j’s blog

Yahoo! News - Villagers Riot in China, 50 Police Said Injured

By Benjamin Kang Lim

BEIJING (Reuters) - Thousands of villagers rioted in eastern China injuring dozens of police after two of about 200 elderly women protesting against factory pollution died during efforts to disperse them, residents and officials said on Monday.

The rioting in the wealthy coastal province of Zhejiang on Sunday followed violent anti-Japanese protests in China’s capital Beijing and the southern cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen over the weekend.

It was the latest in a string of outbreaks of rural violence as the world’s most populous nation struggles with disgruntlement over a widening wealth gap and widespread corruption.

More than 50 police were injured and rushed to hospital, with five listed in critical condition, a doctor told Reuters. About four residents of the village of Huankantou, in Huangtianfan township, were injured.

Police tried to disperse about 200 elderly women, who had kept a 24-hour vigil at sheds and a roadblock outside an industrial park housing about 13 chemical factories for the last two weeks, villagers and local officials said by telephone.

Two of the women were killed, two villagers said. “They were run over by police cars,” one said.

A source with knowledge of the rioting who asked not to be identified said the two had died during arrest. He did not elaborate.

Club-wielding villagers clashed with police in riot gear, overturned police cars and hurled rocks at policemen holed up in a local high school, the villagers and local officials said.

“Villagers knocked down the wall of the school and charged in,” one villager surnamed Wang said.

Villagers also smashed the windows of about 50 buses which carried some 3,000 policemen, paramilitary police and security guards to the scene to try to disperse villagers, they said.

Whoops! Sorry…never mind. Good news, at least we changed our minds about killing you.

Yahoo! News - Jailed ‘Killer’ Freed After Wife Turns Up Alive

BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese man jailed and badly beaten for his wife’s murder has been freed after she turned up not only alive but with another husband, domestic media said on Monday, revealing a brutal arbitrariness to China’s legal system.

She Xianglin’s wife, Zhang Zaiyu, disappeared after a domestic dispute in 1994 and when a woman’s body was found in a local reservoir, She was detained on suspicion of killing his wife, the China Daily said.

The body was so decomposed it could not be identified, but a local court found She, a former part-time police officer from central Hubei province, guilty of murder and sentenced him to death.

A provincial court later commuted the sentence to 15 years in prison.

She, 39, was coerced into confessing to her murder and badly beaten in prison, the China Daily said.

International human rights groups say police torture is widespread in China and that suspects are held for long periods without trial. But it is rare for a victim, or the domestic media, to go public about police brutality.

She told the Beijing News that when he was first apprehended, police took him to a remote house and interrogated him for 11 days. He was given just two bowls of rice a day, nearly no water, prevented from sleeping and threatened with death.

“A policeman put his gun to my head and said, ‘Believe me, I could shoot you right now’,” She was quoted as saying from a prison hospital bed, where he was receiving a physical check before being released on Friday.

He said he did not remember making a confession, though the local court that ruled on his case was told he had.

The China Daily said photographs published since She’s release showed he had been severely beaten while in jail and his legs and fingers broken.

Zhang resurfaced in late March in eastern Shandong province, where she had gone in 1994 and later married a local man, the China Daily said.

She said he wanted compensation for his years in jail and justice to be done.

“I want those officials involved in my conviction punished,” he was quoted as saying.

Daily Times - Site Edition

SEOUL: North Korea accused the European Union on Friday of a “dastardly act” for criticising Pyongyang’s human rights record after Britain said the reclusive Stalinist state could face sanctions for the way it treats its citizens.

The European Union is expected to present the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva with a resolution condemning North Korea’s record.

British Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell, speaking in Geneva on Thursday, urged the United Nations’ top rights forum to condemn any abuses in North Korea, which he said had the “worst record of any country anywhere in the world”.

“If North Korea does not in time genuinely and constructively engage both on our human rights concerns and on the concerns about its possession of nuclear weapons, then I think we will have to look for tougher options of containment or sanctions. I am not advocating that at the moment,” Rammell told reporters.

The North’s official KCNA news agency cited a North Korean delegate to the rights talks as saying the European Union was acting selfishly by backing the position of the United States.

