Mark Abley - The Montreal Gazette - OPINION

MONTREAL, January 20, 1997 -- Nestled in the shadow of the Green Mountains, the college town of Middlebury, Vt., seems an unlikely place for anger about distant political prisoners. Yet for the past year, citizens of Middlebury have been up in arms about a young man languishing in prison halfway around the world.

The man is Ngawang Choephel. A Tibetan musician and teacher, resident in India since his mother fled their occupied homeland when he was but a tiny boy, he attend the college on a fullbright Scholarship in 1993-1994. Choephel impressed many people at Middlebury College - a liberal arts college with about 2000 students and a reputation for excellence.

He had been trained at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts in Dharamsala, India; one of his teachers, Phurbu Tsering, now lives in Montreal. Sensing a need to make Tibetan music more widely accessible, Choephel came to Middlebury to study western music: its notation, theory and instruments. While there, he discovered the medium of video.

In 1994 he went back to Asia to apply these techniques to his research project (which is also his private passion): documenting the traditions of Tibetan music and dance before his country's Chinese occupiers erase them from the face of the world.

In September 1995, Choephel was arrested in the Tibetan town of Shigatse. He was detained without trial for the next 15 months.

Suddenly, last December 26, Chinese radio announced that he had been sentenced to 18 years in jail for espionage. It claimed - offering no evidence - that Choephel had been sent to Tibet "by the Dalai clique with financial support of a certain foreign country."

The Tibetan government in exile (what the Chinese call "the Dalai clique") denies any knowledge of Choephel's work. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are outraged. So are Choephel's friends in Vermont.

"He was very slight, as Tibetans are in general," says his piano teacher in Middlebury, Julia Blocksma. "He was soft-spoken, with delicate hands, and very deliberate in his movements. But he was capable of this wonderful spontaneous laugh that seemed to come from some other time and place." Involuntarily, she uses the past tense. Nobody knows what conditions he is now being kept under - Tibetan prisons are notorious for their squalor. Torture is frequent, malnutrition commonplace.Since Choephel was arrested, he has been allowed no visitors.

Having spent most of his life in India, he knew that in exile, as in their homeland, Tibetans are finding it hard to maintain the integrity of their culture. While karaoke bars have sprung up in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, Indian and American films and music are exerting a potent influence on the more than 100,000 Tibetans in exile.

"Many of the masters of Tibetan music have died or been displaced," Choephel wrote in a fundraising proposal for his research work. "it is imperative that this rich culture be preserved now through the transcription of poems and music into visual forms." "I wish to examine the root causes of the decay of Tibetan culture, namely the Chinese suppression and destruction of Tibetan culture as well as the toll which modern life takes on Tibetans. Without proper care and preservation there is great danger that much of this musical heritage will be lost, as it exists primarily in oral form and has never before been written or recorded."

At the time his arrest, Choephel was travelling in Tibet, openly using a video camera. Not long before his detention, he passed the first 16 hours of footage to a foreign companion who was about to leave the country. That footage - which is feature in a short documentary film, Missing in Tibet - consists entirely of songs, dances and interviews with elders.

"There is not an iota of anything political on it," says Chophel's friend Jon Barlow, a student at Middlebury College. "We have invited the Chinese embassy to view these tapes. But they have not responded."

Missing in Tibet (the film is independently produced, and narrated by actress Goldie Hawn) contains interviews with several of Choephel's friends at Middlebury. One of them, music professor, Jay Pillay, denies that "Ngawang was driven by any kind of political motivation. His main goal was to research the songs and dances of a culture that was dying out."

Blocksma, who found Choephel a natural at the piano agrees: "I consider myself a decent judge of character, and I cannot imagine that he was a spy. I didn't see his interests lying outside music and dance. He was a walking encyclopedia of Tibetan music and dance. He knew hundreds and hundreds of songs, and he had a vision of what he wanted to do with his life."

If he serves out his full sentence (as most Tibetan prisoners are forced to do), Choephel will be nearly 50 before his release.

By means of letters, town-hall meetings, demonstrations and pressure on U.S. politicians, the people of Middlebury, have tried to make China relent. Vermont representative Bernie Sanders and more than 40 other members of Congress wrote to Chinese President Jiang Zemin last fall, saying that Choephel's incarceration "violates numerous controlling provisions of international law and human rights."

The U.S. State Department has raised the issue with Beijing. Canada, by contrast, has remained silent about Choephel - although, says Foreign Affairs spokesman Diane Simsovic, "we do raise the broader systemic problem of dissidents in China."

Among human-rights workers, the case has led to anguish and soul-searching. The aim of their pressure was to help any unlucky prisoner; instead, it may have brought him harm.

"I am convinced," says John Ackerly, director of the International Campaign for Tibet, "the 18-year sentence was given because he became a cause celebre. The Chinese were getting signs from the Clinton administration that human rights are on the back-burner, and they realized they could get away with it. So they said, `Let's show the West what we think of their meddling in our affairs'."

A second possibility, Ackerly suggests, is that Choephel is being set up for eventual release as a supposed token of moderation and good will. It's a cynical game, which Beijing plays like a grand master.

"And then if he release him," Ackerly says broodingly, "the world will think China has done something significant about Tibet."

For more information, contact

Canada Tibet Committee, National Office

4675 Coolbrook, Montreal tel: 487-0665.