Melody in Prison: Ngawang Choephel
	UPDATE 19 August 2000

The following story, datelined New Delhi, appeared in The Asian Age.

Tibetan Woman Appeals to China to Free Sick Son

A 66-year-old Tibetan women who was finally able to meet her imprisoned son in Lhasa early this month after a six-year battle, has appealed to international community and the Chinese authorities to hand over her son for medical treatment.

The women, Ms Sonam Dekyi, fears that her son Ngawang Choephel might not survive 18 years of imprisonment till 2013 because of the pathetic conditions he is in right now. Addressing here reporters at a meeting organized by Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, Ms Dekyi revealed details about her recent visit to a prison in Chengdu where her son was shifted to from Lhasa. Ms Dekyi was allowed to see her son only twice for an hour each time and was not allowed by the Chinese officials to even touch him.

“I could not recognise my son as he had turned so weak and feeble,” Ms Dekyi said. “I could recognize only his voice,” she said, adding, all that is left of him is skin hanging on to bones. Clutching at old photographs of Choephel, Ms Dekyi said her son was suffering from four ailments including an infection in his urinary tract. “I told them not to send him back before he recovers. I also pleaded with the authorities not to torture him. I was told that he is stubborn and difficult and refuses to confess to his crimes,” she said.

Choephel was a musician from the Mundgod Tibetan Settlement near Bangalore. He was a scholar of ethnomusicology at the Middlebury College in Vermont. In July 1995, he went to Tibet with an American photographer, Kathryn Culley, to document and record Tibetan culture. On August 22, 1995, he told Culley that he planned to stay longer and visit Shigatse where he would look for musicians before returning to India in the next three or five months. Choephel also planned to find his father who had been taken captive when his mother had fled with him in 1968 to India.

The boy was declared missing sometime after this and in October 1996, the Chinese authorities admitted that Choephel had been detained. On December 26, 1996, the Intermediate People’s Court of Shigatse Region sentenced Choephel to 18 years of imprisonment and deprivation of political rights for four year for “espionage activities.” Choephel was kept in Nyari Detention Centre in Shigatse till his transfer in July 1998 to the high-security Powo Tramo Prison on Tramo County.

Meanwhile, Choephel’s mother started her campaign by staging a dharna at Jantar Mantar in Delhi and appealing to the Chinese authorities to allow her to see her son before she dies. Ms Dekyi was finally given permission to visit her son with her brother Tsewang Wangdu in July this year.

She plans to resume her struggle to get back her ailing son. Ms Dekyi also plans to go back to Jantar Mantar once she gets the banners and placards ready. “I fear my son will not survive his complete imprisonment period because he is very ill. I want him back. He was never into politics. All he knew was music,” she said.