The delegate repeated a charge the North has made before, that Washington was launching an attempt at “bringing down the system of the DPRK under the pretext of human rights”, KCNA reported

DPRK is short for the North’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. reuters

Scotsman.com News - Latest News - British Minister Condemns North Korea’s Human Rights Record

North Korea may have the worst human rights record in the world, a British minister said at a UN conference today.

The long record of human rights abuses, includes abductions, arbitrary detention and extensive use of torture and the death penalty, said Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell in Geneva.

“Arguably, North Korea has the worst human rights record of any country, anywhere in the world,” he said on the sidelines of the UN Human Rights Commission meeting in Geneva.

“This session has been extremely important, and it’s part of an ongoing process, to shine a spotlight on North Korea in terms of its human rights record,” Mr Rammell said.

Kim Tae Jin, a North Korean who was imprisoned by the government before defecting in 1997, told the commission that “there is absolutely no freedom in North Korea.”

“In a political prison camp in North Korea, one must forget that he or she is a human being,” said Kim, who spent five years in a camp and endured eight months of torture and interrogation.

“There were numerous people who spent 20 to 30 years in the prison camp simply because of some ludicrous crime their grandfather allegedly committed,” said Kim.

Mr Rammell said that the European Union will sponsor a resolution at the commission to condemn North Korea’s record of abuses, adding that he expects it to be passed by a large majority.

Yahoo! News - S. Korea bars secret video of the North

Tue Mar 29, 3:00 AM ET

A tape of a public execution, smuggled into South Korea, is kept off the air.

By Robert Marquand, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA - On a bleached and scratchy video image smuggled out of Kim Jong Il’s closed regime, blindfolded prisoners are tied to white posts on a rocky landscape, shot three times, and dragged away. The rare video footage of summary executions in North Korea - a practice considered routine in the North but never captured on film - was taken by hidden camera March 1 and 2, and smuggled through China to South Korea.

At the time, refugee groups in Seoul were ecstatic. It looked like a human rights slam-dunk: Refugees from the North have long described summary executions - public spectacles where prisoners are shot moments after a death sentence is proclaimed. The shootings are a form of social control via terror, experts say.

Yet in a twist not anticipated by underground groups that carried off the filming, South Korean TV authorities have not let the video be broadcast. The tape has been aired worldwide; Japan recently aired three exhaustive reports.

But due to intense though indirect pressure by Seoul officials, the North Korean execution tapes, purportedly of “middlemen” who help refugees escape to China, are not yet available for viewing by Koreans in the South. The indirect censure adds to frustration among those documenting the gulags and torture in the North. They charge indifference in the South to evidence of manifold suffering by ethnic siblings across the demilitarized zone.

It also raises anew questions about a five-year policy in Seoul of studiously avoiding acts that might upset Pyongyang, for fear of harming fragile North-South relations. South Korea’s ambivalence about a get-tough policy with North Korea may also factor into the mechanics of the six-party talks over the North’s recently declared nuclear program.

“We have told of many public executions [in the North]. But officials in Seoul always ask us for material evidence,” says Pak Sang Huk, an escapee from the North. “Now that we have evidence, they don’t want to see it…. The people who brought this tape through China were speechless when they visited KBS [Korean Broadcast Service] studios, and were shunned.” Mr. Pak claims those who filmed the executions risked their lives to do so.

Seoul’s effort to avoid broadcasts of negative images or facts about North Korea is part of a larger strategy dating to the Sunshine Policy and Korean summit of 2000. In this view, unification of North and South can’t be achieved if the South criticizes or acts in a manner that the North deems hostile.

“Kim Jong Il holds public executions to show the Kim family is omnipotent,” says Jae Jin Suh of the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul. “It is naive to think that Pyongyang will respond to a push by Seoul to change and treat its people better. We need to focus on what is effective, not what we think we should say.”

Of late, the South has stopped raising the North’s abuses in international bodies. In 2003, South Korea withdrew from a UN Geneva process when it required a vote on North Korea’s human rights record. In 2004, Seoul abstained from voting. A new South Korean defense white paper released this month after a three-year delay, deletes a former reference to the North Korean Army as the “main threat.”

Critics say that to stifle or disallow comment about the unpredictable Kim leaves the South in the position of being influenced or governed by Kim’s own whims. Supporters of Sunshine say that patience is needed, and a return to hostile accusations could create a standoff that would slow foreign investment in the South. Critics say millions are suffering now.

