There have been reports of monks being tortured by having shock batons stuck down their throats, delivering powerful electric jolts through their entire body. There are also reports of monks being routinely starved and isolated and beaten with chains, iron bats and sticks with nails and hung by their shoulder for hours.
Women, particularly nuns, have been raped. Richard Gere often tells a story about a group of nuns who held up a placard saying “Free Tibet” at monastery. “They were immediately arrested with all the other women in their convent,” he said. “They were taken to a police station, and stripped naked and tortured and beaten, They were hung by ropes tied behind their backs; and several of them were shocked with electric cattle prods.” GereI asked one of the nuns, “How can you handle this?” She said, “It’s so much bigger than me, so much bigger than these events.”
One Tibetan woman told Newsweek she was beaten at a Lhasa police station for printing an underground newspaper with quotations from the Dalai Lama. “I asked them to stop because I was pregnant,” she said. “One of them said, ‘So what?’ and they kicked me around the room some more before making me stand again.” She collapsed and four days later gave birth to a dead fetus.
A Romanian video shot in September 2006 is said to have captured the fatal shooting of a Tibetan escaping from Tibet. It appears to show a border guard shooting a rifle and a man in the distance—said to be with a group of Tibetan refugees attempting to flee to Nepal—running and then falling in the snow. The video was shot by a group of mountain climbers climbing Cho Oyu, a Himalayan peak near China’s border with Nepal. Eyes witnesses told human rights that the victim was a 25-year-old Tibetan nun, attempting to cross from Tibet into Nepal at 5,800-meter-high Nanpa La.
