Melody in Prison: Ngawang Choephel
	UPDATE 1 February 2000

Reader's Digest Australia Reports on Ngawang and His Mother

The following article appears in the February issue of the Australian edition of Reader's Digest. Thanks to Hansa Natola of Australia Tibet Committee-Perth for making it available.

TIBET UNDER SIEGE
China is destroying the culture and identity of a gentle people
By Brian Eads

It was a sparkling summer's day when Ngawang Choephel arrived in the crowded marketplace of Shigatse, Tibet's second city. The young music student was nervous. His video camera attracted a lot of attention since he arrived in July 1995, and the Chinese police already had questioned him twice. Still, his documentary on Tibetan music and culture was taking shape. He'd shot an opera troupe, an ancient dance to drive off demons, children singing nursery rhymes and much more.

Born in western Tibet, Choephel had been carried into exile in India at the age of two, but his mother had sung native Tibetan fold songs to him from an early age. He became absorbed by the music and, as a teenager, he had fashioned a dranyan, a six-string Tibetan guitar, from a gourd and fishing line and taught himself to play. After graduating from the Tibetan Institute for Performing Arts in Dharamsala, northern India, he won a Fulbright Scholarship to the US and spent a year studying and teaching at Middlebury College in Vermont.

But Choephel knew that Tibetans were being reared on pop music and karaoke, and so, with American photographer Kathryn Culley, Choephel was preserving what he could of traditional culture before it was too late. When Culley returned to America, Choephel travelled alone. He wasn't in Shigatse long before policemen blocked his path between the stalls in the marketplace and marched him to jail.

He was held incommunicado for more than a year. Finally, in reply to a letter from American Senator James Jeffords, a councellor at the Chinese Embassy in Washington acknowledged that Choephel was in jail. He was accused of gathering “sensitive intelligence” and engaging in unspecified “illegal separatist activities.”

Two months later, Chinese-controlled Radio Tibet declared that Choephel had been sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment. His crime was “spying for the Tibetan government-in-exile.” The authorities offered no evidence to support the charge.

Choephel was said to have “confessed,” and Tibetan sources say he is in Powo Tramo, an isolated forced-labour camp 500 kilometrer east of Lhasa. No foreign delegation has ever visited the prison, and inmates are denied all visitation rights.

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Beaten with cattle prods. The violation of Ngawang Choephel's right is by no means unique. According to the India-based Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, no fewer than 1200 Tibetans, mostly political prisoners, are being held in Chinese jails.

Like Choephel, most are denied legal representation or contact with their families, and many are tortured.

One of them, Palden Gyatso, fled Tibet after 33 years in detention, taking with him a collection of manacles, thumb cuffs and electric cattle prods used by prison guards. The 69-year-old Buddhist monk lost all his teeth after a guard jammed an electric prod into his mouth. His gums and tongue still bear the scars.

“Many of my friends are still in prison,” he told Reader's Digest. “By the time one of them completes his sentence in 2011, he'll have spent 44 years in jail.”

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The reason for this cruelty is China's desire to bring this land under direct control. Sandwiched between India and China, Tibet is strategically important. It is rich in minerals, timber and hydroelectric potential. For centuries, its people paid tribute to Chinese emperors to preserve their independence. But soon after the Chinese communists came to power in 1949, they invaded. Beijing continues to insist that Tibet historically has been part of the Chinese nation.

Over the past 40 years, an estimated 6,000 monasteries have been destroyed. Chinese officials deny the charge, pointing out that they have in fact helped renovate many temples. But there is no disputing the fact that pro-independence Tibetan, including monks and nuns, are subjected to what the Chinese call “patriotic re-education.”

Unwilling to be re-educated some 4000 Tibetans made the perilous mountain trek into Nepal and India in 1998, according to the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy.

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Tsering Cheokey is typical of hundreds of former political prisoners who have sought refuge. She was 14 years old on the December morning in 1993 when she and two friends from her Lhasa nunnery walked through the city streets waving a Tibetan national flag and shouting “Chinese Quit Tibet !” They were quickly arrested, but refused to admit any wrongdoing and implicate others. “I knew the consequences,” she says.

From midday to sunset, every day for a month, Choekey was questioned, punched, beaten and prodded with electric batons. “They showed no pity,” she recalls, “they beat me more because I was the youngest.”

Denied medical treatment, the wounds on Choekey's feet, ankles and hands became infected. Even today her feet are swollen and scarred with running sores.

