The Flight of a Karmapa (march2000)

South China Morning Post

Susanna Cheung and Prakash Khanal trace the boy lama's escape route through the Himalayas (Susanna Cheung, a fellow with the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at The University of Hong Kong, has reported on the Kosovo conflict and East Timor crisis. Kathmandu-based writer Prakash Khanal covers Himalayan environmental issues and is former editor with RONAST, The Royal Nepal Academy of Science and Technology.)

Lumbini, Nepal - The Dalai Lama was reportedly taken by complete surprise when his protégé, a 14-year-old Tibetan boy known as the 17th Karmapa, appeared at a hotel in Dharamsala on Jan. 5. The international news media, quoting sources in the Karmapa's 4D entourage and in the Tibetan Exile Government, reported that the boy lama had escaped on C) foot to India all the way from the Tsurphu monastery near Lhasa, a veritable Tibetan odyssey reenacting the Dalai Lama's three-week passage to exile in 1959.

News agencies including AFP, AP and Reuters accepted without challenge the account of the boy lama, named Urgyen Trinley Dorje, who claimed have walked a distance of 900 miles in eight days over the Himalayas. But a modem miracle it would have been for anyone to have walked an average of 112 miles per day, not counting the twists and turns of the mountain roads.

Our two-person news team - a veteran Nepali environmental reporter and a Hong Kong-based journalist - retraced the Tsurphu Karmapa's route through Nepal during a two-week investiuation in January. We discovered that the dramatic escape was not just a teenager's solo adventure but engineered in a meticulous clockwork plan. The Tsurphu Karmapa's rapid 0 progress through Nepal's rugged terrain was made possible by a helicopter operator with reputed links with U.S. intelligence services and by an extensive network of the Tibetan Exile Government.

The Karmapa's initial accounts were so contrary to geographic reality that Time magazine, The New York Times and Time Warner's Asiaweek eventually revised their stories, admitting the Tibetan boy had escaped through Nepal on horseback and train or airplane. But our findings in Nepal show that even these more recent reports turned out to have contained serious errors.

According to most Western news accounts, on the night of December 28, the Karmapa made his dash from Tsurphu monastery, the traditional headquarters of the Kagyupa (Black Hat) sect, in a limousine with his sister, who is a nun, and five other monks. But this media account is inaccurate, according to a well-informed Nepali businessman in the Mustang region and monks with the Kagyupa (Black Hat) sect. For one thing, the Tsurphu Karmapa's sister had entered Nepal at least three weeks earlier and was already in India.

Himalayan Intrigues

On late Tuesday night, Dec. 28, the Tibetan teenager departed the Tsurphu monastery, the traditional seat of the Karmapa, spiritual leader of the Black Hat sect, located near Lhasa. He could not have climbed out of his bedroom window, as reported in some accounts, since it is on the sixth floor. It was safer to walk out a door. The adventurous teenager rode in one of two Toyota Landcruisers driven by a young monk. Another monk drove the second vehicle, brought as a back-up in case of mechanical troubles.

It took the trio three days to cover the 300 miles to their border exit point, normally less than a day's drive. Why did they linger inside Tibet for so long after the Chinese realized they were missing ? In the course of three days, the Tibetan trio made two attempts to exit Tibet in widely separated areas.

In a letter left to Chinese leaders, the Tsurphu Karmapa said that he was going to retrieve ritual treasures from Rumtek monastery in Sikkim, the seat-in-exile of the late 16th Karmapa. Since the early 1990s, the Kagyupa sect has been deeply divided by a succession dispute between the Tsurphu Karmapa, who is backed by the Dalai Lama and Beijing, and a rival candidate backed by the Shamarpa, the order's second-ranking leader. The contender who succeeds in winning the replica of the order's mystic black crown would gain the upper hand. The Dalai Lama joined the sectarian fray because the Kagyupa school is the dominant religious group among the 400,000 residents of Sikkim, an Indian state on the Tibet border. China and Taiwan also share an interest in Sikkim, because neither recognize India's annexation of the former Buddhist kingdom in 1975.

According to senior Kagyupa leaders, the monks of Tsurphu monastery in Tibet had proposed a Sikkim journey to Beijing officials, who were receptive to the idea. In November, the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi sent an official to Rumtek monastery for exploratory talks with monks allied with Tai Situ Rinpoche. The pro-Situ faction in Sikkim were so confident of Chinese approval that they cleared ground for a helipad for his expected arrival by helicopter from India.

On the Indian side, one Cabinet member promised Tai Situ Rinpoche that safe passage would be arranged for the Tibetan boy from the Nepali border to Sikkim. The senior Kagyupa monks add that Taiwanese Buddhists also had a hand in the intrigue through their massive financial support for Situ Rinpoche.

The crossing through Nepal, which borders Tibet and Sikkim, did not pose a great difficulty. In some estimates, some 20,000 Tibetan emigrants slip through the porous borders of Nepal every year. For still murky reasons, something went badly awry at the Nepal border, and the three young monks abandoned their plans to journey to Sikkim.

Plan A Goes Away