‘Beijing 6′ Brian gives Shout Out to SFT on PBS Idea Lab

Brian Conley, creator of the well-known videoblog, Alive in Baghdad, and one of the ‘Beijing 6‘ citizen journalist detained this summer in Beijing for capturing images and videos of pro-Tibet actions during the Olympics, was interviewed for PBS Idea Lab about his incredibly important new project Alive in Tehran.

During his interview, Brian gave the following shout out to SFT and our efforts to break through China’s Great Firewall. Read and listen to the fill interview.

Ryan: So while you weren’t on the ground in Gaza, you had connections who were, and were able to get information out, too.

Brian: Exactly, and then we used Twitter to pull in questions from people and enable people to sort of interact with our guy on the ground there. So then when Iran started happening it seemed like a natural fit to try and use the same tools for the folks there, to enable them to basically communicate out. The primary thing that we’re trying, that we’re pushing right now, is basically a phone number that people can call, get to a voicemail box and record whatever they would like to say, and right now I have a public voice mailbox available via an Alive in Tehran Facebook [group].

Also, people can message me via twitter.com/baghdadbrian and then for people who are more private or who have family, they just want to share one voicemail box…we can set up a specific number for any individual. Beyond that, we’re looking at other tools. I’ve learned a little bit about how Students for a Free Tibet have gotten video out of Tibet. So there’s one tool I’m sort of sharing with people privately. Then there on Alive in Tehran we have a list of tools Iranians can use to communicate securely. So basically, right now it’s a lot of organizing and working it.

SFT Canada’s Tsering Confronts HDI/Continental Minerals’ Executives

Footage from HDI/Continental Minerals Shareholders’ meeting in Vancouver, Canada on June 24th. Tibetans and their supporters protested at the meeting to intenisfy pressure on the company to Stop Mining Tibet.

Global Phonathon to Stop Mining in Tibet!

We need your help to turn up the heat on HDI/Continental Minerals, a Canadian company that is preparing to begin operations at a massive mine site in Tibet.

Tomorrow, June 24th is HDI/Continental Minerals annual shareholders’ meeting. YOU can help ensure that the company hears opposition from people of conscience worldwide.

TAKE ACTION!

Call the company’s head office at 1-800-667-2114 or +1 604-684-6365 to voice your opposition to HDI/Continental Minerals’ Tibet operations. Click here for helpful talking points.

Change your Facebook profile picture and Twitter avatar to the Stop Mining Tibet logo and encourage others to take action on your twitterfeed and status update.

Check out SFT’s fan page for updates on this global action. We want to hear from you! Become a fan of our page and let us know about your call to Continental Minerals.

With a proposed lifespan of 14 years, HDI/Continental Minerals’ mine will irreversibly disrupt the lives of Tibetans in Shetongmon, central Tibet. The mine is located dangerously close to the Yarlung Tsangpo river, which is the main water source for Shigatse, Tibet’s second largest city and many other Tibetan towns and villages. Help stop HDI/Continental Minerals in its tracks!

Learn more about this important campaign: http://www.StopMiningTibet.org

Even as Tibet remains under military lockdown, we’re hearing incredible reports of Tibetans risking arrest, imprisonment, and even death to protest devastating resource extraction operations on their land. Help stop foreign companies and the Chinese government from profiting off the Tibetan people’s land and help protect Tibet’s fragile environment for generations to come.

Stop Mining Tibet Protest - on CTV

Watch SFT Canada’s Tenzin Lobsang being interviewed by CTV during the Vancouver protest of HDI/Continental Minerals to Stop Mining Tibet.

When the Party’s over…the joke will be on them

It’s unbelievable the lengths to which the Chinese government will go to cover up the June 4th, 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre: It has denied it ever happened; erased it from China’s history books; imprisoned and exiled survivors; threatened anyone who dares to openly mourn, demand justice, or even talk about what really happened in Tiananmen Square in the lead-up to and on that fateful day. They have forced an entire generation to ‘forget,’ and they have effectively kept the next generation from ever hearing of their parents’ struggles, hopes, and horrific losses.

