A Tibetan mother's mission: her son's freedom


Boston Globe, October 20, 1998

She's on worldwide tour to publicize case as example of China's repression

he tiny Tibetan woman sits quietly in a loft on Boston's Commercial Wharf, her left arm looped around an 8-by-10 portrait of a young man, her right distractedly wiping imagined smudges from the spotless glass of the frame. ''I keep this photo with me day and night,'' she says.

Then Sonam Dekyi, 63, rises and returns to her obsession - to free the youth in the photo, her only son, Ngawang Choephel, from the Chinese prisons in which he is serving 18 years for espionage.

Something comes over Choephel's unschooled, widowed mother, a woman who has spent most of her adult life in refugee settlements in India, when she walks downstairs and begins to speak to a small crowd gathered to support her, her son, and the cause of Tibet. She speaks with poise, firmness, and fervor.

Choephel ''was interested and dedicated from the age of 13 to preserving Tibetan music and dance,'' she says; that is why he returned there from India - to record the songs and dances of what she calls a dying culture. ''He was not involved in any political activity or crime.''

Tibet's Chinese occupiers felt otherwise. They arrested him in mid-1995, and convicted him late in 1996, of espionage in the service of the Tibetan government-in-exile and an unnamed foreign country. His cultural research was just cover, they said.

In the two years since, Choephel has become the foremost symbol of China's efforts to subjugate Tibet and repress its culture. Partly that is the work of Tibet support organizations in the United States, Europe, and India. Partly it is because of the political and intellectual friends the young ethno-musicologist made while a Fulbright Scholar at Middlebury College in Vermont in the years just before his arrest. Most of all, it has to do with his mother, who first camped out on the street in New Delhi and now is on an international tour to draw attention to Choephel's plight.

Dekyi, from the nomad region Ngari, left Tibet on foot in 1968. She paused for a night on the trail to give birth to a baby, who ultimately did not survive; her brother carried Choephel, then 2, on his back. Her husband, Choephel's father, was arrested before he could leave, and died, she says, after being tortured by the Chinese.

''I ask you to look at my tragedy,'' she tells listeners at the end of a presentation she planned to repeat yesterday at Harvard and today at Brandeis during appearances sponsored by campus chapters of Students for a Free Tibet. ''Empathize with me. Understand my yearning. ... I have come to the United States with great hope.''

Hopefulness is an article of faith with most Tibetans, but news from their country since Choephel's arrest has been almost uniformly bad.

The India-based Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy says a reeducation campaign launched by the Chinese in 1996 and intensified last year has led to the expulsion from Tibetan temples of thousands of monks and nuns who refuse to renounce Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and the closing of their places of worship. The center says it documented 1,216 political prisoners in jail in Tibet at the end of last year.

Dekyi and Choephel ''have undergone a great amount of tragedy and suffering,'' says Tsering Norzom Thonsur, a member of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile who is accompanying Dekyi as a translator, ''and there are many such mothers, and thousands of sons like Ngawang Choephel, languishing in jails inside Tibet.''

As the campaign for Choephel's freedom has gathered steam, the White House, the State Department, Democratic US Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, and other members of Congress have raised Choephel's case directly and in correspondence with Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Chinese ambassadors. But Chinese officials have not responded, and Tibet, despite the efforts of its exiles and foreign supporters, remains immensely remote from the Western world.

''The ethnic cleansing, the genocide in Kosovo, you see on TV daily,'' Norzom says. ''The repression of Tibet, you just don't get to see it.''

This story ran on page A19 of the Boston Globe on 10/20/98. © Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.

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