Read the original article at: https://www.elmundo.es/papel/historias/2021/01/19/6005a7f9fc6c83943a8b45d2.html
Some 150.000 Tibetans live in exile due to pressure from the Chinese government, many of them mired in administrative limbo. During the decades, the Argentine photographer Ángel López Soto has followed in his footsteps.
Avalanches on the roof of the world buried the elderly and children. Others, they died frozen. In midwinter, to more than 6.000 meters high, only the strongest managed to survive the Himalayas. That December 1997, of a group of 40 families who fled Tibet, only 20 They came to Nepal, to a shelter in Kathmandu. The Argentine photojournalist Angel Lopez Soto spent several weeks with them, listening to their stories and portraying their fears. They were his first photos of the Tibetan diaspora, of the exile of a people who had to escape from their land in order to maintain their identity.
On that trip, Soto coincided with the award-winning writer Javier Moro, that had just been published Las buddha mountains, a book in which he narrates the Dalai Lama's two-week escape on foot and horseback in 1959, nine years after Mao Zedong's China invaded Tibet. «I met the Dalai Lama in 1998, in the Indian city of Dharamshala, where the Tibetan Government in exile had settled», says the photojournalist. «You can follow it for two weeks in your daily activities, both spiritual and in the audiences where he received the exiles who escaped from the mountains of Tibet due to the repression of China».
For more than 20 years, Soto has been capturing the Tibetan exile around the world. A work that can be seen in an exhibition starting Wednesday (Tibet, A threatened culture) at the Fernán Gómez Theater in Madrid. In total, will present around 100 character photographs, landscapes and temples that cover a one-way trip without return of one of the most endangered towns in the world.
«If I had to choose a photo, I would keep the portraits of Palden Gyatso, who died in 2018. He was one of the most famous Tibetan monks, that was 33 imprisoned for years in forced camps in China and never renounced his beliefs or unconditional support for the Dalai Lama. He was tortured for it. When they released him, He bought torture tools from his prison guards because he wanted to denounce the situation they were experiencing in exile.», explains Soto.
Palden Gyatso's prisoner memoirs were collected by the monk himself in his book Fire Under the Snow. He was arrested in 1959, when the population of Lhasa, capital of Tibet, revolted, but China crushed the rebellion, leaving about 10.000 muertos. The Dalai Lama managed to escape. «I met several times at the beginning of the years 50 with Mao Zedong and he seemed like an honest man. He told me that they had entered Tibet to help us turn the country into a modern nation., and that two decades later, when they had finished the work, they would leave. He didn't keep any of his promises.», the Dalai Lama said in an interview with EL MUNDO in 1999.
News of his departure spread throughout Tibet and caused thousands of Tibetans to flee across the high mountain passes of the Himalayas.. It was the case of Thubten Wangchen. «Then I was a five-year-old boy and I crossed the Himalayas on my father's shoulders.. The image of the hundreds of corpses that we found along the way will never be erased.», remembers this Buddhist monk who today is the director of the House of Tibet in Barcelona and member of the Tibetan Parliament in Exile. When he managed to arrive in Nepal, Wangchen and his family were begging on the streets until they found some money to travel to Dharamshala., the territory that India had ceded to the Tibetan refugees and where the Dalai Lama had already settled and more of 80.000 exiles. «in 1982 I traveled to Spain for the first time and stayed there. Now I feel even more Spanish than Tibetan», says the monk. Wangchen already has Spanish nationality, but it occupies one of the 45 Dharamshala Tibetan Parliament seats. It is not internationally recognized, but it has its own administrative and judicial system. Right now the first round of elections in which overseas Tibetans can elect a new president and deputies of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), a government in exile. «We will continue fighting for our rights and recognition as an independent people. Beijing has a lot of Chinese history. His policy remains very harsh towards Tibet. We thought that when President Xi Jinping came to power he would be more understanding because his father was a fan of the Dalai Lama and his wife is Buddhist. However, The Chinese Government has toughened arrests, persecutions and torture in recent years», assures the monk. It is estimated that more than 150.000 refugees form the Tibetan diaspora. The vast majority settled in India, to the shelter of his spiritual leader. Although, In recent years, according to data from the Indian Administration, he 44% of the exiles who were in the Asian country have gone to the United States, Canada or Europe. «The Tibetans are not officially recognized as refugees in Indiaa, On paper they are still foreigners and it is not easy for them to have good jobs. Thus, many are looking for a life in other countries», says documentary filmmaker Kwhat Tenzing, who also fled with his family from Tibet when he was a child. Until mid-February, many of the photos and stories of the exile will appear in the exhibition by photojournalist Ángel López Soto. After two decades covering the topic, There are still pending projects. «Locate the 20 refugees that I met on my first trip in the mountains of Nepal and to know if they managed to recover that life without repression that they were fleeing from in their country».
