Arab News slams China’s smothering of Taiwan’s participation in the World Health Organization

Posted on May 12, 2008

From the May 10 Arab News (an English language daily newspaper in Saudi Arabia)

In May 2005, the World Health Assembly (WHA) — the governing body of the UN World Health Organization (WHO) — enacted a thoroughly revised set of International Health Regulations (IHR). This marked a significant milestone in the history of cooperative efforts of governments to counter the increasing risk of cross-border spread of infectious diseases. Not the least reason for this appraisal is the addition to the IHR (2005) of Paragraph 3, Article 3, which reads as follows:

“The implementation of these Regulations shall be guided by the goal of their universal application for the protection of all people of the world from the international spread of disease.”

The insertion of this “universal application clause” was motivated by the resolve of WHO member states to remove political barriers to comprehensive implementation of the regulations. It was aimed at empowering the WHO to communicate and cooperate with “all people of the world” regardless of whether they are citizens of member states.

The Taiwanese people welcomed this amendment to the IHR and looked forward to close cooperation with the WHO in IHR-related affairs. However, the WHO Secretariat has continued to spurn Taiwan’s participation in cooperative efforts to implement the regulations, leaving a dangerous vacuum in the disease prevention network.

Note that the “universal application clause” is supposed to allow participation by citizens of non-member states, so why is it that the WHO is spurning Taiwan? The answer is the same reason that the U.S. opposes Tawian’s efforts at United Nations membership…to appease Beijing. As the Arab News continues:

On the eve of the WHA’s enactment of the IHR (2005), the WHO Secretariat signed a secret memorandum of understanding (MOU) with China wherein, reportedly, it promised that the WHO would not communicate with Taiwan’s health authorities on any matter, or invite them to take part in any WHO activity, without China’s consent.

So it is Beijing’s thuggery at work behind the scenes, with the aid of its toadies in the WHO Secretariat. Here’s where it gets interesting:

Politically, Taiwan and China are separate entities that do not exercise jurisdiction over each other’s territories, although they share confusingly similar official names — the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China, respectively. China, therefore, cannot legitimately represent Taiwan’s people in the international community.

Wow, an Arab newspaper from the dictatorial Saudi Kingdom publishes an article saying essentially (and correctly) that China’s claim of sovereignty over democratic Taiwan lacks legitimacy. In the meantime, the United States of America still clings to an archaic “one China” policy that explicitly recognizes China’s legitimacy to represent Taiwan’s people in the international community.

Shouldn’t that be the other way around?

» Filed Under China, Taiwan | Leave a Comment

Police state on Everest update: Climbers use red smoke to protest Red China’s thuggish occupation of Tibet (and Everest)

Posted on May 11, 2008

From MountEverest.net:

Alberto Peruffo, of the global campaign Sad Smoky Mountains, announced Sunday 11th May, at 13 local time as the first simultaneous ignition of red smokes as a protest action against the violation of human rights and Chinese repression in Tibet.

More than 100 summits are now involved: during the last few days the Sad Smoky Mountains project was joined by summits such as North Table Mountain (Colorado, USA), Rittner Horn on Süd Tirol Alps, Corno Grande, Corno Piccolo and Pizzo Cefalone on Gran Sasso (Apeninnes), Nanos on Dinaric Alps (Slovenia), Mount Giovo and Rondiniano (Modena Apeninnes), Puy de Manse (France) and also historically important summits such as Col Moschin and Summano (near Vicenza and Asiago) where a large number of soldiers died during World War I.

This comes only days after Beijing (and its toadies in Nepal) used the Olympics as an excuse to turn Mount Everest into a high-altitude police state.

While I’m pretty sure the very cool picture shown above is a photoshop job (since the Sad Smokey Mountains website posted it prior to the protest date) created for visual impact …..there are actual pics of climbers popping smoke in protest here.

» Filed Under China, Mount Everest, Olympics, Tibet | Leave a Comment

Chinese influence in Africa: Krause podcast with Ethiopian journalist Habtamu Dugo

Posted on May 10, 2008

What are the implications of China’s growing (and un-democratic) sphere of influence in Africa? Over at the Independence Institute’s podcast website, I have an interview with Ethiopian journalist Habtamu Dugo. We discuss the effects that China’s relationship with Africa has had on its people and policies. Habtamu brings a unique perspective, having personally been the on the receiving end of the brutal Ethiopian government’s treatment of journalists who write what the regime doesn’t like.

Podcast here.

MP3 compatible podcast here.

For a firsthand account of life under an African thugocracy, check out Habtamu’s website, Free Oromia.

