‘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.
Woeser profiled on NPR’s All Things Considered
NPR’s Beijing Corespondent Anthony Kuhn did an amazing interview with Tibetan writer and poet Woeser on China’s clampdown on ringtone songs deemed “revolutionary” in recent weeks. The interview was broadcast on NPR’s popular All Thing Considered.
Click here to listen: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101158634&ft=1&f=1004#email
Woeser discusses the popularity of patriotic songs:
“Ama Jetsun Pema,” a very popular Tibetan song, is one example.
You have endured all sorts of hardship for the sake of the children of the Land of Snows.
How can we forget you, whose kindness to us is as deep as the deepest sea.
All the children of the Land of Snows pay tribute to you, Ama Jetsun Pema.
“As soon as this song came out, everyone was very excited,” says Woeser. “We all ran down to the markets to listen to it and buy it, as if it would disappear if we didn’t. When it was eventually labeled as reactionary, everyone said, ‘Oh, it’s finally been exposed.’”"Ama Jetsun Pema,” a very popular Tibetan song, is one example.
You have endured all sorts of hardship for the sake of the children of the Land of Snows.
How can we forget you, whose kindness to us is as deep as the deepest sea.
All the children of the Land of Snows pay tribute to you, Ama Jetsun Pema.
“As soon as this song came out, everyone was very excited,” says Woeser. “We all ran down to the markets to listen to it and buy it, as if it would disappear if we didn’t. When it was eventually labeled as reactionary, everyone said, ‘Oh, it’s finally been exposed.”
Associated Press Quotes SFT
Today’s AP article covering Losar included a quote from SFT’s Lhadon Tethong:
“The Chinese government is flooding Tibet with troops and attempting to force Tibetans to celebrate the New Year against their will but, in spite of incredible risks to themselves, Tibetans remain defiant,” Lhadon Tethong, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet, said in an e-mail
LA Times: China Expects Tibet to Celebrate, or Else
Barbara Demick of the LA Times writes about Beijing’s paranoid response to the ‘No Losar’ movement in Tibet - the widespread civil disobedience campaign of Tibetans refusing to celebrate the Tibetan New Year beginning February 25th:
China Expects Tibet to Celebrate, or Else
February 23, 2009
Reporting from Beijing — The Chinese government has a New Year’s greeting for Tibetans: Celebrate, or else.
The Tibetan New Year, or Losar, is normally the most festive holiday of the year, when Tibetans burn incense, make special dumplings and set off fireworks. But this year, Tibetans have declared a moratorium on celebrating their own holiday, saying they will instead observe a mourning period for people killed last year during protests against Chinese rule.
The 15-day holiday begins Wednesday, and as it approaches, tensions are rising. In the last few weeks, the Chinese government has closed large swaths of western China to foreign visitors — not just Tibet itself, but parts of provinces with large Tibetan populations.
Nearly a year after the violent demonstrations reportedly left more than 120 dead, Tibetans are trying a novel technique for nonviolent protest. “Say No to Losar,” as the campaign is called, was launched by Tibetan groups in Dharamsala, India, the Dalai Lama’s home in exile.
“Instead of the usual celebrations marked by singing, dancing and other festivities, silence will be observed and butter lamps will be lit in the temples and homes to pray for the deceased,” they announced in a statement last month.
The tactic appears to be driving Chinese authorities crazy. They’re countering with their own campaign of forced merriment, organizing concerts, pageants, fireworks, horse races, archery competitions. They’ve declared a one-week public holiday beginning today in Tibet and are offering free admission to museums and parks.
The Communist Party in Tibet also gave vouchers worth $120 each to 37,000 low-income families to shop for the holidays.
To further tempt the 2.8 million Tibetans, state television will broadcast a four-hour gala with 800 performers Tuesday night.
“They want to show that the Tibetan people are happy, that they have returned to normal life. But by intervening, they’re making them unhappy,” said Tsering Shayka, a Tibetan historian now living in Canada. “They are trying to come up with gimmicks instead of solving the problem.”
Robert Barnett, a Tibet expert at Columbia University in New York, says that Chinese efforts to push New Year’s celebrations are likely to backfire.
“I think people will ask, ‘Why is the Communist Party telling me what to do in my own home?’ ” Barnett said.
At Beijing’s Central University for Nationalities, Tibetan students who had applied last year for permission to hold a Losar celebration informed the university recently that they wished to cancel. But the university told them that the party must go on, said a university source who asked not to be quoted by name.
“Celebrating is compulsory,” he said.
As the holiday nears, tensions are spilling into the open.
