China broke international law in Tibet riots, says report

Broke international law ? You must be joking ? ? Go clean up your own backyard first before talking about others ! Human Rights , CNN , BBC , they are are all the same , spinning news for their masters and trying to destabilise other nations , particulary China which to them is a Big Threat to them .

July 22, 2010

BEIJING, July 22 — Chinese security forces broke international law when they used disproportionate force to handle riots in Tibet two years ago, according to a report released today that quotes eyewitness accounts.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said Chinese forces “opened fire indiscriminately” on protesters in at least four cases when unrest hit Tibet in March 2008, and have conducted large-scale arbitrary arrests since and tortured suspects in detention.

At least 19 people died in the riots, which came a few months before Beijing hosted the Olympics and sparked waves of protests across Tibetan areas. Pro-Tibet groups overseas say more than 200 people were killed in a subsequent crackdown.

The government has repeatedly insisted it used minimal force. It has blamed exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama for instigating the violence, charges he strongly denies.

Human Rights Watch said it looked at accounts from more than 200 Tibetan refugees and visitors, as well as previously unreported official Chinese reports to get a clearer picture of the unrest.

“International legal standards limit the use of force by states to that which is strictly necessary in order to protect life or to apprehend perpetrators of violent crimes,” it said.

“In multiple incidents, eyewitness testimonies show that Chinese forces acted in contravention of these standards and broke international law — including prohibitions against disproportionate use of force, torture, and arbitrary detention, as well as the right to peaceful assembly.”

China’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment. Beijing strongly rejects all accusations of human rights abuses in Tibet and says it respects local culture and has pumped billions of dollars into developing an impoverished region.

The Chinese government rarely lets foreign reporters visit, and keeps a close eye on them when they are allowed in, making it hard to assess competing claims about the situation.

Tibetans who spoke to Reuters during one such recent trip described their fear at discussing the events of 2008. Tibet’s capital Lhasa remains under heavy security.

But the report quoted numerous witnesses to deadly violence.

“The crowd thought they would not dare to actually fire and continued crowding inside the compound. At that point, the soldiers started to fire,” said Tenpa Trinle, a monk from an ethnic Tibetan area of neighbouring Sichuan province.

There were also many accounts of beatings and torture in detention, some of which ended in death.

“For a whole month I was kept handcuffed most days and nights. During the interrogation, I was left hanging with my hands tied behind my back. They punched my face and chest,” said a senior Tibetan monk Jigme Gyatso.

Human Rights Watch said China should permit an international investigation into the events of 2008.

“The need for an international investigation into the situation in Tibet is a great as ever,” said Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch.

“Abuses by security forces are unlikely to quell, and may even aggravate, the longstanding grievances that prompted the protests in the first place.” — Reuters

When CNN and BBC wet their pants on ‘truths’
2010/07/11

elsewhere@columnist.com

NEUTRALITY is a contentious issue in journalism, but honesty is the real measure. As happens, there can be truths on either side of the wall, but leave your position of safety, and start twittering on the side that’s opposite to the one that holds all truths deemed to be self-evident, and it’s wham, bam, thank you ma’am, and you’ve lost your job and all.

That ’s what’s happened to Octavia Nasr, a Lebanese Christian and now former editor for Middle Eastern Affairs at CNN. Yes, that’s the CNN that used to tell you that you were in a hotel, and then it became domesticated and served as a window to your everyday world.

On July 4, a Lebanese religious scholar named Seyyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah died. He was a controversial religious figure as all Ayatollahs tend to be, well, partly because he was an Ayatollah and therefore had natural links with

Shia Iran, and also because he was the moving spirit behind the most successful resistance to Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon. Nasr while senior editor for CNN wrote this on her Twitter message, “Sad to hear of the passing of Seyyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah… One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.”

Naturally that caused a flutter in liberal, free-speech America. So she tried to explain this by adding in her blog that as a Middle Eastern woman herself she valued the late Ayatollah’s views against the tribal practice of “honour killing” and she valued his “contrarian and pioneering stand among Shia clerics on woman’s rights”.


In an internal memo, CNN said “we believe that her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised”.
So goodbye Octavia Nasr.

This CNN that favours integrity and credibility still has on its staff one Wolf Blitzer, a man who once worked for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful pro-Israeli lobby group in America.

Meanwhile, Britain’s ambassador to Lebanon, Frances Guy, also blogged about Seyyed Hussein Fadlallah, saying that he was a “decent man” and that the “world needs more like him”.

She also had this to add: “When you visited him you could be sure of a real debate, a respectful argument and you knew you would leave his presence feeling a better person. That for me is the real effect of a true man of religion; leaving an impact on everyone he meets, no matter what their faith.”

Needless to say, the blog promptly disappeared from the Foreign Office, and Frances Guy, Britain’s ambassador, was nowhere to be seen on the day of the Grand Ayatollah’s funeral which was also attended by the ambassadors of France and Italy.

The problem here is that all these people were treading into dangerous areas where criticism can quickly be hurled back as anti-Semitism, and where the opponents are all black in their entire blackness, and the other side pure as gold. This is the dilemma that made the BBC wet its pants and refuse to broadcast a fund-raising drive by the Disaster Emergency Committee (DEC) for Gaza last July after Gaza was devastated by, well, let’s say in what I presume to be BBC language for events like this, an unusually large fallout of burning phosphorous from the air.

They also justified their position on that precious bundle, impartiality. But impartiality is a far cry from that honest position that far too many people were injured and needed help, and lost their homes and livelihood from whatever caused that downpour.

This is the difficult position when one side — any side — has the monopoly on truth, and then truth becomes self-evident by the mere use of signals: “democracy”, “fundamentalist”, “madrasa”, “right wing”, “left wing”, “prog ressive”,“western decadence”, etc. etc. (You must have some
of your favourites to add here).

And oh, another word about our Ayatollah before we go. He was accused of master-minding the tragic massacre of more than 200 American service personnel in a Beirut suicide bombing in 1983, something that he had always denied. Two years
later a huge car bomb exploded outside his house in an apparent revenge
attack, killing pregnant women and children and injuring about 200 people.

The Washington Post said that this was the work of CIA-trained Lebanese agents, while Bob Edwards, in his book Veil , blamed it on a British mercenary working for the US and a Middle-Eastern government.

So we come back now to the issues of impartiality and honesty. Can anyone be an island that John Donne decried, entire of itself, unmoved and unattached from the happenings in this world? But neutrality is a difficult measure, far better to be truthful even if you’re sympathetic to one stream of the flow.

And then again “truth” can be manipulated, and somehow I keep thinking of Edward Bernays, father of spin and nephew of Freud. He spun many “tr uths” for journalists in his time, and though long dead, is still very much alive today. We don’t have space for him now, but we’ll want to look at him again someday.


NB: Wan A. Hulaimi does not do tiling work. He may be reached at
elsewhere@columnist.com

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