The taped executions took place near Hoeryang, along the Chinese border. South Korean intelligence officers have told Western reporters the tape is far too detailed to be a fake. Yet officially the tape’s authenticity is “still under investigation.”

North Korean refugees claim that an underground group called Youth League for Freedom shot the tape, which records about 104 minutes over two days.

The camera is held at mid-body and initial images are of a rush of dark winter coats, a thronging crowd, police officers pushing people into line. Some 1,500 persons appear scattered around a rocky ravine. At one point, a white “propaganda truck” pulls up and over a megaphone one hears a charge read out. The accused are described as prostitute traffickers. (Sources insist the executed were helping Koreans escape the North.)

In due course, white posts are hammered into the ground. Then two men are escorted from a tent. Their arms are tied to the post. People stand on top of bicycles to see. A woman is heard to say, “I can’t watch this.” A police chief’s voice calls out, “Aim, fire, fire, fire.” Nine shots by three soldiers ring out from behind the prisoners, who instantly fall. An official with a megaphone can be heard saying, “How pathetic is the end of these traitors of the fatherland.”

Such footage is rare, coming from one of the world’s most closed states. Since 1956, North Korea has been sorted into a hierarchy of those with greater or lesser adoration for the ruling Kim family. At the top is a “core class” of supporters, followed by a “wavering class” whose loyalty is questioned, and a “hostile class” that are outcast. The Kim family “recognizes only a part of the population,” notes Stephen Bradner, a veteran US adviser in Seoul. “The rest are considered disposable.”

Evidence of a system of gulags where hundreds of thousands of the hostile class live has been confirmed by satellite imagery. From 1995 to 1999, between 1 and 3 million starved to death. Detailed knowledge of the North is difficult to obtain.

Nearly half the geographical area is off limits. Distrust of foreigners is profound. A fifth of the population are alleged to be informers, and a half dozen security agencies compete with each other to quash dissent, say US sources.

What the tape shows, apart from punishment seemingly in excess of the alleged crime, is that the accused have no lawyer, are not allowed to speak, and have no appeal, says Abraham Lee, a human rights lawyer in Seoul who also heads Refuge Pnan, which offers sanctuary for refugees.

US and Japanese sources describe a practice of stuffing rocks in the mouths of the accused - making them unable to shout out last words against the regime.

Many activists express dismay at a disinterest in the fate of fellow Koreans. Gyeng-seob Oh, who runs the newsletter NKnet, says, “When I first saw the footage, I thought it would be front-page news. But South Korea, the most important market for this information, was not interested.”

The only public airing of the tape in Korea came March 25 in a basement room of the Seoul National Assembly Library. One refugee testified that Pyongyang had in recent years declared that executions should be kept indoors. A large public outdoor gathering suggests that a crackdown may be under way, experts mused.

Another refugee plaintively asked the group what South Koreans will say to North Koreans “once North Korea is liberated. “What will we say when they ask us, ‘What did you do to help?’ “

Yahoo! News - Kuwait Professor Gives Up on Speech Fight

By DIANA ELIAS, Associated Press Writer

KUWAIT CITY - A liberal university professor — tired of legal and verbal assaults from fundamentalists who say he mocks Islam — has given up his fight for freedom of speech in a country he says has become infested with the "germs and viruses of hatred and tyranny."

Ahmed al-Baghdadi — sentenced last week to a suspended one-year prison term for mocking Islam — said he has written his last newspaper column. Earlier, he said he would seek asylum in a Western country to protect his life, his family and his freedom of expression.

On Saturday, the Kuwait University political science professor told The Associated Press he also was considering less drastic options, such as retirement or spending a year abroad, which would be easier on him and his family.

"Writing and living in the shadow of fear is impossible, and dignity is above all," al-Baghdadi wrote in his final column Saturday.

He said legal battles have broken his only weapon — his pen — and there was nothing left for him but to surrender.

Al-Baghdadi’s decision came a week after the Appeals Court convicted him of mocking Islam and handed down a suspended one-year prison sentence, overturning an acquittal by a lower court. It also ordered him to pay a $6,825 deposit, which would be forfeited if he commits the same offense within the next three years.

