Drawing blood

Live from Boudha

Kathmandu, Nepal

This afternoon I witnessed a Tibetan monk beaten, along with two other protestors, during a nonviolent anti-China protest at Boudha Stupa.

The three protestors were just standing (with Tibetan flags) at the stupa entrance, between the New Nyingma Gompa and the Ajima shrine, chanting slogans. Totally nonviolent. In fact, they were there for so long it got routine and I went off for tea.

When I returned half an hour later (about 3.30 pm) they were still there, chanting "Dalai Lama Zindabad," "Hu Jintao Murdabad," ("long live the Dalai Lama," "death to Hu Jintao"), "UN Where Are you?" "stop the killing in Tibet," and so on. They were standing on a Chinese flag that one protestor told me they planned to set alight. That's about as violent as they got, planning to burn a flag.

I looked down for just a moment to adjust my camera. Out of nowhere I heard a sickening thud and people started running. I ducked under the porch of the Nyingma Temple (figuring that if I had to, I could go inside - surely they wouldn't trash the monastery and shrine). The Nepali boys went straight for the one monk of the three protestors - -with large 2x2 wooden sticks raining blows.

"Don't take pictures! Don't take pictures!" they yelled at anyone with a visible camera. Then, "This is not a place for protest! This is our God-place! Do not protest here!" in English. Which to me, sounded very rehearsed and conspicuous. In English? The attackers were local Nepali boys (from the Tamang community, if it matters).

Having a little sub-compact camera finally paid off as the professional photogs with their bulkier equipment were chased off and threatened by the attackers. I just stood behind a column on the mandap of the New Nyingma Gompa and snuck snaps.

The monk, his face painted with the red, blue, yellow and white of the Tibetan flag, lay motionless on the ground - I suppose he'd been trained to react that way to violence. The boys continued to whack him, with body blows to the back and front torso.

Some Tibetans tried to approach the monk to assist him. They, too, were attacked. A uniformed security guard, employee of the Nyingma gompa, stood by with hands behind his back.

Eventually the thugs disappeared and sympathetic persons could approach the monk. He was lucky they hadn't busted his ribs. The monk sustained only some bad abrasions to his face, which bled fluently through the face paint. Very slowly, with his friends sustaining him on either side, the monk began to walk. He must have had terrible bruises all over.

Two Tibetan helpers flanked the monk. I came over and suggested, "Shechen Clinic jaane." (It seemed better to go to the clinic of a local Tibetan monastery than to go to the Nepali-run hospital, which might not be sympathetic.) Slowly we all started moving down the unpaved lanes, toward Shechen.

Bystanders glanced up from their labour, looked aghast, clicked tongues and shook heads. The attackers had actually stooped to attacking a monk - a nonviolent monk. This was sure to rouse more anger in the community.

We were joined by another foreigner, a British man named Lewis. He had seen the whole thing too, and felt it important to accompany the monk and party down the lanes. It was less likely that the party would be attacked again if a couple of foreigners with cameras were walking beside them. (Indeed, the tradition of the sahib dies very hard.) Westerners are both assumed to be pro-Tibet and sympathetic, and simultaneously less susceptible to localized violence.

The fact that the attackers were local Tamangs confused me. Tamangs, a Tibeto-Burman people, share a language family, and more importantly, the same religion of Tibetan Buddhism with Tibetans. There are a number of Tamang monks as well as Tibetan in the area. Why would they attack the nonviolent protestors and monks?

When we reached Shechen, the doctor cleaned and dressed the monk's wounds. Luckily there was no serious injury. I took this chance to question the Tibetan compadre. The duo (and many other protesters in the area) turned out to be from Himachal, and came here with a coordinated group to launch nonviolent protests.

Tenzin and other Tibetans I spoke to believe the Tamang boys were paid by local Chinese contacts to carry out the beatings. They claim there have been a number of monks (at least eleven, according to the doctor at Shechen) injured in the same way, by local thugs on Chinese pay. It's true, there is a certain amount of rivalry between the Tamang and Tibetan communities - for one thing, the more recently-arrived Tibetans tend to be more prosperous and high profile. It's so sad that a bit of money and local rivalry could induce them to attack their co-religionists.

