2007 January | Tibet Will Be Free

Nangpa Pass Update: Refugees Freed After Torture, Hard Labor

Posted by philo on Jan 31, 2007 in Human Rights/Political Prisoner | 0 comments

Yesterday we had an exciting update. One of the Nangpa Pass detainees, a 15 year-old boy named Jamyang has safely reached Dharamsala, India. According to him, several other detainees have also been released. He further describes how he and over twenty others were captured following the shooting at Nangpa La and subjected to torture, harsh interrogations and were forced to do manual labor while in prison for forty-eight days.

Nearly three dozen Tibetans captured by Chinese troops as they tried to sneak out of their homeland were tortured with cattle prods and forced into hard labor, a teenager who identified himself as one of the former detainees said Tuesday, in the first reported account of the fate of the group.

Jamyang Samten, 15, said he was one of 75 Tibetans who were making their way over a 19,000-foot-high Himalayan pass on Sept. 30 when Chinese border guards opened fire, killing a 25-year-old Buddhist nun and another person.
…
Samten said his group was taken from an army camp to a police station four hours away. There they were questioned over a three-day period during which they were repeatedly hit with an electric cattle prod, he said.

“It went on until I fainted,” said Samten, adding that police repeatedly asked him to identify the dead nun.

Seven members of the group who were under 15 years old – including a 4-year-old child – were not questioned, he said.

After three days, they were taken by truck to a prison in Shigatse, Tibet’s second-largest city, Samten said.

They were questioned again while chained to a wall, he said. “A guard wearing a metal glove would hit us in the stomach,” Samten said.

They were held there for 48 days during which they dug ditches, built fences and tilled fields, he said.

Samten said he was released alone but had heard from other Tibetans that the others were freed a day later.

Samten also said that when they were first captured they were put in a military truck with the dead body of Kalsang Namtso and another Tibetan man who had been shot in the leg. It’s unclear whether other Nangpa refugees have attempted to escape Tibet, but clearly the desire for freedom did not die at Nangpa Pass.

Unfortunately the International Campaign for Tibet has confirmed that a similar shooting of Tibetan refugees by Chinese border forces took place over a year ago at Nangpa Pass.

New information has been obtained about the circumstances of the shooting of a second group of Tibetans escaping into exile, a year before the September 30 incident on the Nangpa Pass. In mid-October 2005, a group of more than 20 Tibetans fleeing into exile suffered beatings and interrogation after they were fired upon and then detained by soldiers in Dingri county, en route to the border with Nepal.

According to the new reports, a group of around 50 Tibetans had traveled by bus towards the border from Lhasa, and then walked at night for several days. As the group arrived near the Nangpa Pass, at around six in the evening, they were spotted by PAP personnel at a distance who opened fire. One of the group, who is now in exile, told ICT: “The Chinese opened several rounds of gunfire on us. We thought they were just trying to scare us by shooting in the air. But then we realized the shooting was serious. Our group scattered and I have no idea about where the others are, maybe they went back where we had come from, or managed to escape. After continuous shooting for some time, many of us stopped running away and 23 of us were arrested by the Chinese soldiers.” According to the same source, none of the Tibetans detained were injured by the shooting.

There’s much more detail at the link above; all of it bears great similarity to what we know happened on September 30th, 2006. When the Nangpa Pass shooting first came to light, we suspected that this sort of illegal attack on refugees was common – why else would Chinese soldiers shoot to kill with such impunity? Now we know the sad truth and we were right.

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China Pledges To Purify Internet

Posted by philo on Jan 30, 2007 in Economic | 0 comments

So Google, tell us again how that liberalization of China is going to work?

Chinese Communist Party chief Hu Jintao has vowed to “purify” the Internet, state media reported on Wednesday, describing a top-level meeting that discussed ways to master the country’s sprawling, unruly online population.

Hu made the comments as the ruling party’s Politburo — its 24-member leading council — was studying China’s Internet, which claimed 137 million registered users at the end of 2006.

Hu, a straitlaced communist with little sympathy for cultural relaxation, did not directly mention censorship.

But he made it clear that the Communist Party was looking to ensure it keeps control of China’s Internet users, often more interested in salacious pictures, bloodthirsty games and political scandal than Marxist lessons.

Of course Google.cn is a tool in the purification process. One of the primary original justifications for Google to custom build their self-censoring search engine Google.cn was to make it harder for internet users in China and Tibet to find scandalous material, just as many western democracies filter out search results for child pornography. Scandalous material in China isn’t like scandalous material elsewhere; in China we’re talking about information about Tiananmen, Tibet, democracy, and the tens of millions of deaths during the “Great Leap Forward.” Basically anything that the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t want people within China and Tibet to know, anything that threatens their stranglehold on power is scandalous.

Google’s desire to engage the Chinese market with the doe-eyed hope that it would somehow lead to a realization of greater freedom inside China and Tibet (repeat: instituting a ruthlessly efficient censorship and disinformation machine would somehow increase freedom) has fallen flat on its face. Even as they admit their failures, Google continues to charge ahead with a service that cannot do what Google claimed it would do one year ago. Enough is enough – it’s time for Google to close shop on Google.cn and end this shameful chapter of their company’s history.

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Banned In Tibet

Posted by philo on Jan 29, 2007 in Multimedia | 0 comments

The Fall 2006 / Winter 2007 issue of Banned in Tibet, the Students for a Free Tibet newsletter, is now available online! Click here to download your copy.