Twenty years later, as the above video demonstrates, the Chinese government has not changed. However, the Party leadership has learned that when a government opens fire on its own people, it attracts intense international scrutiny – exactly 100% more negative attention than they want. In turn, they have adapted and developed new, more subtle tactics, like the umbrella assault, to distract the world’s attention from the Chinese government’s brutally repressive policies.

Your instinct when watching this video is to laugh; even one of the Chinese undercover thugs reveals a smile. But behind the humor and the lightness of the umbrella assault is a smart, strategic, and very scary government that regularly detains, tortures, and disappears Tibetans, Chinese, and anyone who threatens its control by advocating for change.

But, this video also demonstrates the Party’s ultimate weakness. By not acknowledging or taking responsibility for its heinous crimes in 1989 in Tiananmen Square, or today, the Chinese leadership is driving a wedge between the Party and the people. The people remember the brutality, the death, and the pain. If you are never able to mourn openly, to grieve and to share the truth of your experience, how can you ever fully move on? The Chinese government’s strategy of balancing an open economy, while simultaneously keeping the door to historical honesty and political freedom slammed shut, is unsustainable.

If one thing is certain, it’s that change will come to China. The scales will inevitably tip in favor of political openness, and when the Party falls, it will fall hard. In the end, the joke will be on them.

Video of NYC Tiananmen Solidarity Protest

SFT’s Executive Director, Lhadon Tethong, speaks in front of the NYC Chinese Consulate on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Share this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Sn3K6fsTeM

More than 100,000 people attend vigil for Tiananmen in Hong Kong

In a remarkable show of solidarity and support for democracy, more than an estimated 100,000 people took part in a candlelight vigil this evening in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park.

The Telegraph’s Malcolm Moore describes the remarkable protest in his blog post “Astonishing Scenes at Tiananmen Square Vigil in Hong Kong.”

Keith Bradsher from the New York Times writes about the moving scene at Victoria Park in his piece “Hong Kong Tiananmen protest Is Enormous and Somber.”

Prosperity Can’t Erase Tiananmen: Op-ed by Wu’er Kaixi

Excerpt from a powerful op-ed by Wu’er Kaixi, Tiananmen student leader in today’s Wall Street Journal.

In the aftermath of the bloodshed in Beijing 20 years ago — when I first went into hiding — my mother had a stroke. It paralyzed one side of her face. I was 10 years in exile before my brother told me. I do not regret what we did in Beijing that year the Berlin Wall fell, when there was so much hope of change in the air, but the deaths have haunted me for 20 years, and I want to hug my mother and tell her: “Sorry.”

I can’t. The Chinese government will not issue passports for my parents. China will not allow me to go home. It is difficult to explain the feelings I have at this moment to a world that has come to see China as a responsible member of the global community — the motor of global economic growth, the miracle that will jumpstart global capitalism. But the feelings can largely be summed up as disappointment: disappointment that China’s “progress” has been so one-sided.

Read the full op-ed here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124405068737681917.html#

Kristof’s Monument to Passivism On Tiananmen Sq Aniversary

by Matt Browner-Hamlin, Current SFT Board Member and Former SFT Staff

Read the full post here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-browner-hamlin/kristofs-monument-to-pass_b_211291.html

For as long as I’ve been blogging about Tibet and China, I’ve had problems with Nick Kristof. Any reader of my writing knows that I think New York Times columnist Nick Kristof is one of the most intellectually dishonest and profoundly unserious members of the American press who write with any regularity on China. That’s why I found it quite surprising last night to read Kristof’s column on the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. Kristof was the Beijing bureau chief for the Times then — something I did not know — and was covering the protests. His retelling of the protests and the zeitgeist in Beijing in 1989 is powerful and it seems Kristof is walking down what for him is a rarely walked path: criticizing the Chinese government and ruling Communist Party. Of course I was wrong to get excited about the first half of his colum, as what followed in the second half was Grade A wankery.

SFT Germany Remembers Tiananmen Massacre