You don’t see them straight away, the scars. You can sense it when Dhondup Wangchen brings his hands to his heart, holds them out while talking and opens them: the rough hands of a man who has worked in the fields for many years, and many years of it under duress, as he will later report . You can also hear it in his voice, which vibrates with determination, as if he was sometimes carried away by the force of the things he is telling. Things that anyone who had experienced something similar would hide deep in the fog of oblivion.
To this day, he says, he has “nightmares” about it.
Dhondup Wangchen from Tibet has been telling “about it” for years. He speaks in parliaments, on videos you can see him in the American Congress in front of Senator Marco Rubio. He speaks for human rights at the Geneva Summit. These days he is also speaking in Germany with representatives of the Foreign Office, with politicians from the human rights and sports committees. And of course he speaks to countless Tibetan communities that live in the diaspora, and sometimes, like now in Berlin, there is noodle soup and Tibetan dumplings afterwards. Only with the bare minimum, water, flour, meat, onions, ginger and coriander. Just like at home, which many Tibetans have not seen for years, including Dhondup Wangchen.
The words have stayed with him and he packs them into messages
His most recent European tour spanned three months, together with organizations such as the “International Campaign of Tibet” and the German “Tibet Initiative”. You were most recently in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and also in Berlin, where you meet him before his lectures in a coffee house with Viennese characteristics, where politicians and bodyguards at the next tables are busily pushing sandwiches with rather unnecessary ingredients. Soon it will be the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, later the Czech Republic, Austria and Italy. Everywhere Dhondup Wangchen tells his story, patiently and insistently: How he once made a documentary about the life of his people under China’s rule, how he was tortured and imprisoned as a result, how he escaped from Tibet and has continued to fight with words ever since.
The words have stayed with him, and he wraps them in messages that are currently receiving a lot of response: It is the least, says Wangchen, to boycott the Winter Games in Beijing in February. Completely, not just diplomatically, as more and more countries are doing.
Activists demonstrate in front of the IOC headquarters in Lausanne in November.
(Photo: Fabrice Coffrini / AFP)
Wangchen almost always begins his story that he is a simple farmer, he has never attended school; but as someone who lived in the third generation among the Chinese in Tibet, he draws from “many bad experiences”. His grandfather was arrested during the Cultural Revolution and died as a result, at the age of 54. Everything that has been experienced in the Buddhist region since the Chinese “invasion” since 1950 is a “constant decline in human rights”. When Beijing received the summer games at the turn of the millennium, he took the institutions at their word: China’s government, especially the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Both had affirmed that human rights and freedom of speech were guaranteed around the Games, recalls Wangchen. So let him go, in winter 2007, only with a hand-held camera in his hands, “and the promise of peace and freedom in his luggage”.
Wangchen traveled along country roads in front of snow-covered steppes, he went to villages and the mud huts of the residents, he met monks, workers, and farmers. What did you think of life under China’s leadership? Popularizing the region with Han Chinese, the predominant ethnic group of China? Olympia and all the promises that this will open up the country? Not one person he interviewed was benevolent.
“The reprisals are getting stronger.”
“We are being forcibly resettled, losing our valuable pastureland in the mountains.”
“Our language is in danger.”
“There is no religious freedom.”
“The Olympic Games should be under the sign of peace and freedom. As a Tibetan, I have neither one nor the other.”
“We Tibetans have no reason to celebrate. We are not even allowed to watch the Olympics.”
China’s government insists that Tibet is bringing wealth to an impoverished region
Wangchen called his film “Leaving fear behind”. It lasts just under 25 minutes, and you can find it today on the relevant Internet platforms, nicely categorized as: “The Film China Doesn’t Want You to See.” Back then, in the winter of 2007, Wangchen hadn’t shown the film anywhere, when he was already dead. Police took him to a “hotel”. He was clamped into an apparatus that forced him into terrible positions; many prisoners in China have reported about this “tiger chair”. He was tortured for seven days and eight nights with electrodes on his neck that sent electricity to his body. No sleep, no food, no lawyer. Wangchen didn’t even know what to confess. “You had nothing to reproach me with,” he says today. He was held in an undisclosed location for a year, then sentenced to six years in prison as a separatist. Nobody in his film had asked that Tibet should split off from China.
