She wants her son back

Despite all the celebrity attention to the plight of Tibet, the Chinese crackdown in the so-called autonomous region has worsened. Mike Crawley narrates the story of one man whose jail sentence for spying symbolises the Tibetan struggle.

A Tibetan musicologist who won a prestigious Fulbright scholarship might seem an unlikely candidate to engage in the murky world of espionage, but not according to the Chinese government and legal system. Ngawang Choephel is currently serving an 18-year prison sentence in Tibet for spying and "counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement". He went to Tibet in August 1995 — for the first time since his family fled when he was two years old — to film traditional Tibetan music and dance, travelling legally on a Chinese-issued visitor’s document.

Barely a month after Choephel arrived, Chinese authorities arrested him. No official announcement of his status was made until December 1996, when state radio reported that a closed court had found him guilty and handed down the sentence, one of the longest ever given to a Tibetan political prisoner. He was paraded through a marketplace with 28 other Tibetan prisoners in a public display later broadcast on Chinese television.

China says recording the songs and dances was merely Choephel’s pretext for collecting sensitive information. The official news report of his sentence claimed he was sent to Tibet "by the Dalai (Lama) clique with expenditures and equipment provided by a certain foreign country."

The worldwide campaign to free Choephel is now being led by his mother, a tiny, grey-haired 62-year-old who speaks no English except "Thank you". Sonam Dekyi lives in the Tibetan refugee enclave of Mungod in southern India, but has travelled to the US and the UK, appealing to politicians to put pressure on the Chinese government, all the while clutching a framed photo of her only child with a Tibetan guitar across his lap.

Dekyi recently battled a bout of tuberculosis and fears that she will die before seeing her son again. During an interview in London, she spoke through an interpreter, but the tears that streamed down her eyes needed no translation. "He is innocent,"she declared. "I guarantee he was not in any way spying or doing any political activities." She says her son’s passion is for music and dance, not espionage.

While in London, Dekyi posed for a publicity photo with the former Beatle, Paul McCartney, another example of the celebrity attention that has pushed the issue of Tibet into the mainstream media spotlight in recent years. Big names and Hollywood movies might work wonders for getting attention in the West, but for the people living in Tibet, little substantial change has come from all the hype.

"In spite of it, the human rights situation is becoming worse in Tibet day by day,"said Tsering Norzom Thonsur of the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy. The centre’s most recent statistics say 1,216 Tibetan political prisoners are confirmed to be in Chinese jails, many of them serving sentences on charges of espionage, counter-revolutionary activity and endangering state security. "Those are just the documented and confirmed prisoners, there may be many others who are not known," said Thonsur.

Human rights groups report that the Chinese use torture widely in Tibetan prisons. Jailers’ methods and equipment include electric cattle prods, extracting blood, solitary confinement in dark, freezing cells, and beating the bottoms of prosoners’ feet.

The latest report of Choephel’s condition came from a monk who served time in jail alongside him and described the musicologist as "weak and dazed". He was being interrogated in secret and other prisoners were not allowed to have contact with him, according to the monk.

Choephel’s jail term is just one of the more extreme examples of the recent intensification of the Chinese crackdown in Tibet. Through incentives as well as forced migration, ethnic Chinese have moved into the region in such numbers that they now outnumber Tibetans. Since 1996, China has been on a campaign to expel Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns and "re-educate"the rest. Work teams have been sent to monasteries and nunneries to persuade the occupants to sign a political pledge to denounce the Dalai Lama and the notion of Tibetan independence, a campaign that Beijing has declared a success.

More recently, China has introduced forced retirement of monks and nuns at the age 60. "Monks and nuns who practise religion, it’s for their lifetime, they don’t retire," said Thonsur.

Dekyi has applied three times to go to Tibet to visit her jailed son and has been refused each time. A Chinese embassy official in London confirmed that the law of China gives prisoners the right to see visitors. When told that Dekyi had not been allowed to see her son, the official asked, "Do you believe her?"

"If I had the opportunity, I would even visit China and appeal to the president personally to understand the pain of a mother separated from her son," said Dekyi.

"If recording music and dance in Tibet were a crime, the amount of three years and one month he has already spent in prison is more than enough. This sentence of 18 years, I don’t accept."

After finishing high school, Choephel went to Dharamsala to study music at the Tibetan Institute for Performing Arts. He then worked for six years as a music teacher in two Tibetan settlements in south India, including the one where his mother lived.

Choephel next attended Middlebury College in the state of Vermont on a Fulbright Scholarship, a prestigious international award. His former teachers there describe him as soft-spoken and interested only in music and dance.

"He was always very interested in learning music and dance from his childhood days," says his mother. "As a Tibetan, he felt it was very important to preserve the Tibetan culture and heritage in the form of music and dance."

The most recent official word of Choephel’s location came in May of this year, when some Beijing-based European ambassadors on a delegation to Tibet were told that he was being held in Nyari detention centre in Shigatse, the town where he was arrested.

During her visits abroad, Dekyi met with Congress members and State Department officials in Washington, as well as members of the All-Party Parliamentary Committee on Tibet in London. All gave her plenty of assurances that they will do their utmost to appeal to China, but the fact remains that they’re a handful of low-level politicians dealing with the case of one man imprisoned in a territory occupied by the world’s largest undemocratic country, a country that consistently dismisses human rights concerns as internal matters.

Negotiations between China and the Tibetan government-in-exile remain a possibility. Until now, Chinese President Jiang Zemin has said the Tibetans must accept that Tibet is part of China as a precursor to negotiations. In late October, the South China Morning Post reported that the Dalai Lama is soon to make a statement about a willingness to engage in negotiations, but no specifics were mentioned. — Gemini News