There were a few guys hanging round the Stupa who had "McLeodganj" written all over them. I cautiously approached them. One told me that there was another action planned for either the Chinese Embassy or the UN building in Pulchowk within the next hour, but they couldn't or wouldn't give a fixed time or place. The next time I looked, they had dispersed.

These days, there is a skirmish at the stupa every single evening. There is a routine march round the stupa Kora, or circumambulation path. After about 20 minutes of this, the procession attempts to leave the Stupa enclosure (a UNESCO World Heritage site) via the main gate. It seems a fitting symbol for the whole procedure - going round in circles, unable to find an outlet for their justifiable anger, then beaten back by local powers sympathetic to China.

Every night they are confronted by Nepali police in what's known locally as a "lathi charge" (raining blows with their bamboo canes, the subcontinental version of a billy club). The pro-Tibetan group is driven back (running, with that panic I know so well from a number of Indian stampedes) into the stupa enclosure.

I didn't see this, but in last night's skirmish several shops on the Main Road ("Boudha Tushal") were vandalized - bricks thrown through windows. Locals I spoke to claimed the shop owners were either Chinese, or locals functioning as Chinese spies, employees and sympathizers.

I'm waiting for a call from a photographer for Himal Media whose "stupa mole" will tell us if there's more activity tonight, but right now I'm exhausted.

Travel advice for Kathmandu: it helps to be white, and wear running shoes.

Still In Saigon

Another day in Samsara

Kathmandu, Nepal

That was always my favourite part of Apocalypse Now - the opening shot. Willard wakes up staring at the ceiling fan, and for a second everything is fine. Then he remembers where he is.

Sh*t, I'm STILL HERE.

I'm trying to remember a morning when I didn't wake up feeling that way. Like, if I could just get the mission over with, I could go home.

"Home," in this case, isn't Tennessee, or America. It's escape from Samsara.

Sorry for the not-posting thing. It's just that I've had a blinding migraine since Tuesday and can't get rid of it. Ibuprofen, paracetamol, the original Otis & Carla duets on the Stax label....nothing works.

Shangri-La behind concertina wire - this photo sums up the current mood of Kathmandu.

I feel like I'm reading the same newspaper every morning. Editorials by distressed, hand-wringing liberals saying things like, "The Maoists must stop their high-handedness, must cease and desist their abductions and extortionate ways and the rule of law must be restored." But they're not going to, and it won't be, and everyone seems to know that but no one wants to say it out loud, particularly in a country where so much of the economy depends on tourism.

Losar (the Lunar New Year) has just ended. Boudha was full of Tamang people in various forms of regional dress, singing and dancing Tamang and Tibetan folk songs around the Great Stupa. The Tamang are just one of the myriad ethnic groups (mostly Tibeto-Burman) that have lived in Nepal long, long before the "Hindians" invaded about 300 years ago.

Tibet and Tibetans have such a hold on the popular imagination, most people don't realize that Boudha is a Tamang neighborhood, and the Boudha Stupa is a Nepali stupa, built by Nepali Buddhists - Tamangs and Newars.

The Tibetans, though they have always come through the area on the old trade routes, became residents later, post-exile.

Tamangs still paint most of the Buddhist thangkas for sale in India and Nepal, carve the wooden chham dance masks, and make the mind-numbingly intricate metalcraft used in the Tibetan Buddhist rituals - all stuff that is associated with Tibetans.

Burning brains

Many people think the shrine immediately in front of the stupa entrance -- a ferocious, pot-bellied silver deity snacking on entrails - is the Tibetan god Mahakala. Other people have told me it's the Nepali god Bhairav.

It's actually not a god at all, but a local goddess named Ajima (Grandmother).

And if this migraine doesn't go away, I'm going to offer my brain to her in a skull cup, an extremely authentic one. My cranium feels like a short-wave radio jammed with conflicting frequencies.

Here are a few more images from my past week in the land-locked insurgency-wracked power-starved isolated Himalayan former kingdom.

--Oh sh*t, it's not uploading. I'm still here, all right.
Here, watch this space while I go bang my head against a 5,000 year old brick wall.