NEPAL

Katmandu

"The word went round that new Tibetan refugees had just been arrested. Lhamo had recently arrived after her long walk across the Himalayas with her two children. She managed to slip through the mesh of the net…"

Abstracts

"In 1950, barely one year after the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, Tibet, a land that had been independent since 127 A.D., was invaded by the Communist army that proclaimed sovereignty over it. Today, Tibet’s historic surface area has been reduced by half. Around 7.5 million Chinese colonists can be counted, whereas the Tibetan population is no more than 5.5 million. Nearly 1.5 million Tibetans have been eliminated, one way or another, by violence, detention or hardship.

Since the Dalai Lama took flight in 1959, and his warm reception by Jawaharlal Nehru who offered to host, in his country, the seat of the exiled Tibetan government, there has been an endless exodus towards lands of refuge, Bhutan, Nepal and India, on the other side of Chomolungma, the world’s goddess mother ('Everest' in Tibetan). But one by one, like the rest of the world, these countries are turning away from the Tibetan cause."

Extract from Zoé Zoé, Femmes du mondes, 2007, Éditions Gallimard