Jonathan Mirsky

The body in the snow

A word is missing from the subtitle of Jonathan Green’s shocking exposé: cowardice.

issue 17 July 2010

A word is missing from the subtitle of Jonathan Green’s shocking exposé: cowardice.

A word is missing from the subtitle of Jonathan Green’s shocking exposé: cowardice. It shines out of his story of the murder of the 17-year-old Tibetan nun, Kelsang Namtso.

It happened on 30 September 2006, at the base camp on Cho Oyu in Tibet, the sixth highest peak in the world. Forty teams of Westerners, who had paid up to $20,000 each for the trip, waited there for their turns to climb. To make the wait more comfortable, hundreds of yaks and porters had carried quantities of wine, sushi, TV films, pregnancy-testing kits, condoms and M&Ms to about 20,000 feet. Into this scene, half an hour from the Nepalese border, exhausted and starving, staggered Kelsang, her best friend Dolma, and 70 other women, men and children, defying a Chinese law forbidding Tibetans to leave their country without permission.

The group was spotted by Chinese border guards and fired on.

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