Al-Baghdadi, an archrival of religious extremists who also took him to court in 1999, has appealed the verdict to the higher Cassation Court, but he said Saturday in his final column for the Al-Siyassah daily newspaper that he would not return to writing even if he won the case.

"It is not a matter of a court ruling here or a court ruling there," he wrote. "It is the sick climate that is filled with germs and viruses of hatred and tyranny."

The legal battle stemmed from a June 5, 2004, column in which al-Baghdadi wrote that he sent his son to an expensive foreign school rather than a state school because he did not want "ignorant" teachers to teach him "how to disrespect women and non-Muslims." Wrong teachings could lead his son to terrorism, he said.

"In short, I want to have a son with an education and a mind I can be proud of, not (a son) with backward thinking," he wrote.

Two Muslim fundamentalists complained to judicial authorities about the column and al-Baghdadi was tried and acquitted by a misdemeanor court.

The Appeals Court, however, ruled the professor had made "derogatory" comments about Islam by linking terrorism and "backward thinking" to religious classes at state schools.

For more than a decade, this small, oil-rich ally of Washington has been pulled between politically strong fundamentalists, who want to fully implement Sharia, or Islamic law, and the less powerful Westernized liberals, who call for more democracy and freedom of expression.

The 1962 constitution guarantees freedom of expression but laws penalize those who insult the country’s religion.

In his farewell column, al-Baghdadi said he could not play "the Kuwaiti roulette" by continuing to write without knowing when the next court case would come.

The U.S.-educated al-Baghdadi, who specializes in political Islam, has been campaigning for years against fundamentalists who he said "terrorize" writers and journalists.

"If terrorism spreads, nobody will be spared. Everyone could be gripped by the neck for a word or a joke unsuspiciously uttered, and accused of being against religion," he wrote in a December 1999 column.

That year, al-Baghdadi was convicted of blaspheming Islam when he wrote that the Prophet Mohammed initially failed to convert nonbelievers in the holy city of Mecca. Kuwait’s emir, Sheik Jaber Al Ahmed Al Sabah, pardoned the professor and he was released from prison after serving about half of his one-month sentence.

Here’s a good overview on the lack of freedom of speech in many countries, especially the Middle East. Would you be brave enough to write what you do if there was the possibility of punishment such as 14 years in an Iranian prison? Don’t take your freedom of speech, if you have it, for granted:

Scoop: William Fisher: Blogging In The Middle East

Tuesday, 15 March 2005

By William Fisher

In democracies throughout the world, ‘blogging’ - setting up personal websites, known as weblogs, able to receive comments from readers - has grown exponentially over the past few years.

In the United States, there are literally millions of ‘blogs’. Their growth has been accelerated by five main factors.

1. First, the number of home computers has grown enormously. Some 61% of adults in the U.S. have Internet access at home and 71% have computers.

2. Second, access to the online technology for creating a blog has become easier and simpler.

3. Third, the U.S. has a relatively high literacy rate.

4. Fourth, for the past decade - but particularly after the historic and controversial presidential election of 2000 - Americans have become increasingly cynical about reporting by newspapers, radio, and broadcast, cable and satellite television controlled by giant corporations.

5. Finally, America has become a deeply divided nation politically and socially. Citizens with widely divergent points of view have found blogging a way to express their ideas and join or create communities of like-minded bloggers.

When satellite television arrived, it was hailed by journalism watchers as the ‘the new media’. But, predictably, its novelty was short-lived. Now, there are indications that, over the next decade, the Internet generally, and blogging in particular, may become the ‘new new media’ - America’s primary source of news.

However, it’s not there yet - a recent survey Gallup for CNN showed that only one in four Americans are either very familiar or somewhat familiar with blogs. So the jury is still out on whether virtual reality will replace Gutenberg. However, trends point in that direction.

Not yet in the Greater Middle East, though there are many parallels. For example, blogging technology is available to anyone with access to the Internet, and content can easily be created in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and other languages. While home computer ownership is still embryonic, there is pretty solid anecdotal evidence of deep suspicion of government-owned ‘mainstream media’ that spurred growth in the ‘blogosphere’ elsewhere.

But there is at least one critical difference. In most of the countries in the Greater Middle East, using a personal weblog to express political dissent can land you in jail as easily as taking part in an unauthorized political protest in the public square.

