NEW DELHI, India - Buddhist monks wept in the rubble as Chinese authorities razed Tibet's largest religious institute and nunnery, two monks who secretly filmed the destruction said Thursday.
"We were frightened to see so many Chinese. Right away they started to destroy thousands of homes of our monks and nuns," said monk Khempa Tenkyong, who fled from the Serthar Institute in the Sichaun province, just east of Tibet.
Tenkyong spoke as campaigners against Chinese occupation of Tibet showed a 10-minute documentary they said was pieced together with smuggled footage from Tibet.
They told the Foreign Correspondents Club of South Asia it was the first visual depiction of the destruction of the deeply revered learning center by Chinese officials.
"This clearly proves that China's propaganda that Tibetans enjoy religious freedom is untrue," said Tenkyong. He said the main Buddhist shrine at the center was spared.
Chinese officials denied the institute had been ravaged.
"This is not true. They have not been evicted. I don't think this video is the real thing," Yang Shuying, first secretary at the Chinese Embassy, told The Associated Press.
"The Chinese government respects people in Tibet. (They) enjoy religious freedom," she said.
Tenkyong said he and another monk, Paltrup, escaped by hitching rides at night to the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, to avoid the attention of Chinese security forces. From Lhasa, they walked for a month across the Himalayas to reach Nepal, India's neighbor.
Dressed in a flowing saffron robe, Tenkyong said nuns were coerced to denounce the Dalai Lama, the supreme leader of Tibetan Buddhists, and forced to sign documents vowing allegiance to the communist leaders.
Jigme Phuntsok, who founded the Serthar Institute in 1980 and is the most popular Tibetan religious leader living in Tibet, has been detained by Chinese authorities, said Tenkyong.
Grainy video images showed men in suits and armed soldiers in fatigues watching as workers with pickaxes and crowbars razed huts along a hilly, grassy expanse, said to be pasrt of the institute campus. Several huts crumbled in plumes of dust. Separate shots showed stacks of wooden logs and the debris of shattered homes.
Old women searched for belongings in the rubble. Many wept as they sat in small cavities in the debris, their heads lowered between their knees.
The students did not protest or demonstrate as they were evicted, because their religion forbade them to, said monk Paltrup.
"In all its 22 years, Serthar's students have done nothing to break Chinese law," said nun Damchoe Dolma, interviewed in the documentary. "With all our homes gone, hundreds of nuns are now homeless."
More than 8,000 students were forcibly evicted and approximately 2,000 homes demolished by Chinese laborers through 2001, the independent Tibetan Center of Human Rights and Democracy said. It said the demolitions began last June 26.
The human rights group said 19,000 monks and nuns from different Tibetan sects had been evicted from their homeland over the past seven years.