Tibetan SFF soldier killed on India-China border told family: ‘we are finally fighting our enemy’
- Tenzin Nyima saw fighting China as the apex of more than 30 years’ service with the Special Frontier Forces, and knew he might die, his family says
- ‘Every Tibetan wants to fight China, because that fight is not just for India, it is also for our own land, our identities,’ says his brother
Nyima was destined to be a “brave soul”, he said. Indeed, in 1987, Nyima, just 18, went to an army base in Leh, the capital of Ladakh, asking to be recruited into a secretive Indian paramilitary unit with Tibetan soldiers, known as the Special Frontier Forces.
On August 30 this year, Nyima’s mother Dawa Palzom, 76, was reminded of the oracle’s words when she got off the phone with Nyima.
The 51-year-old, a company leader in the SFF, had made a surprise call to her at her home in Choglamsar, a town in Leh, from a forward position along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) – the loosely defined line separating Indian-controlled territory from Chinese-controlled territory.
Nyima’s older brother, 54-year-old Tenzin Nyandak, said Nyima sounded “tense”. This was not surprising given Nyima and his company were stationed in mountain passes less than 200km (124 miles) away, where Indian troops were locked in a bitter and tense stand-off with Chinese troops at various points along their 3,488km undemarcated border, bringing political ties between the nuclear-armed neighbours to their lowest point in decades.