On Feb. 14, a 39-year-old Tibetan monk set off a furor when he walked through a public market in the Tibetan plateau’s Lithang county carrying a photograph of the Dalai Lama and chanting, “No Losar.” Hundreds of people reportedly joined the protests, which continued into the next two days, according to the Dharamsala-based Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy. The group said that Chinese police detained 21 people, some of whom were badly beaten, and that the county has been locked down for the holiday.
Reports say that as many as 20,000 additional soldiers and paramilitary troops have been deployed in Tibetan areas and that in Qinghai province, village leaders were threatened with arrest if they urged people not to celebrate the holiday.
Even among Tibetans, there is a vigorous debate about the campaign to boycott Losar. The holiday, which dates back to pre-Buddhist times, is the most beloved in the Tibetan calendar and involves elaborate rituals and meals. Families traditionally make a soup with special dumplings in which they hide various items — chile pepper, wool, charcoal — and family members read their fortune by which dumpling they pick.
“The very idea that there won’t be any Losar is, let’s admit it, a little bit like calling off Christmas in a Christian community,” one Tibetan blogger complained.
In addition to the tension over the holiday, next month will bring the 50-year anniversary of a failed anti-Chinese uprising, after which the Dalai Lama fled to India. The date has traditionally been a trigger for protests within Tibet, and this year might be especially tense because the Chinese plan to mark the occasion with a celebration of what they are calling “Serf Emancipation Day.” The Chinese government says it liberated the Tibetans from brutal feudal serfdom.
In a preemptive strike against another flare-up of violence, the Chinese have held thousands of Tibetans at a detention center east of Lhasa, according to bloggers in the Tibetan capital.
The Chinese also have launched a crackdown in Tibetan regions on out-of-town visitors without residency permits. Foreign tourists have been banned until at least April, people in the tourist industry said.
“It is going to be a very sensitive time. When the Tibetan New Year is finished, then it will be the one-year anniversary of the riots,” said a Tibetan tour guide who asked not to be quoted by name.
He said foreigners would not be sold plane or train tickets if they tried to get into Tibetan areas. “You can’t get in if they don’t want you in.”
Nicole Liu and Eliot Gao of The Times’ Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.
Bad News For Everyone?
Regular readers of this blog know that I’ve been on the war path about New York Times columnist Nick Kristof’s writings on Tibet and China for quite a long time. In my view, Kristof has taken a remarkable arrogant stance on Sino-Tibetan relations that reveal a startling lack of moral fortitude. He consistently tends towards anti-independence positions while apologizing for the worst Chinese abuses of human rights with off-handed speculation of intangible improvements. I think Kristof’s writings on Tibet and China are some of the most offensive on any foreign relations issue by quasi-liberal American pundits since Tom Friedman’s cheerleading in the lead-up to the Iraq war. Indeed, I believe Nick Kristof is complicit in the abuses by the Chinese government of local petitioners and Tibetans alike in the lead-up and duration of the Olympic Games.
Unfortunately while Kristof is outraging Tibetans and their supporters, he apparently is also pissing off Chinese nationalists, too. A few days ago the China Daily, the English language state-organ, printed a seering attack on Kristof’s columns, which they viewed as overly pro-Tibet.
This is bad news because Kristof will likely view pissing off both sides as a great achievement indicative of his excellent standing as a Serious Person. It also means we’re almost certainly guaranteed to get more awful, arrogant columns on Tibet and China by Nick Kristof.
Damn.
China Earthquake Pushes Tibet to Sidelines
A headline in today’s New York Times sums up a worrisome phenomenon that has SFT leaders debating about how to maintain momentum in a political and media atmosphere that has suddenly changed from the last couple months: China Earthquake Pushes Tibet to the Sidelines.
Reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal writes that the “shift is, partly, tectonic. An earthquake in China’s Sichuan Province killed tens of thousands of Chinese, evoking an outpouring of global sympathy for China and turning it overnight from victimizer to victim.”
The article goes on:
“The protests this spring put Tibet at the forefront of human rights issue — they accomplished a lot — but I think the interest can’t go further right now,” said John Kamm, a leading human rights advocate whose San Francisco-based organization, Dui Hua Foundation, has helped free prominent Chinese political prisoners.
“Now the Chinese people are in a state of mourning,” he said. “I’m not suggesting that we stop putting pressure on China, but we should use judgment in where and when to direct the fire.”
Ms. Rosenthal goes on to write about the eternal difficulty of how underfunded grassroots movements maintain momentum and morale. She notes that since the historic events beginning with the latest March 10th popular uprising against China’s occupation, and followed by the Tibet solidarity protests that overshadowed China’s Olympic torch relay, Tibet groups have:
become more emboldened, forming new alliances and finding themselves deluged with volunteers and donations. About 200 new chapters of Students for a Free Tibet have been started in the past six months, in places like Estonia, the Czech Republic and the state of Montana.