Looking Back From Nangpa-La

Posted by philo on Jan 29, 2007 in China Watch | 0 comments

Jamyang Norbu has an incredibly powerful essay on Phayul titled, “Looking Back From Nangpa-La.” I recommend every supporter of Tibetan independence and human rights read this essay and share it with friends. Here’s a small excerpt:

It is important to place the context of the shooting in its correct perspective. Of course only two people were killed this time around (though we can be certain that, unknown to us, more have been killed before) and there are, unquestionably, greater massacres taking place around the world. It is the deliberate casualness of the act that sets it apart. In fact it could be argued that the shooting deaths of these two young people was far more cold-blooded and criminal than many other cases of killings of civilians around the world. First of all the Nangpa-la shootings did not happen in conflict area. Tibetans are not launching Qasam rockets against China. Tibetans are not sending suicide bombers to Chinese cities. Tibetan leaders are not calling for Communist China “to be wiped off the face of the earth�. They are in fact doing everything they can to accommodate Beijing’s demands.

The Tiananmen massacre has been rationalized by some Western experts with the observation that the regime’s power was being threatened by the students. But what threat did those young Nangpa-la escapees constitute to China’s control of Tibet? The killing of the two Tibetans could not even be compared to the shooting of innocent civilians by policemen, that sometimes happens in New York or LA when policemen panic, overreact or make a bad judgment call. In Nangpa-la there was no threat (real or even perceived) no panic and no mistake. The shootings took place in bright sunlight and the victims were many hundreds of yards away with their backs to the Chinese soldiers and moving away slowly; clearly no threat at all. But the Chinese did not even bother to shout at the Tibetans to stop, or even fire a warning shot. A Czech climbing expedition leader, Josef Simunek, who witnessed the shooting, stated: “We felt as though it was 20 years ago in our country in the Communist time, when Czech soldiers killed Czech citizens in their escape over the ‘Iron Curtain’.� While on the subject of the “iron curtain� it must be said that as standard procedure the VoPo (the East German police) always fired a warning shot before they actually opened fire on anyone attempting to escape across the wall.

The Chinese callously gunned down these two Tibetans because they knew they could get away with it. They knew that there would be little outcry in the world, and the little there was would be played down or explained away by the increasing number of media people, academics, businessmen and politicians in the West who do their bidding. Even though the shootings were most fortuitously caught on video and appeared as brief news-reports on TV networks worldwide, there were practically no editorials, op-eds or commentaries from any major newspaper or TV networks condemning the shooting. Even the usually reliable BBC did just a barebones report. The New York Times carried nothing, but managed to come out with a full color, front page, tourist attraction piece on Tibet in its Sunday Travel Section, a few weeks later. The European Parliament and a couple of other heads of legislative bodies raised some formal objections. Tibetans around the world demonstrated, held vigils and prayers but nowhere on the scale and fervor as before.

Founder: Google.cn Was “Bad For The Company”

Posted by philo on Jan 29, 2007 in Economic | 0 comments

I’ll say again, “Well, duh.”

Google’s decision to censor its search engine in China was bad for the company, its founders admitted yesterday.

Google, launched in 1998 by two Stanford University dropouts, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, was accused of selling out and reneging on its “Don’t be evil” motto when it launched in China in 2005. The company modified the version of its search engine in China to exclude controversial topics such as the Tiananmen Square massacre or the Falun Gong movement, provoking a backlash in its core western markets.

Asked whether he regretted the decision, Mr Brin admitted yesterday: “On a business level, that decision to censor… was a net negative.”

The company has only once expressed any regret and never in as strong terms as yesterday. Mr Brin said the company had suffered because of the damage to its reputation in the US and Europe. [Emphasis added]

Last June Brin announced that Google had “compromised its principles” in abandoning their “Don’t be evil” motto to partner with the Chinese government. Admitting that your critics had you pegged from Day One is well and good, particularly when the criticism levied against Google by Students for a Free Tibet, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Open Net Initiative. But if agreeing with your critics doesn’t lead you to change your behavior, then you have not yet reclaimed your principles nor made the right decision.

From what was said yesterday a policy change seemed unlikely in the near future. Co-founder Larry Page said: “We always consider what to do. But I don’t think we as a company should be making decisions based on too much perception.”

The launch of Google.cn was a “net negative.” It “compromised [Google's] priniciples.” It precipitated a massive outcry from Google users, technophiles, and free speech advocates. And yet Google has not tried to correct its mistakes. It has not announced that it will discontinue providing a censored platform on Google.cn, despite the fact that according to Sergey Brin “virtually all the company’s customers in China use the non-censored service.” Not only is Google.cn morally reprehensible, it isn’t used.

Back in June Brin acknowledged that Google was considering reversing themselves and abandoning Google.cn. They haven’t. Seven months later – a year after the site’s launch – Google continues to provide its tailor-made censorship and disinformation engine for the Chinese market. After Brin’s statements were released I wrote:

Google repeatedly resort to paternalistic, intellectually dishonest, and outright shameful arguments in defense of its decision. The company went so far as to equate censoring information on human rights and democracy in Tibet and China as morally on par with censoring Nazi hate speech or child pornography in Western democracies. Congressman Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, undressed this defense:

I cannot begin to describe how disgusted I am by this particular argument. Because, in essence, it equates the vile language and evil purposes of Neo-Nazi groups and hate speech with content provided by the human rights activists of Falun Gong, by journalists and by democracy activists in China. There simply is no comparison between efforts of the democratically-elected government of the Federal Republic of Germany to move against hate-mongerers, and the Chinese regime cracking down on religious freedom, human rights and democracy.

But today, finally, we see Google recognize the failing of their partnership with the Chinese Communist Party. Google users have shown that they’d rather have the Chinese government censoring them than an American corporation doing it at the government’s request. My guess is Google has proven themselves much better censors that the CCP’s 30,000 internet police.

This remains true today, except the recognition of their failures has not lead to a change in course. Google.cn, a black smear on the reputation of Google, carries on, blighting a company that continues to resist making the decision that it knows is right.

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