NEWS UPDATE APRIL 2002
Ani Pachen Dolma, 68, Tibet's 'Warrior Nun'
By Myrna Oliver, Los Angeles Times, 2/12/2002
Ani Pachen Dolma, who as Tibet's ''warrior nun'' helped lead the resistance against the Chinese and was imprisoned for 21 years, died of heart failure on Feb. 2 in the Tibetan exile community of Dharamsala, India. She was 68.
Her remarkable story was detailed in her book, ''Sorrow Mountain: The Journey of a Tibetan Warrior Nun,'' written with Adelaide Donnelly and published in 2000.
That summer, Miss Dolma led one section of the San Francisco-to-San Diego march to rally support for Tibetan independence from China. The two groups met in Santa Monica, Calif., to coincide with a visit by the Dalai Lama of Tibet, who wrote an introduction to Miss Dolma's book.
The Tibetan government in exile had asked the nun to write the autobiography and gave her stationery, overcoming her reluctance to tell her story on the grounds that others had suffered more than she had.
She finally agreed to the project, she told an interviewer last year, because: ''Through my experiences, I can introduce to other people what has happened to my country and also let the younger generation know about what has happened to their country and what is going on. Also, I thought, I am old, I am an old lady now, so after I die I cannot bring my story with me. So I leave this story.''
A London Sunday Mail reviewer said of Miss Dolma's book: ''The writing is a little slow to digest because it is set in a cultural milieu that is new to Western readers. But the courageous Ani Pachen deserves the effort. And her cause deserves to be recognized as a tragedy, not just a slogan in the catalog of human-rights abuses to which we in the Western comfort zone turn a complacent cold shoulder.''
Born Pachen Dolma, the future freedom fighter was the only surviving child of Pomda Gonor, chieftain of the Lemdha clan in Gonjo in Kham, eastern Tibet. Although trained for marriage into another chieftain's family, she also learned to ride horses and shoot guns and became religiously devout. In her teens, she rebelled against arranged marriage by fleeing to a monastery and becoming a Buddhist nun. ''Ani'' means ''nun'' and ''Pachen'' translates roughly to ''Big Courage.''
But when her father died in 1958, clan elders insisted she take over his duties, and she abandoned the religious life to lead farmers and nomads in armed resistance to the invading Chinese People's Liberation Army. When Gonjo was overrun, Miss Dolma fled to the hills and led the fighting until she was captured and imprisoned a year later.
For 21 years, until her release in January 1981, she endured cold, starvation, psychologically scathing interrogation, and physical torture. She was kept in leg irons for a year, frequently hung upside down, and for nine months was confined to a dark concrete isolation cell. She spent 11 years in the notorious Drapchi prison in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. Her hair fell out, and her health never recovered from the years of being malnourished and mistreated.
''Faith. Faith kept me going,'' she said in an interview last year.
Even after her release, she continued to fight for the cause of independence in Tibet. But under threat of rearrest in 1988, she finally fled over the snow-covered Himalayas to Nepal and then to Dharamsala, where she realized her dream to meet the Dalai Lama and tell him her story.
Miss Dolma made several trips to world capitals, including London and Washington,
D.C., to rally support for Tibetan independence, frequently in the Dalai Lama's
entourage.