plea:

And to all of you who inhabit the world who
also believe in the virtues of truth, justice and decency,
Help to deliver us,
Help us to be free, to be independent,
to be able to do what we choose ? in our own country.</ FONT>

Read his book and weep. And perhaps heed his call.

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