Iran is one of the worst offenders. Recently, an Iranian weblogger was jailed for 14 years for ’spying and aiding foreign counter-revolutionaries’ after using his blog to criticize the arrest of other online journalists. Despite the risks, an estimated 75,000 Iranians among its five million Internet users maintain online ‘blogs’. Especially among middle class youth, they have become an important way for Iranians to express dissatisfaction. As in Iran, most countries of the region impose varying degrees of restriction on weblogs.

Saudi Arabia, where authorities block some 400,000 websites, is among the most restrictive. It is unclear how many blogsites there are in the Kingdom, but those that are accessible focus largely on political dissent.

Typical is a site called "The Religious Policeman". One recent posting said, "What Reforms? There aren’t any Reforms! The government promised to set up a higher commission on women’s affairs, guaranteed women participation in the recent National Dialogue Forum… .and in the National Human Rights Commission… the National Dialogue Forum… agreed to change nothing, the ‘team photo’ had no women in it, anyone with any sense left in tears."

In Iraq today, there are hundreds of blogsites, most run by Iraqis, some by American and other coalition soldiers. They are communist, monarchist, Kurdish, Assyrian, Islamist, Shiite, Sunni, nationalist and secularist. Their political positions range from full support for the U.S. invasion and occupation to rabid calls for jihad against the Americans.

For example, on the one-year commemoration of the start of the Iraq war, a 24-year-old woman computer programmer wrote in her "Baghdad Burning" blog, "Occupation Day, April 9, 2003: The day we sensed that the struggle in Baghdad was over and the fear of war was nothing compared to the new fear we were currently facing. It was the day I saw my first American tank roll grotesquely down the streets of Baghdad - through a residential neighborhood. And that was April 9 for me and millions of others…and the current Governing Council want us to remember April 9 fondly and hail it our ‘National Day’ … a day of victory … but whose victory?"

Mona El Tahawy, a columnist at the daily Asharq Al Awsat, writes that bloggers in Iran and Iraq "have inspired others in the Arab world… Despite working in an elite medium, requiring a computer and literacy", she said, "bloggers are the voice of the true Arab street, especially the young." But free expression comes at a price.

In Egypt, authorities have tightened their control of the country’s 600,000 web users. The webmaster of the English-language Al Ahram Weekly was sentenced to a year in prison for posting a sexually-explicit poem, and a 19-year-old student was sentenced to a month in jail for "putting out false information" after reporting a serial killer on the loose in Cairo.

In Syria, one blogger asked others to sign an online petition addressed to " The White House" and "The Elyses" (palace). "With the killing of Hariri in Lebanon" it said, "Syrian Ba’athists are out of control. Who’s next? Syria is inciting civil war in Lebanon." Another Syrian, calling himself "Kafka", wrote that President Assad’s speech "made the Syrian people forget that (he) "never cared to give a damn about us since he came to power… ."

In Tunisia, President Zine el-Abidine ben Ali has been determined to stamp out all cyber-dissidence. Among many others, a prominent lawyer was arrested for posting an article online. In Bahrain, two online forum moderators were arrested. Nonetheless, a Bahraini blogsite, called "Sabbah’s Blog" was busy organizing a "Middle East Bloggers Meetup". Dozens of enthusiastic comments were posted by readers.

Even in Afghanistan, poorest of the poor, blogging is beginning to catch on. One Afghan blog reports, "During the Taliban we didn’t have the Internet, but now there are about 25 net cafes in Kabul, and also some in Herat, Kandahar, and Balkh provinces. People are really interested to use the Internet but it’s too expensive… only rich people can afford it."

If political dissent via blogging has not yet risen to the level of "new, new media" in the western democracies, it is at least not yet constrained by government regulation (though Congress and the Justice Department have floated various proposals to do just that). In fact, there may be a bizarre inverse relationship between the suppression of free expression and the proliferation of blogs. In the U.S., the number of blogs has increased significantly during the Bush Administration, when millions of Americans feel passionately that their civil liberties are being eroded by the ‘war on terror’. That outcry has generated equally passionate response from bloggers on the right.

Maybe the lesson for heads of state in the Middle East is: Increase freedom of speech and reduce the challenge and expense of having to deal with this cyber uproar.

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William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. His weblog is THE WORLD ACCORDING TO BILL FISHER (http://billfisher.blogspot.com/)