» Filed Under Africa, China, Ethiopia | Leave a Comment

Mount Everest: China’s highest police state (updated)

Posted on May 8, 2008

It is being reported that a Chinese mountaineering team carrying a symbolic Olympic torch has summited Mount Everest.

Prior to the ascent, the government of Nepal announced that protesters would be shot:

Nepal has given its security personnel permission to shoot pro-Tibet demonstrators during China’s Olympic flame climb to Mount Everest’s summit early next month.

“About 25 soldiers and policemen have established camps on the mountain and they have been ordered to use force if necessary to stop any anti-Chinese activities,” Mod Raj Dotel, spokesman for the home ministry, said Sunday. “This could mean shooting if necessary.”

Security personnel will also check mountain climbers for non-essential expedition materials, Dotel added.

“If anyone is found with anti-Chinese material their permit will be canceled and returned from the mountain,” he said.

So in keeping with the international spirit of the games, Chinese communists and their toadies in Nepal have turned Everest into a high altitude police state.

Update: some reaction to the Olympic torch atop Everest from climbers.

From newclimber.com

in climbing news today, china torches mount everest to distract the world from beijing’s oppressive occupation of tibet.

From MountEverest.net

“The moment I saw the torch lit on top of Mount Everest I felt very hurt,” a Tibetan told Reuters and his feelings were shared by many around the world.

Beijing arming Sudan: “Made in China” label on the killing grounds of Darfur

Posted on May 7, 2008

From a recent report by Human Rights First, “Investing in Tragedy: China’s money, arms and politics in Sudan”

Through its growing oil revenues, the government of Sudan has also been able to expand its purchasing of arms, which are being used to sustain the violence in Darfur. For decades China has sold Sudan arms, but its small arms exports to Sudan have increased significantly in the last several years. From 1999 to 2005, a period that includes the start of the Darfur crisis, Sudan’s imports of small arms increased by 680 percent, and from 2004 to 2006, China made up an average of 90 percent of those small arms sales to Sudan. From 2003 to 2006, China sold over $55 million worth of small arms to Khartoum.

In order to protect its client regime, Beijing uses its clout on the UN Security Council to give Khartoum political cover. The report continues:

China has also provided robust political support for the government of Sudan in spite of the violence in Darfur. This is clearly demonstrated in the way China has repeatedly obstructed United Nation Security Council efforts to take action to stop the violence in Darfur by threatening to veto resolutions addressing the conflict. Between 2004 and 2007, the Security Council debated 14 substantive resolutions about Darfur, and China used its power to weaken nine of them. On most occasions, China forced the removal of tough language, including the threat or imposition of targeted economic sanctions.

Beijing and Khartoum, a match made in…well, it sure isn’t heaven.

Human Rights First also has an online petition to stop arms sales to Sudan.

» Filed Under China, Darfur, Genocide | Leave a Comment

Hitchens on Beijing’s numerous client regimes and captive nations

Posted on May 6, 2008

How do you even begin to summarize, in just a couple of paragraphs, the various thugocracies subsidized, or otherwise enabled by Communist China, or the sheer scope and breadth of the misery Beijing props up around the world?

If you are Christopher Hitchens, you do it something like this:

Those who care or purport to care about human rights must start to discuss this problem in plain words. Is there an initiative to save the un-massacred remains of the people of Darfur? It will be met by a Chinese veto. Does anyone care about Robert Mugabe treating his desperate population as if it belonged to him personally? China is always ready to help him out. Are the North Koreans starved and isolated so that a demented playboy can posture with nuclear weapons? Beijing will give the demented playboy a guarantee. How long can Southeast Asia bear the shame and misery of the Burmese junta? As long as the embrace of China persists. The identity of Tibet is being obliterated by the deliberate importation of Chinese settlers. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man who claims even to know and determine the sex lives of his serfs (by the way, the very essence of totalitarianism), is armed and financed by China. It was this way when President Bill Clinton wanted the United Nations to take on Slobodan Milosevic and was stymied (by China, among others), and it was this way when President Bush asked the United Nations to live up to its resolutions on Saddam Hussein. And now I hear human rights activists bleating about Burma and our inaction and simultaneously complaining about the only time that any U.S. president had the nerve to break the hold of China (and Russia, and sometimes France) on the possibility of any international rescue.

China also maintains territorial claims against India and Vietnam (and, of course, Taiwan) and is building a vast army, as well as a huge oceangoing navy, to back up these ambitions.

There’s more.

Hitchens actually started out talking about Beijing’s cozy relationship with the vicious military dictatorship in Burma. With the recent news that swaths of Burma have been devastated by Cyclone Nargis, the ineptitude of dictatorships in dealing with natural disasters (as opposed to their specialty of creating man-made disasters) will sadly be on display to the world, and in fact may have already begun.

