Regime Watch: Beijing

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

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.

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.

Jacques Rogge, the chief of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), wants the west to be patient over China’s thuggery. From Saturday’s Financial Times:

Mr Rogge says while he understands the depth of emotion in the west on China’s human rights record, public expectations about the country’s pace of change are unrealistic.

Noting that the People’s Republic of China has only been around since 1949, Mr. Rogge goes on to compare contemporary China to past colonial powers:

Back in 1949, Mr Rogge pointed out, the UK was a colonial power. So too were Belgium, France and Portugal, “with all the abuse attached to colonial powers. It was only 40 years ago that we gave liberty to the colonies. Let’s be a little bit more modest”.

China may not be a role model in the west, Mr Rogge concedes, but “we owe China to give them time”.

Granted, Mr. Rogge was not the IOC president at the time China was granted the 2008 Olympics, but the IOC awarded the Games to Beijing with full knowledge of China’s atrocious human rights record, so now the IOC gets to reap what it sowed.

But as long as Mr. Rogge wants to tell the rest of us what China is “owed,” perhaps he could also tell us all how much longer the people of places like Tibet and Inner Mongolia should be expected to exist under the boot heel of Beijing, or how much longer the Taiwanese should be expected to live with Chinese ballistic missiles pointed at them from across the Taiwan Strait.

China has tried mightily to put on a friendly face for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, but with the brutal nature of China’s military occupation of Tibet on display to the world, the regime in Beijing is showing its true colors. Tibetans being murdered on the streets of Lhasa and other parts of Tibet by Chinese security forces, an amazingly efficient censorship campaign of video websites such as You tube, and the ousting of foreign journalists from Tibet is all bad enough on its own. But Beijing’s thuggery in Tibet is also a grim indicator of what might be in store for Taiwan should the island-nation ever be “re-unified” with Mainland China.

From my article on this topic in the Boulder Daily Camera (Boulder, Colorado) newspaper from earlier this month:

As with Tibet, China claims sovereignty over democratic Taiwan — even though it is obvious that Taiwan functions as an independent state — and that only Beijing may represent Taiwan’s 23 million citizens in international organizations.

China backs up its claim over Tibet through brute force of military might. Similarly, China backs up its false claim over Taiwan with over 1,300 ballistic missiles pointed at the island from across the Taiwan Strait and the threat of annihilation against the Taiwanese people.

While China has been tyrannizing Tibet for decades, Beijing recently codified its threats of violence against Taiwan, thus giving itself a legal rationalization (at least by totalitarian regime standards) for possible future tyrannization of Taiwan:

Shortly after the People’s Republic of China was formed, Chinese Dictator Mao Tse-Tung sought to “re-unify” Tibet with China. After first invading eastern Tibet in 1950, China pressured Tibetan delegates to sign a 17-point “peaceful liberation” agreement in 1951. Then Mao went ahead and sent People’s Liberation Army soldiers into the capital city of Lhasa and simply tyrannized Tibet by force.

In 2005, Beijing enacted an “Anti-Secession Law” which codified China’s already long-standing threats against Taiwan. Article eight of the law mandates the use of “non-peaceful” means against Taiwan if, among other things, “a major event occurs which would lead to Taiwan’s separation from China.”

As I conclude in the article, what is happening in Tibet makes clear that Beijing is more than willing to back up its threats of violence with the real thing, and should be reason enough for the world to demand an end not only to China’s occupation of Tibet, but also to the regime’s threats of invasion against democratic Taiwan.

The Falun Gong Human Rights Working Group has a new report out on the round-up and torture of Falun Gong practioners by China in advance of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

An example from the report:

In 2000, at the Changchun Women’s Labor Camp Ms. Zhang was forced to do slave labor, often until midnight, and was beaten and shocked with electric batons. In 2003, just two years after the Communist regime promised to “improve human rights” in order to get the Olympics, Ms. Zhang’s father and brother were tortured to death for practicing Falun Gong. On November 28, 2007, the police arrested Ms. Zhang, and caused her to “disappear.” The authorities refuse to give her family any idea of her whereabouts, or even tell them whether she is still alive.

A quick primer on totalitarian thinking: Since Falun Gong is a spiritual movement, and since totalitarian regimes like the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cannot tolerate belief systems outside the control of the state, the obvious solution to the popularity of Falun Gong in China is to round up its practitioners, torture them and then “disappear” them.

