INTERVIEW WITH AMERICAN WRITER WHO JOINED THE MARCH TO TIBET, PART 1
We hear from LEX PELGER an American on the March to Tibet immediately after the marchers were arrested.
INTERVIEW WITH AMERICAN WRITER WHO JOINED THE MARCH TO TIBET, PART 2
With the original marchers in jail, Lex describes walking with a new group of monks and nuns and a midnight run from the police
Lex Pelger on what happens when you put 85 Tibetan monks in an Indian jail...
An interview about courage, international friendship, and how to break INTO an Indian jail...
On the morning of March 10th, 2008, on the 49th anniversary of the Tibetan National Uprising in Lhasa, 100 Tibetans, mostly monks, set off from the town of Dharamsala, India, with the intention of walking to Tibet. They were marching to focus global attention on the plight of their countrymen, timing their arrival at the Indian-Tibetan border with August’s Beijing Olympics. One of the marchers was Tenzin Tsundue, the poet and activist, who has become an icon of creative resistance among Tibetan youth.
They were only a few hours in to the march when they were stopped by local authorities under orders from Delhi Central government and forbidden to leave the district of Kangra in the state of Himachal Pradesh. Unperturbed, they continued on and the following day, all 100 were summarily arrested at the Kangra district border.
The Tibet Connection’s Ronny Novick spoke with Lex Pelger, a 25- year-old Pennsylvanian writer who is traveling with the marchers. Lex spoke by cell phone from outside the jail at Jawala Mukhi about the marchers’ dedication to non-violent resistance, why he and 9 other Westerners joined the hunger strike that they mounted, and how to break INTO an Indian jail....
Transcript of interview (Word Document), Part 1
Transcript of interview (PDF file0, Part 1
Latest news: The Tibetan monks will be held in a government hostel for two weeks and then be released. The hunger strike is over. All the foreigners have returned to Dharamsala, India.