From yesterday’s USA Today:

U.S. and international aid groups scrambled Monday to send help to victims of what could be Asia’s worst natural disaster since the 2004 tsunami, but roads were closed in the low-lying delta region that was hardest hit.

First lady Laura Bush said the U.S. government had rushed $250,000 to aid organizations operating in Burma. However, she said further aid could be delayed because Burma’s government, one of the world’s most isolationist military regimes, has not yet agreed to allow a U.S. disaster response team into the country.

Maybe the junta in Burma is waiting for marching orders from Beijing first.

» Filed Under Burma, China, Darfur, Mugabe, Olympics | 2 Comments

Mia Farrow: the one-woman Darfur protest machine

Posted on May 4, 2008

It’s often easy to dismiss celebrities and their causes, think movie stars discussing carbon footprints…just before they hop on the private jet to Cannes or Aspen.

But Mia Farrow’s advocacy for the victims of the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan seems the real deal…passionate, articulate and relentless.

It was Ms. Farrow who dubbed the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing as the “Genocide Olympics” in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, eloquently laying out Beijing’s economic and political complicity in the mass-slaughter.

On Saturday, the Los Angeles Times reported on Farrow’s one-woman protest during Olympic torch ceremonies in Hong Kong:

Actress Mia Farrow urged Beijing today to help stop the killings in Sudan’s western Darfur region, staging a peaceful, one-woman protest on the sidelines of the Hong Kong leg of the Olympic torch relay.

The 63-year-old actress held aloft her own torch, which she said honored victims of genocide, near Hong Kong’s government headquarters — away from the Olympic torch route.

“As the games approach, China has the opportunity to change the course of history,” she said.

Sad, but true. Last May, President Bush cut off certain government-run companies involved in the Sudan oil business, and several individuals suspected in involvement in the slaughter in Darfur from the U.S. banking system. But the fact is that the regime in Khartoum doesn’t really need the U.S. banking system as long as it has the economic backing of Beijing. From the Heritage Foundation’s Peter Brookes in 2007:

Over the last decade, Beijing’s energy firms have invested between $3 billion and $10 billion in the Sudanese energy sector, stuffing at least $250 million a year into Khartoum’s pockets.

The hundreds of millions of dollars from Beijing help prop up Khartoum’s arsenal, making the genocide all the more efficient. Brookes continues:

Beijing also helps arm Khartoum. As a result of its energy profits, Sudan has doubled its defense budget in recent years, spending 60 percent to 80 percent of its oil revenue on weapons - arms mostly made in China.

Moreover, with Chinese assistance, the Sudanese government may have built a number of weapons factories - further frustrating any efforts at a reasonably air-tight arms embargo.

So the power to actually and substantially impact an ongoing genocide lays with a regime that has no interest in exercising that power in any positive way.

The Times piece continues about Farrow:

Farrow, who has dubbed the Beijing games the “genocide Olympics,” said she has lobbied Chinese officials in New York on Darfur.

Recalling one meeting, she said one Chinese official asked her why activists didn’t highlight Beijing’s humanitarian work in Darfur.

Farrow said she replied, “Here in America, when something’s wrong with our car and we take it to the mechanic, we don’t say what’s right with our car. We say what’s wrong with our car.”

She added, “Maybe I’m not the most tactful person … but I’m not a liar.”

Don’t sweat it, Ms. Farrow, this is genocide we’re talking about here and you’re doing great. Tact is for the diplomats who sip cocktails with mass-murderers, and we’ll leave the lying to the genocide enablers in Beijing.

For more on Darfur, see dreamfordarfur.org

» Filed Under China, Darfur, Genocide, Olympics | 2 Comments

Both ways Beijing: Chinese communists want to have their Olympics, but don’t want their thuggery examined

Posted on May 3, 2008

Here’s how “both ways” Beijing works. First, the regime vigorously pursues the 2008 Summer Olympics, and the International Olympic Committee makes the horrid decision to grant Beijing the Games. Then when the regime’s world-wide thuggery, such as its military occupation of Tibet, or its complicity in the genocide in Darfur gets put under some scrutiny, the regime cries foul and whines that the Games should not be politicized.

An example from earlier this year:

Zhu Jing, a spokeswoman for the Beijing Olympic organising committee, said: “Linking the Darfur issue to the Olympic Games will not help to resolve this issue and is not in line with the Olympic spirit that separates sports from politics.”

What a load of blather. Beijing is at the head of the line to politicize the Olympics for its own benefit. Besides which, when have the Olympics not been politicized?

