Former Middlebury music student held in Chinese prison

By Adam Lisberg, Free Press Staff Writer - The Burlington Free Press, August 7, 1996

Ngawang Choephel fled his native Tibet when he was 2 years old, and grew up in southern India as a refugee.

Yet he was determined to help reserve the traditional songs and dances of Tibet. And in 1993, Choephel earned a prestigious Fulbright scholarship to Middlebury College, where he learned how to write musical notation so he could record those songs.

In summer 1995, he headed back to Tibet to make a documentary film about his country's culture. He's still there.

Sometime last fall, human rights groups say, Choephel, 30, was taken prisoner and held without charges by the Chinese authorities who rule Tibet.

Now a network of American friends and supporters, including several in Middlebury, are trying to shame China into letting Choephel go.

"We wonder where he is and how he is," said Julia Blocksma, a Middlebury piano teacher who worked with Choephel in Vermont. "We're trying to make his cause as public as possible."

Students and professors at Middlebury have organized letter-writing drives to pressure China as well as U.S. diplomats. International human rights groups, such as Amnesty International, have made Choephel's case a priority.

The people who know and care about Choephel say those efforts are important, but have not been enough.

"It's very difficult. It makes me very angry that I feel kind of helpless," said photographer Kathryn Culley, the last Westerner to see him. "It's really heart-breaking to know that he's somewhere in some prison."

Culley traveled with Choephel in central Tibet in summer 1995. She saw him a few days before she left the country in August, when he was preparing to head for the eastern part of the country.

Choephel knew he might face risks in hi visit, Culley said, and took the precaution of sending 16 hours of film out of the country. Human-rights groups say none of the film contains political content.

A Tibetan businessman reported seeing Choephel in a prison in central Tibetan last September and October, according to the International Campaign for Tibet. Choephel said he had been arrested in a marketplace, and his travel documents and camera had been confiscated.

The businessman reported Choephel appeared to be in good health, said John Ackerly, director of the campaign. But prisoners in Tibet are routinely beaten and tortured during their first months of detention, he said, and Westerners did not learn he had been arrested until February 1996.

"The longer it takes for us to hear about it," Ackerly said, "the more the chance that his fate would have been sealed."

At Middlebury College, students and faculty members have written hundreds of letters on Choephel's behalf to Chinese authorities in Washington and Beijing. They also have shown a film or Choephel on Middlebury cable television.

Many people in town knew Choephel because he taught a college class in the Tibetan flute, and demonstrated Tibetan dances and songs for local schoolchildren, said music instructor Jay Pillay.

"His absence is very real," said Pillay, who was Choephel's adviser. "It is not about some abstract Tibetan who has been detained."

The college itself has "been supportive" but hasn't taken a formal position on Choephel's case, said college spokesman Phil Benoit.

For now, Choephel's friends remember his thick black hair, the Tibetan folk songs he would sing, his fascination with American country and western music, and his quiet determination to preserve the culture he grew up with.

"He was so passionate for the music," said Wendy Cook, a former girlfriend of Choephel's who now works full-time on his case in Boston. "He felt if he didn't go back there and record these elders and listen to them and watch them, that a whole generation of tradition would be lost."