Gareth Jones
[bas relief by Oleh Lesiuk]
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TOPICAL
'Are you Listening NYT?' U.N. Speech - Nov 2009 |
Gareth Recognised at Cambridge - Nov 2009 |
Reporter and the Genocide - Rome, March 2009 |
Order of Freedom Award -Nov 2008 |
Premiere of 'The Living' Documentary Kyiv - Nov 2008 |
Gareth Jones 'Famine' Diaries - Chicago 2008 |
Aberystwyth Memorial Plaque 2006 |
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I entered the reception room of the Living Buddha. It had a throne and a place for about 14 people on bright coloured mats around the wall. The High Lama was in a salmon coloured silk robe with a purse of gold. I liked him very much. He had a frank smile with white teeth. He had a sense of humour. He did not sit on his throne, but beside it. He ‘told’ brown beads all the time. Priests came in with gifts of silk - in rolls of bright blue and red. We were given Mongolian tea. Then Diluwa took some Mongolian butter like cream and stuck masses in my cup of tea. He started speaking in Mongolian to his secretary who was wearing a dark long brown robe. He translated into Chinese, which Müller translated into German and which I wrote down in English. It was an appeal for help for refugees from Soviet Outer Mongolia. Many, about 40,000 to 50,000, had had to flee, unable to rescue much of their property and arriving at most with only their riding animals, either camels or horses. The poverty among them is terrible. They have few household utensils and only a small pot. They started to come in 1931 when the Communists started to press their ideas. They did not bring their herds, because the Bolsheviks confiscated these. They had a difficult time to escape the guards. The Nanking Government has given £30,000 for rice, but this is not enough. While we talked lamas peeped through the windows like schoolboys. Then a Japanese man rode by in brilliant Mongol dress, on a fine Mongol saddle, with a little skullcap and a button on top. Müller says: “A lot of them do it. It is much more comfortable and they think it makes them more popular”. After my interview with Diluwa, we motored on and got stuck in a river for three hours and twenty minutes and eventually we arrived late at night at Ujmutchin, not far from the Soviet and Manchukuo frontier. The leader of the Buriat Banner, Prince Otcheroff gave us a room near his palace and we slept well. Next morning, we went to the Yamen and paid a visit to the Japanese representative of the Kwantung Army, as the Japanese occupied it. The leading Japanese in the yurt was a man of great charm with fine teeth, a tuft of beard and brilliantly humorous eyes. They had a wireless there. Into the room came a Mongol who had a purse with a swastika, black on white with a red border. The Japanese man said he, himself, had been there since March and had not yet had a bath. |
Gareth at the Lama service. |
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