China’s government has repeatedly defended its course in the region with the story that wealth is being carried to an impoverished region. That many Tibetans often do not perceive this supposed prosperity as such; Beijing does not accept that they are satisfied with the bare minimums that their homeland gives them. Those who revolt, this is often documented, are often covered with the same accusation: inciting separatism.
Dhondup Wangchen’s case sparked international protests at the time, but China, as is so often the case, left it cold. He was released in 2014 after six years of imprisonment and constant forced labor up to 16 hours a day, he says. His life after? “Like in a second prison.” He wasn’t allowed to travel or meet friends without permission, and if he does, they’ll be monitored and harassed, he says. Five of his ten siblings still live in Tibet today. The authorities ask them time and again: What is the brother doing? How did he get out of the country back then? In 2017 Wangchen fled, despite “great risks”, via Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and the USA. Even there, the tires of his private car were stabbed, he says.
We’ll find you, no matter where you are, that’s obviously the message.
For Wangchen, there is no question that the winter games in Beijing should be boycotted. Anyone who wants to take part there and earn money on cable cars, slopes and allegedly 300 million future Chinese winter sports enthusiasts is putting business above the welfare of whole peoples – in Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan. If an athlete just wants to thunder down a ski slope without commenting on the grievances, it is also “like an advocacy that all of this can be carried out on the back of human life”.
Intimidating presence: Chinese police paramilitary forces patrol the sanctuary of Tibetan culture: the Potala Palace in Lhasa during the torch relay for the 2008 Summer Olympics.
(Photo: Teh Eng Koon / AFP)
Wangchen now speaks with a very firm voice when it comes to how much the situation in Tibet has deteriorated since the 2008 Games, despite all assurances: He talks about Lhasa, the power center of religious and cultural diversity in Tibet, which has been under for years Quarantine. From private schools that would be “destroyed”. From children who are “indoctrinated” in boarding schools, alienated from their parents. Of 156 Tibetans who have set themselves on fire since 2009, of “countless” people arrested and disappeared, of a people who are being “exterminated”.
“It’s unbearable,” says Dhondup Wangchen.
In this light, he thinks that the national Olympic committees sharply criticize the Games, publicly, is the very least. They also have to educate their athletes about “what is actually going on in the country”. And that everyone who travels to Beijing, including the athletes, has the right and the strength to denounce the grievances on behalf of those who can no longer do so.
Although Wangchen knows how risky it could be for an athlete who suddenly talks about persecuted Tibetans in the mixed zone after his Olympic victory on the normal hill. “Of course it’s dangerous,” he says. “You just have to see what the Chinese do with other people who express their thoughts freely.” Or with prominent athletes who bring allegations against powerful men, such as the tennis player Peng Shuai recently. “She’s a very famous athlete who looked up once – and then disappeared like an insect that you crush,” says Wangchen. Even if it has surfaced again, it has long been in a life under constant surveillance. Like in a second prison, like once with him.
What is left of the meager remainder of the freedom of expression that the IOC guarantees for the Games?
A meeting with the German Olympic Sports Confederation made him “sad”
When Dhondup Wangchen talks about the representatives of organized sport, his voice fills with resignation. He has recently met many officials, but all of them have evaded his demand to boycott the Beijing Games. The conversation with representatives of the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) in Berlin recently made him “sad”: The association rejects a boycott and he does not want to position himself publicly on the situation in Tibet and China – because he allegedly lacks the expertise . But why are you talking to activists who, well, have a lot of expertise?
On request, the DOSB writes that it is a sports organization, not an expert body on China-related issues. The newly elected Presidium will “discuss” whether it will position itself publicly. In any case, you will provide your athletes with the information of all the experts with whom you have met over the past few months and will still meet.
“My impression was,” says Dhondup Wangchen: “They have no interest in human rights in Tibet and just want the games to take place. They seem to be only interested in profit.”
Dhondup Wangchen says he will never be discouraged. “It remains so incredibly important not to forget the situation given the incredible things that are happening in China,” he says. “It’s difficult, but we have to stick with it, we all have a responsibility. And at some point there will be an opportunity for change.” In the end, says Dhondup Wangchen, it is quite simple: “It’s about human life and human rights.”