The Flight of a Karmapa (march2000)

A local travel agent explained that tourists usually take a tour-group helicopter, which is much cheaper than a private helicopter like the ones operated by Fishtail Air, which can cost as much as HKS12,000 (US $1,500) for a one-way one-hour trip for five people. In any case, the New Year period is an off-season for tourists, and Pokhara had few visitors then. Fishtail Air is an American-Nepali joint venture and the only air company in Nepal with foreign ownership. In an interview with Hong Kong's "Open Magazine," the editor of the Tibetan Bulletin, a publication of the Tibetan Exile Government in Dharamsala, admitted that Fishtail Air helicopters are frequently used to ferry Tibetan refugees from the Nepal-Tibet border. Under Nepali law, however, such people-smuggling activity is a criminal offense. In Kathmandu, an executive with a major Western aircraft company, who supplies private aircraft to airlines across the Asia-Pacific region, expressed surprise on hearing that the Tsurphu Karmapa had flown aboard a Fishtail Air helicopter.

The aircraft executive immediately blurted out: "Oh, does this mean that the CIA was involved in the Tibetan boy's escape?"

This same question was being asked across Nepal, a country that has seen more than its share of covert operations. The mystery was enhanced when we checked with Fishtail Air's head office in Kathmandu. The local staff told us that the flight record for January 3 was missing.. The staff showed us the records for the day before, the day after and every other day in the month. The flight record on the day of the Tsurphu Karmapa's flight were nowhere to be found.

All Western news accounts have failed to mention the role of Fishtail Air in this escapade. Barbara Crossette former New Delhi bureau chief of The New York Times, wrote that the Tsurphu Karmapa's party rode horses from the Tibet border to Pokhara. This would have taken four days and would have required a change of ponies. To account for the lost time and to explain how the Tibetan youth could have reached Dharamsala on Jan. 5, the Crossette report claimed that the Tsurphu Karmapa took an airplane from Pokhara to somewhere in India. This is patently impossible because Pokhara Airport is not allowed to handle international flights but only air traffic inside Nepal. Also, security inside India's airports was extremely tight because of the rising threat posed by Afghan drug traffickers and Kashmiri terrorists using Kathmandu's Tribhuwan International Airport as a transit point. Coincidentally, the American owner of Fishtail Air has had business links with the fugitive chief of India's "Muslim mafia,'' who is accused of killing 300 people in the bombing the Bombay Stock Exchange in 1993.

The Egghead Nun

The remainder of the Tsurphu Karmapa's journey through Nepal was by car not airplane. It is possible that he stopped at the Hotel Annapurna. The receptionist on duty on Jan. 3 said that no guests of that name had checked in. The hotel staff, however, said they could not rule out the possibility that the Tibetan might have visited the hotel director's private house, located in the hotel compound. The hotel director, a lama, was away in Dharamsala at the time of our visit. The Hotel Annapurna is owned by Dalai Lama's Tibetan Exile Government and managed by a lama who is a member of the exile government. Pokhara is also a major refugee center and information-gathering point for a British relief group that has supported the Dalai Lama since the Tibet armed uprising in 1959.

It is unlikely that the Tsurphu Karmapa could have passed unnoticed through Pokhara's exile community because his sister had visited the lakeside Lhasa Restaurant in mid-December. The restaurant owner said he remembers her as "unique, strange-looking woman" whose head is shaped like an egg. The oldest Tibetan restaurant in the area is run by a Tibetan family who had escaped from Tibet to India in 1959, a few months after the Dalai Lama's departure from Lhassa.

The owner Dhoudup Tsering said, "In mid-December, Tibetan nun came in to our restaurant with four other Tibetans. Among them was a lama dressed in simple maroon robes. Since I didn't recognize the nun, I paid no attention to them and went back to my shop next door. Then, one Tibetan told me that the nun he was accompanying was the Karmapa's sister." The Tibetan visitor was a professor with a German university. The restaurant owner asked the professor which claimant of the title " 17th Karmapa" was related to the nun : the boy lama in Tibet or the rival contender picked by the Shamarpa, the sect's second-ranking cleric in New Delhi? The professor answered that the nun was the sister of the Karmapa in Tibet. Throughout the two-hour luncheon, the Tibetan men held a relaxed conversation, but the nun had a serious expression and remained silent. One of the waiters said that the Tsurphu Karmapa's sister came to Pokhara with a traveling party of 18 other Tibetans. Tibetan residents said that the Tsurphu Karmapa has relatives in Pokhara and the appearance of his sister had stirred up excitement in the local Tibetan community. Exactly why the closest of his two siblings arrived three weeks before Tsurphu Karmapa's escape remains a mystery. Two points, however, seem certain : She did not escape with her brother as most media reported, and the news of her presence in Nepal must have reached Dharamsala. And by the time of the Tsurphu Karmapa's escape, the egghead nun had already been smuglled into India. If the Dalai Lama was "surprised" by the escapes from Tsurphu, then he must have been the last to know.

Smugglers and Siddhartha

From Pokhara, the Tsurphu Karmapa was taken for a five-hour drive along the southbound highway to Lumbini. Now a historic center surrounded by barren plains, Lumbini was long ago a lush garden where under a full moon Queen Mayadevi gave birth to Prince Siddhartha, the historical Buddha. In the darkness unmitigated by a sliver of lunar light, the Tibetan teenager missed the sight of King Asoka's pillar and the archaeological dig where the oldest statue of the Buddha was uncovered from the ruins of Mayadevi Temple.

The young Tibetan could easily remain incognito because a major international Buddhist conference was being held inside the new visitor center designed by Japanese architect Kenzo Tange. Some 30,000 monks were visiting from Lhasa and other parts of Tibet. Unlike the Tsurphu Karmapa who was conveyed by helicopter and limousine, these penniless monks had to walk from Lhasa to the Nepal border and -ode public buses the rest of the way. "Can you imagine such a great number of monks going through the Himalayas ? The attention of the Chinese police was diverted. I think it was why the Tibetan Karmapa chose to escape at the end of December," said one East Asian monk in Lumbini.

Lumbini is also a favorite stopover for Tibetan migrants before they are led by Nepali peoplesmugglers across the border into India. One Tibetan refugee returning for his relatives described the illegal border-crossing.

"The journey usually starts at midnight. It takes 15 minutes to reach a safe border point near Lumbini. We get off the bus, carrying our luggage. Escorted by Nepali people-smugglers, we walk across the border into India. On the Indian side, a bus is waiting to take us to New Delhi along small roads and then further up to Dharamsala," he said. "The whole trip takes about two days."

Professional smugglers took the Tsurphu Karmapa to the Indian side of the border, where a car was waiting to whisk him off to Gorakhpur and then New Delhi. The Tibetan teenager reached the Indian capital by noon, and an overnight train put him in Dharamsala by January 5 - for his appointment with the Dalai Lama and an adoring but gullible international media. With our long, exhausting journey at its end in Buddha's birthplace, we marveled at all the deceptions that litter the Tibetan teenager's crooked trail and the false reports repeated by the world's press. The tolling of bronze Buddhist bells resonated across the dusty plains of Lumbini, reminding us of the Buddha's Eightfold Path, which instructs his followers never to deceive others in this world of appearances and to always speak the truth.

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