And yes, these guys actually get to host the Olympics.

Media advisory on the report here.

Great analysis of Communist China’s fear of Falun Gong here.

In other circumstances, a modern day “political education” drive by Communist China might sound like a bad parody on the old “re-education”camps of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Unfortuanately for the Tibetans being tyrannized by Beijing, “political education” just sounds like a code phrase for intensifying the ongoing suppression of Tibet.

According to Reuters:

In a bid to reinforce control in Lhasa, Party authorities have launched an education drive focused on officials and Party members, the official Tibet Daily reported on Monday.

The campaign to “fight separatism, protect stability and promote development” would focus on “unifying the thinking and cohesive strength of officials and the masses, deepening the struggle against separatism and counter-attacking the separatist plots of the Dalai clique”, said the paper.

Party members and officials would be assessed on their “performance” in the two-month drive, which will include television programs and organized denunciation sessions.

Organized denunciation sessions? That would make for some compelling television…just before the opening ceremony for the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

On April 18, The Guardian–a british newspaper–reported on a Chinese cargo ship docked in South Africa loaded with some 77 tons of small-arms, and destined for the Robert Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe.

According to The Guardian’s South Africa correspondent:

A Chinese cargo ship believed to be carrying 77 tonnes of small arms, including more than 3m rounds of ammunition, AK47 assault rifles, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, has docked in the South African port of Durban for transportation of the weapons to Zimbabwe, the South African government confirmed yesterday. It claimed it was powerless to intervene as long as the ship’s papers were in order.

Copies of the documentation for the Chinese ship, the An Yue Jiang, show that the weapons were sent from Beijing to the ministry of defence in Harare [the capital city of Zimbabwe]. Headed “Dangerous goods description and container packing certificate”, the document was issued on April 1, three days after Zimbabwe’s election. It lists the consignment as including 3.5m rounds of ammunition for AK47 assault rifles and for small arms, 1,500 40mm rockets, 2,500 mortar shells of 60mm and 81mm calibre, as well as 93 cases of mortar tubes.

It might seem amazingly stupid timing on Beijing’s part to be supplying arms to one of Africa’s most atrocious authoritarian regimes only months before the opening of the Olympics in Beijing. But arming, and otherwise propping up African thugocracies is business as usual for Beijing. As The Guardian continues:

Despite international criticism, the Chinese government has been a longstanding backer of Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe’s authoritarian regime, supplying it with jet fighters, military vehicles and guns. China, or Chinese businesses, are reported to have sold radio-jamming devices to prevent independent stations from contradicting the state-controlled media, and have signed vital agriculture deals.

The Beijing/Mugabe arms story broke at about the same time as a new report by Human Rights Watch on torture camps being set up in Zimbabwe to punish opposition party memebers who voted against Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party in last month’s elections.

According to the April 19 Human Rights Watch report:

During the day, ZANU-PF and their allies (so-called “war veterans,” youth militias and some armed men in military uniform) gather at these camps to decide on their targets, generally those known or thought to support the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). According to witnesses, the targets are then rounded up and brought to the camps at night, where they are beaten for hours with thick wooden sticks and army batons. Human Rights Watch has interviewed more than 30 people in the last two days who have sustained serious injuries, including broken limbs, as a result of these beatings.

Zimbabwe’s parliamentary elections on March 29, 2008 delivered a decisive defeat for the ruling ZANU-PF led by Robert Mugabe. Yet, nearly three weeks later, the ZANU-PF-appointed Election Commission has failed to announce the results of the presidential poll that took place at the same time.

ZANU-PF officials are calling the crackdown Operation Makavhoterapapi, or “Where did you put your cross?” There seem to be two aims to this organized violence: to punish people for having voted for the MDC and to intimidate them to vote for ZANU-PF if there is a presidential run-off. One victim told Human Rights Watch: “They told me that next time you will vote wisely, now you know what we can do.”

If there is a run-off election in Zimbabwe, maybe next instead of wooden sticks and batons, Mugabe’s thugs will be using Chinese-made AK-47s.

With China’s thuggish occupation of Tibet on display to the world, Beijing is showing its true colors. Read the Krause op-ed, “Misery:  China’s main export” on China’s moral illegitimacy to host the 2008 Summer Olympics.  First published in the excellent Colorado weekly paper, Johnstown Breeze.