Editorial - By Boston Globe Staff

This story ran on page A12 of the Boston Globe on 01/01/97.

There are times when a single case of injustice can illuminate the agony of an entire people. So it is with the injustice done to Ngawang Choepel.

The Tibetan musicologist, who had been studying at Middlebury College on a Fulbright fellowship, returned to his homeland in July 1995 to record traditional forms of Tibetan music and dance. Choepel was arrested a month later by the Chinese occupiers of Tibet, who held him incommunicado for more than a year and then announced on the day after Christmas that they had sentenced him to 18 years in prison on the preposterous charge of being a spy for the Dalai Lama.

It was Choepel's misfortune to be found in Tibet with a video camera at a time when the Chinese regime was conducting a vicious crackdown on Tibetans who had been protesting against Beijing's attempt to impose the Communists' own choice of a young boy to accede to the title of Panchen Lama, the second-most-revered figure in Tibetan Buddhism.

The rulers in Beijing had made a political crisis out of the Tibetans' wish to preserve a religious tradition rooted deep in their ancient culture. The Chinese even took into captivity the boy chosen in the traditional way to become the next Panchen Lama, complaining that his designation had been approved by the Dalai Lama.

In the same spirit of imperial crudeness, the Chinese arrested Choepel and afterward pretended that his scholarly activity was political. The reality is that the Tibetan political groups had not known of the musicologist. He had raised money for his research from sympathetic individuals. But to a regime that has no use for the rule of law, there is evidence of espionage in Choepel's videotapes of grandmothers and grandfathers singing songs that might otherwise be lost to posterity.

In their propaganda, the Chinese complain that they spend more money on monasteries in Tibet than on Communist Party buildings. The complaint is a telltale sign of the totalitarian mentality that cannot abide the survival of works of the spirit such as those Choepel was trying to save.