By Sue Williams - "The Weekend Australian", January 18-19

The former Australian fiancee of a music documentary maker jailed by Chinese authorities in Tibet for 18 years on spying charges has pleaded with the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Downer, to intervene on his behalf.

Ms Wendy Cook, who became engaged to Fulbright scholar Mr Ngawang Choephel in 1990, has been asked to provide Mr Downer with more information on the Tibet-born exile's plight. She is also organising a series of demonstrations outside Chinese consulates in Melbourne and Sydney to coincide with the showing of a documentary on SBS television about Mr Choephel.

"If democratic countries like Australia don't speak out about such gross injustices, then who will," said Ms Cook at her home near Melbourne. "We have an obligation to do something."

Mr Choephel, 32, whose family fled Chinese-occupied Tibet when he was two, studied ethnomusicology in India, then at the prestigious Middlebury College in Vermont, United States. He disappeared soon after returning to Tibet in July 1995 to make a video about traditional Tibetan music, dance and poetry.

Last February, a Tibetan businessman released from a Chinese jail for political prisoners reported that he had seen Mr Choephel in a cell. A few weeks ago, he was sentenced in Xigaze to 18 years in prison on charges of spying on behalf of the Tibetan religious leader, the Dalai Lama, with funds provided by the US.

"The whole thing's plainly ridiculous," said Ms Cook, also 32, who met Mr Choephel in 1987 when she was travelling in India and kept in close contact with him when he was studying in the US and she was working close by in Boston.

"He's a musician who was just concerned about preserving the traditional forms of dance and songs in his country and sharing them with the world. Music was his absolute passion."

The documentary, Missing In Tibet, which goes to air on SBS on January 30, talks to friends and colleagues of Mr Choephel about his life and love of music from his homeland. Narrated by Hollywood actor Goldie Hawn, it uses footage he sent overseas from Tibet as well as film and photographs of him growing up, and details the international human rights campaign that has been launched to have him freed.

"I think about him every day," said Ms Cook, a former national executive member of the Australian-Tibet Council who has given up her publishing job in Boston to work full-time for his release. "Even when I sit out in the sunshine on a lovely day in Victoria, I can't stop thinking about him lying there in a cold dark prison cell, without any access to friends or legal counsel and without a fair trial.

"Quite frankly, I don't even know whether he might be dead or damaged or is being tortured. That's my worst fear. Nobody knows anything. This is my heart's work to help my friend. It's a gross violation of human rights and we have a duty to speak out."