From an outstanding editorial last year from The Hill, a Washington, D.C. newspaper that covers Congress. This could have been written yesterday and it would still be spot on:

Sports and politics are not kept separate and rarely have been. Nazi Germany most notoriously used the 1936 games in Berlin to grandstand the master race (and Adolph Hitler walked out when Jesse Owens demonstrated what nonsense it was); Tommie Smith and other African-American athletes raised their gloved fists in Black Power salutes while standing on the medal podiums of the Mexico games in 1968; the United States boycotted the 1980 Moscow games to deny the Soviet Union the international acceptance it craved in the aftermath of its 1979 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan; the Russian empire struck back by boycotting the 1984 games in Los Angeles — and so on and so forth.

The games have long been used by host nations to showcase their modernity, power, and international prestige. Beijing worked doggedly to get the games for precisely these benefits. By unshackling itself from the economic strictures of communism, China has become a hugely successful international trading power while crushing political and religious freedom at home. It is thus both widely accepted and a rogue.

China wants to wear the games like a testimonial or badge of global acceptance — a rosette allowing it into the enclosure of top nations.

But it cannot have it both ways — inviting praise but complaining that criticism is out of bounds. As Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) noted, “to suggest that somehow it is unfair to ask those questions [about Chinese links to Khartoum] is ridiculous … If China doesn’t like the scrutiny, they can stop tacitly supporting genocide.”

One quibble with Representative Lee…China doesn’t so much “tacitly” support the genocide in Darfur, but rather outright subsidizes, enables and gives political cover to its perpetrators.

Eric Reeves (who runs the great Darfur website sudanreeves.org) from the March 22 Boston Globe:

Though Khartoum’s genocidal counterinsurgency campaign against Darfur’s African tribes has been authoritatively documented for years, Beijing seeks to obscure this grim reality through distortion, half-truths, and outright mendacity. In turn, nothing encourages Khartoum more than China’s refusal to speak honestly about violent human destruction in Darfur, where growing insecurity has brought the world’s largest humanitarian operation to the brink of collapse.

Why does China airbrush away Darfur’s genocidal realities? Why has Beijing been Khartoum’s largest weapons supplier over the past decade? Why has China repeatedly wielded a veto threat at the UN Security Council as the world body vainly struggles to bring pressure to bear on Khartoum? The answer lies in China’s thirst for Sudanese crude oil.

Though nothing excuses the sheer genocidal thuggery of the National Islamic Front regime in Khartoum, the members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might as well be alongside the Janjaweed in Darfur pulling the trigger.

» Filed Under China, Darfur, Olympics, Tibet | Leave a Comment

“Genocide Olympics” update

Posted on May 2, 2008

The Washington Post is reporting that actress Mia Farrow has been admitted into Hong Kong ahead of today’s Olympic torch ceremonies in Hong Kong. As Beijing well knows, Miss farrow has been one of the driving forces in bringing attention to China’s complicity in the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.

The regime in Beijing must really be feeling the pressure.

From Farrow’s excellent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal from last year, The ‘Genocide Olympics’

China is pouring billions of dollars into Sudan. Beijing purchases an overwhelming majority of Sudan’s annual oil exports and state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. — an official partner of the upcoming Olympic Games — owns the largest shares in each of Sudan’s two major oil consortia. The Sudanese government uses as much as 80% of proceeds from those sales to fund its brutal Janjaweed proxy militia and purchase their instruments of destruction: bombers, assault helicopters, armored vehicles and small arms, most of them of Chinese manufacture. Airstrips constructed and operated by the Chinese have been used to launch bombing campaigns on villages. And China has used its veto power on the U.N. Security Council to repeatedly obstruct efforts by the U.S. and the U.K. to introduce peacekeepers to curtail the slaughter.

My own piece on China’s enabling of the genocide in Darfur from the Aspen Times here.

» Filed Under China, Darfur, Genocide, Olympics | Leave a Comment

Beijing enabling Mugabe regime

Posted on May 1, 2008

Good piece at World Defense Review about the nations and leaders who have helped the Robert Mugabe regime cling to power and ruin Zimbabwe. Wherever there is chaos and thuggery in Africa, Beijing seems to have a hand in it. From the piece:

Not surprisingly, one of Mugabe’s most important enablers has been the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). As I reported here last year, not only has Beijing sold Harare some thirty military aircraft, including FC-1 fighter jets and K-8 light attack aircraft, which the latter can ill afford, but it has also provided the ZANU-PF regime with the literal tools of repression, including radio-jamming equipment and listening devices. Mugabe, like his fellow despot, Sudan’s Umar al-Bashir, has come to expect “customer courtesies” from the PRC like the Chinese prevention of UN discussion of his situation last week.

» Filed Under China, Mugabe, Zimbabwe | Leave a Comment

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