For Love of Music

By Lisa McLaughlin

Growing up in the Tibetan refugee settlement of Mundgod in southern India, Ngawang Choephel was enthralled by the music of the land he had left behind. He had fled in 1968, when his mother Sonam Dekyi carried the two-year-old Choephel on her back through the Himalayas to India, and he found that traditional music was just about the only link he had to home. As a teen, he made a dranyan (a six-stringed lute) from a gourd and fishing line and taught himself to play. In 1992, after graduating from the Tibetan Institute for Performing Arts in Dharamsala, India, Choephel earned a Fulbright scholarship and spent a year studying ethnomusicology and filmmaking at Middlebury College in Vermont. He planned to use his new training to preserve Tibetan song and dance--traditions that were endangered because Tibetan teens were more interested in pop music, and because Chinese officials were conducting a systematic campaign to obliterate Tibetan culture.

But when Choephel returned to Tibet, things began to go wrong. Barely a month after he arrived in August 1995 to begin making a documentary on music and dance, he was detained by the Chinese government and held incommunicado. No official announcement of his status was made until December 1996, when state radio reported that a closed court had found him guilty and handed down a sentence of 18 years, one of the longest ever given to a Tibetan political prisoner. Says a Tibetan academic living in Beijing: "[The Chinese] assume that being a Fulbright means you're working for the CIA."

Choephel may be alone in his cell, but he's not alone in his predicament. According to the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy, more than 1,000 Tibetans, mostly political prisoners, are being held in Chinese jails. Like Choephel, most have been denied legal representation and contact with their families, and many have been tortured. Choephel's case won some early press attention: in 1997, Congress passed a resolution condemning his imprisonment, and then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made a personal plea to Beijing for his release. But today Choephel is still being held in a remote prison, reportedly in failing health, and his plight has moved off the political front burner. Now that China has landed the 2008 Olympics, the West may have run out of carrots. "It is six years since my son was put in jail," says Dekyi, now 67. "And no one has done anything."

China claims that Choephel's research was a pretext for collecting sensitive information. The official news report of his sentence concluded he had been sent "by the Dalai [Lama] clique with expenditures and equipment provided by a certain foreign country." But shortly before his disappearance, Choephel sent the first 16 hours of his videotapes out of the country with American tourists. The tapes show folk songs and dances that seem to pose little threat to any country's national security.

Dekyi has been allowed to see her son only once since his imprisonment. She maintains a daily public vigil on the streets of New Delhi, India, handing out petitions. "My only hope is to get my son released," she says, with tears flooding down her face. "That is my life. If the Chinese do not release my son, I shall make sure I die in front of their embassy."

--Reported by Hannah Beech/Beijing and Michael Fathers/New Delhi

With reporting by Hannah Beech/Beijing and Michael Fathers/ New Delhi