Six determined Tibetans are starving themselves to dramatize the cause of freedom for their homeland

By MEENAKSHI GANGULY /NEW DELHI

ver since he left when he was 12 years old, Dawa Gyalpo has dreamed of going home to Tibet. Now, at 50, he's decided he will never make it. His hopes that Tibet will ever regain its freedom from China are fading, and so the unassuming former tour guide has chosen to starve himself to death. Since March 10, he and five other Tibetans exiled in India have been on a hunger strike. They are not demanding anything as impossible as liberty for their country; they only ask that the world, or at least the United Nations, acknowledge Tibet's plight. Scrawny even before he started his fast, Gyalpo has lost 10 kg. "The United Nations solved problems in every country where there has been fighting and killing," he whispers weakly. "But why not Tibet? Because we don't harm anything. Now everything is finished in Tibet."

The hunger strike, timed to coincide with a U.N. session on human rights, places the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, in a moral bind. Suicide violates the Buddhist belief in non-violence, but over the decades, other Tibetan protests have failed to shake China into significantly loosening its hold on the Himalayan country it first invaded in 1950. When the Dalai Lama, who now lives in the Indian hill town of Dharamsala, recently visited the six Tibetans--five men and one woman, ranging in ages from 25 to 70--inside their tent in a New Delhi park, he said: "I consider hunger strike unto death as a kind of violence. However, I cannot offer them suggestions for an alternative method. I don't know what to do." Witnesses say he was nearly weeping when he pushed aside the tent flap and said goodbye to the hunger strikers. Few Tibetans would dare disobey the Dalai Lama openly, but many--like these protesters--are clearly frustrated by their leader's middle path of negotiation and dialogue, which they believe the Chinese simply ignore. Tseten Norbu, president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, which organized the strike, has approached the U.N. with three "achievable demands": to revive a debate on Tibet in the U.N. General Assembly, to appoint a special investigator on human rights abuses against Tibetans and to promote a settlement between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese.

The protesters, however, may find the U.N. bureaucracy unyielding. The organization has not yet responded to their pleas, though one official privately said the Tibetans don't understand how the U.N. operates. "The U.N. Secretariat can't do anything on its own," the official explains, noting that the Tibetans need at least one country to raise the issue in the General Assembly. Although some international groups have written letters of support to the Tibetans, so far, no nation has dared risk China's wrath by starting up a diplomatic debate. Watching the hunger strikers, the Dalai Lama later said, was like seeing "Tibet itself dying in front of the so-called civilized world. This is very sad."

Inside their sweltering tent, far from their high-altitude homeland, the strikers are growing weaker and weaker. When one of them dies, he or she is to be replaced by another and then another. Accumulated rage against the Chinese is so great that hundreds of Tibetans from refugee settlements in India and abroad have volunteered to join this suicidal relay. "We have to do something now," Norbu says. "It's the duty of every Tibetan." The strikers' only nourishment is a daily glass of water and a swallow of smoke from burning Tsampa barley which, the Tibetans believe, can strengthen the invisible "winds" of energy inside the body.

Dawa Gyalpo is determined to do his part. He pulls out a postcard of Mount Kailash, a holy mountain in Western Tibet close to his birthplace. He talks wistfully of childhood memories, of how he had hoped to return one day to that sacred mountain. Then suddenly, he shrugs and holds out the postcard. "You take it," he says through parched lips. "It was just a dream. There will be no home for me. I am dying."

> --With Reporting by Tim Mcgirk /New Delhi