But sustaining that momentum has been difficult. “It is a challenge to keep people engaged,” said Lhadon Tethong, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet, which operates on a budget of about $400,000 a year from a ramshackle office above a dry cleaners in New York’s Alphabet City. “There’s no substitute for China bringing the Olympic torch into your neighborhood.”
More on SFT with a thoughtful quote from Tendor (nice job, man) that I think perfectly encapsulates the sentiment that many SFTers dedicated to rangzen – particularly young Tibetans – have towards the Dalai Lama and his leadership:
With its guerrilla style “actions,” Students for a Free Tibet has little in common with the far more established International Campaign for Tibet, which shares a staid Washington townhouse with the Dalai Lama’s representative to the United States.
The International Campaign for Tibet accepts the Dalai Lama’s limited goal of greater autonomy and religious freedom for the Tibetan people. But the students’ group wants more. “Yes, we want independence for Tibet — that is what the Tibetan people want,” said Tenzin Dorjee, vice director of Students for a Free Tibet, who tried to unfurl a banner on the Eiffel Tower during the Paris torch relay and last year achieved that goal at Everest Base Camp. “We have the utmost love for His Holiness and respect for his leadership, and we know where Tibet would be now without him.
“But we are inspired not just by his divinity, but also his humanity. So we can disagree with some of his ideas.”
And back to Dui Hua’s John Kamm, who has put his negotiations with China for the release of political prisoners before the Olympics on hold “during the relief efforts:”
…he hopes that the earthquake may provide a face-saving exit for China from a torch relay that has often been more embarrassment than celebration. Already, the relay has recently been scaled back in response to the disaster.
“The Dalai Lama said he’s praying for the victims,” said Mr. Kamm, noting that many of the hard-hit areas had large ethnic Tibetan populations. “Maybe this will give the government the opportunity to cancel the relay in Tibet.”
Ah yes, the torch relay through Tibet. Chinese officials put the torch relay on hold for three days to mourn the earthquake’s victims but it seems there’s no intention to let such an important propaganda display as carrying the torch through recently riot-scarred Lhasa slip away. We of course agree with Mr. Kamm that the torch relay must be canceled. Before the IOC even authorized China’s Olympic Committee’s plans for its torch relay, our SFT troublemakers were up at Everest base camp saying “IOC: No Torch Through Tibet.” This remains a critical issue and we can’t let the sensitivity around criticizing China in the wake of the earthquake’s horrific human toll scare us away from pressing on with our campaign to demand the IOC do the right thing.
In concert with other Tibet support groups, SFT is ramping up our efforts to pressure IOC Executive Members before their last meeting in Athens (June 4th-6th) before the torch is scheduled to enter Tibet on June 9th. It goes to Gyalthang in far southeastern Tibet (an area now annexed into Gansu Province) and then comes back to central Tibet, including Lhasa, June 19th-24th.
To conclude with Tendor’s quote from yesterday’s SFT press release that I think sums it all up:
“In the wake of a natural disaster that has devastated many Tibetans as well as Chinese, the IOC is threatening to add a man-made disaster in the form of the torch relay through Tibet, a preventable tragedy which will compound the suffering of thousands of Tibetans who continue to face the Chinese authorities’ violent crackdown on peaceful demonstrations for freedom.”
Washington Post on Woeser
The Washington Post has a feature article on Woeser, famed Tibetan writer and blogger. Go give it a read…
Report: IOC Debating Ending Torch Relay
The Associated Press reports:
Meanwhile, International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge said the committee would consider ending the international leg of the Beijing Olympic torch relay because of anti-Chinese protests.
Rogge told The Associated Press he was ”deeply saddened” by violent protests in London and Paris and concerned about the upcoming torch relay in San Francisco, where activists expressed fears Monday that the torch’s planned route through Tibet would lead to arrests and violent measures by Chinese officials trying to stifle dissent.
…
Rogge said the IOC’s executive board would discuss ending the international leg in a meeting Friday.
The IOC and the City of San Francisco should cancel the torch relay stop scheduled for tomorrow in the Bay Area immediately. The rest of the torch relay should be canceled as well and the IOC should rescind their approval for the torch to run through Tibet. This is not a hard decision. It’s time for Rogge and the IOC to finally do the right thing.
Chinese-Canadians rally in support of homeland
Watch our videos!
Phayul Latest News- Two monks arrested in Tsawa Pashoe January 31, 2009
- Man Blinded, Sentenced to 4 years' in jail January 31, 2009
- Nationwide Journey for Tibet Stops over in Dharamsala January 30, 2009
- Non-violent approach can change China: Tibetan PM January 29, 2009
- China should resume dialogue with Dalai Lama:Merkel January 29, 2009