Choekey was detained for a year, without charges, legal representation or visitors. Eventually she was sentenced to three years in prison for her pro-independence demonstration. In official jargon, she was guilty of “splitism.” She served the remainder of her sentence in a labour camp.

As soon as she was strong enough, she made a hazardous 30-day journey with 85 other Tibetans crossing the wide Yarlung Zangboo River on inflated inner-tubes and scaling snow-clad peaks to freedom in India. She lives in the Shugseb nunnery-in-exile, home to 42 other Tibetan nuns, many of them former detainees who survived similar abuse.

At least Choekey is safe. Sherab Ngawang, a 15-year-old nun caughts singing a song about free Tibet, died of kidney failure after being beaten with electric cattle prods and plastic tubing filled with sand. At least 35 Tibetans are known to have died from beatings sustained in prison over the past decade.

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Acts of defiance. Human rights groups and foreign diplomats say that the situation is getting worse. “Many Tibetans are convinced that increased repression is a direct result of the easing of international pressure on China,” says Mike Jendrzejczyk, director of the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch in Washington.

In 1998, police arrested 490 monks and nuns and expelled more than 9,900 from their monasteries. These are three times the numbers arrested or expelled the previous year. Political prisoners are now detained simply for expressing their support for the Dalai Lama, their exiled religious leader, and for an independent Tibet. Such speech is classified by China as “endangering state security.”

Still, some Tibetans refuse to be cowed. In a large monastery near Lhasa, I met a young monk praying openly before a forbidden photograph of the Dalai Lama. It was an almost theatrical act of defiance, lit by smoky yak-butter candles. On a nearby wall was a large portrait of the late Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-tung in a heroic, revolutionary pose. Wasn't the monk afraid ? “No,” he said. “It's my duty as a Tibetan.”

A few days later, in another city, a woman led me to a small, curtained attic. Behind the heavily padlocked door was a secret shrine, its walls and ornate cabinets festooned with pictures of the Dalai Lama, the air scented with sandalwood incense. A made-up bed lay along one wall.

“This room is for His Holiness,”she explained. “We pray that one day he will come.”

Such displays of courage notwithstanding, the odds are badly stacked against these gentle people, for Tibetans have become a minority in their own land. A comparison of Tibetan and Chinese maps shows that neighbouring Chinese provinces have incorporated over half of Tibet's original territory. Using pre-invasion maps, the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile estimates that 6 million Tibetans are now outnumbered by 7.5 million Chinese.

Beijing's latest initiative may tip the balance even further. With World Bank funding, tens of thousands of Chinese farmers are to be relocated onto land traditionally part of Tibet. Chinese officials insist the impoverished farmers are being relocated for economic reasons. The US government has denounced the plan. “The project would result in the dilution of the local Tibetan population,” says Kate Saunders of the Tibet Information Network in London.

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A former Chinese Communist Party member, Migmar, told Reader's Digest that at closed door meetings party bosses admitted they had failed to win Tibetan hearts and minds. Henceforth, they would crush dissent. “A top official told us their goal was to wipe out Tibetan language, culture and identity at the grassroots level,” Migmar recalled.

Entrusted with distributing and exhibiting party propaganda films, Migmar rethought his loyalties. He set up a clandestine pro-indepence network, and for 16 months waged a poster and letter-writing campaign calling for a free Tibet. Identified by his handwriting, he was arrested, tortured and jailed for three years.

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A heartfelt plea. Ngawang Choephel's mother is a frail widow who lives in southern India. After Chinese diplomats in Delhi repeatedly refused a visa to visit her son in prison, Sonam Dekyi took her protest to the streets of the Indian capital. For the next 15 months she lived and slept on a city centre footpath to draw attention to his case. In October 1998, she travelled to the US and Europe to seek support for his release. Clad in traditional dress, day and night, she cradled in her arms a framed 20-by-25-centimetre portrait of her son.

Everywhere Dekyi went her pleas excited wholehearted support – from politicians, human rights groups, her son's teachers and fellow students in America, and ordinary people. Children at one Boston school donated return tickets for Dekyi and her son to visit America as soon as he was freed. But the Chinese government will not budge.

Now back in Delhi, Dekyi has resumed a roadside vigil. Squatting on a tattered length of cloth, amid diesel fumes in searing 38 degree-heat, she looks much older than her 65 years. “I am old, and my time is short,” she said in an interview. “All I ask now is to see my son just once before I die.”