The Long Trek Out of Tibet

KATMANDU, Nepal — Thousands of Tibetans fleeing repression in their own land take one of the world's most harrowing paths to freedom.

They climb across the Himalayas.

Each year, Tibetans trying to escape the vise of Chinese rule set out across the world's highest mountains--and into blizzards, crevasses and ice--hoping to reach Nepal.

The unlucky are captured or turned back by Chinese authorities. Or they die in the snow.

The rest wander into this city frostbitten and starved, often missing fingers and toes.

"Everyone was fainting, falling. The snow was at my chest, and I could not see," recalled Taga, a 22-year-old man who left his Tibetan village in December with a dream of studying English in India.

Weeks after he left home, Taga staggered down from the peaks and into a Nepalese settlement. His feet, blackened with frostbite, were removed.

"It would have been better to die," Taga said, staring down at the stumps of his legs.

While exact numbers are impossible to verify, officials with Tibet's India-based government-in-exile say the number of refugees going over the Himalayas into Nepal doubled last year to 2,639--about seven people per day.

The refugees say they are fleeing Chinese repression that has worsened since 1996, when Beijing stepped up its efforts to reeducate Buddhist religious leaders and launched a "Strike Hard" campaign against dissent.

Many of the latest refugees are Buddhist monks and nuns expelled from their monasteries and nunneries by agents of the Chinese government. Others are children, sent by their parents to schools in India where they can learn their language and history, which is often suppressed in Chinese-run schools.

The surge threatens to upset the delicate and largely unspoken arrangement among China, India and Nepal to tolerate a trickle of refugees out of Tibet since the Chinese invaded in 1950. And it adds a new poignancy to the Tibetans' struggle to secure self-rule and preserve their culture in the face of a sustained Chinese onslaught.

"What the Tibetans endure is almost unbelievable," said David R. Shlim, an American doctor living in Nepal who has treated dozens of refugees. "They cross the highest mountains in the world, they have no tents, no sleeping bags, and they are often wearing only windbreakers and cheap Chinese sneakers."

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