Exiled Tibetans recall the indignities they fled

By Jonathan Allen

DHARAMSALA, India (Reuters) - The dormitories of the Tibetan refugee reception centre in northern India may be drab, but for the recently arrived exiles staying here they offer luxuries unthinkable in their homeland.

They are free to stick up any number of smiling pictures of the Dalai Lama, while a child can run around the main dormitory waving the Tibetan flag as noisily as he wants -- both prohibited activities in Tibet.

And soon enough each of them will get an audience with the Dalai Lama himself.

"If you talk about life in Tibet in one sense it's really improved and you can live a luxurious life," said Tenzin Norbu, who says he sneaked across the Nepal border a month ago disguised as a Nepali laborer.

"But if you go deeper than that every Tibetan has more serious problems not being addressed. Generally Tibetans don't have any rights, any speaking rights," he said.

Almost all of the 2,500 to 3,000 Tibetans who escape from the country each year pass through the centre in Dharamsala, the home of the Tibetan government in exile in northern India.

Many staying here now left Tibet only a few weeks before the recent violent protests flared up.

Few here expected the riots that broke out shortly after the March 10 anniversary of the failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule, but say they understand why they happened.

Tibetans, they say, are tired of being outnumbered and outranked by Chinese, and resent the separation from the Dalai Lama, their spiritual leader.

Sherab Radel, a 28-year-old Buddhist monk, was sick of hiding his many pictures of the Dalai Lama from the Chinese officials who sometimes showed up at his monastery in Amdo province.

Monks caught with such an image were forced to curse the Dalai Lama's name or be jailed, Radel says. And so, a month ago, he and another young monk from the monastery fled.

"The Chinese government always says that all Tibetans have freedom of religion, but in reality it's just nonsense," he said.

The first his parents knew of his decision was when he phoned them from Kathmandu to say he had fled the country. He says they were delighted.

MYSTERIOUS MEDICATION

He brought with him only the robes he was wearing and a small case packed neatly with religious texts, a pouch of mysterious brown pills which he described as a herbal cure for a whole range of ills, and a little photo album.