In April 2004, Shi Tao e-mailed a pro-democracy Web site in the United States about a government regulation ordering the country’s media outlets to down play the upcoming 15th anniversary of the military crackdown on pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square. Authorities arrested him seven months later, charging him with “providing state secrets to foreign entities.”
China has a history of cracking down on freedom of expression through restricting journalism. It has implemented broad censorship of the Internet. Authorities used information provided by the host of Shi Tao’s e-mail account, Yahoo!, to convict him in April 2005.
China: Crackdown in Preparation for 60th Anniversary Party
In preparation for the October 1st celebration of the 60th anniversary of Communist rule, China has initiated a crackdown of human rights activists, press and private citizens in an effort to eliminate disruptions or protests that would reflect negatively on the country’s message of social harmony. The repression has included the increased surveillance, harassment and imprisonment of activists, students, religious practitioners, and ethnic minorities. An estimated several hundred individuals are either under surveillance, house arrest or are being forcibly removed from Beijing. We have received reports that petitioners are being held in informal jails or detention centers outside of the city. Similar to arrangements made for the 2008 Olympic Games, up to one million volunteers are assisting police in security efforts throughout the capital to ensure that there are no threats to security or displays of dissent. As a precautionary measure, tourists have also been denied access to Tibet until after October 8.
Local government and security forces have also been tasked to prevent the entrance of activists to the capital prior to this week’s festivities. These measures are accompanied by an internet crackdown, targeting mainly free web-based online tools, in the hopes of preventing access to websites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Some foreign media and human rights organizations have also been targeted by email viruses.
The Chinese government wants to celebrate the country’s success while ensuring that no dissenting view or complaint is heard. As a result, what the Chinese government is highlighting is its own fear of giving the Chinese people a real voice to talk about the reality of their lives, good and bad. – Roseann Rife, Amnesty International’s Asia Pacific deputy director
There is definitely a pattern of virus attacks in the run-up to important dates on the Chinese political calendar. Whether the government is behind it, closes its eyes to it, supports it or has nothing to do with it is unclear. There are also patriotic hackers, so there is no way to know for sure who is behind it.- Nicholas Bequelin, Human Rights Watch
Food Crisis in Africa The food crisis in Africa is getting worse every day, as has been reported over the past few days. The World Food Programme (WPF) is currently facing an unprecedented $3 billion gap in funding, forcing them to cut rations in programs throughout the world. These cuts are leaving millions of vulnerable people without stable access to food. The World Bank is predicting that a historic high of 1.02 billion people will be left hungry this year.
Last week for instance, the BBC reported that the WPF would soon be closing 12 feeding centers for mothers and children in Somalia because they had run out of money to run these programs . Meanwhile, in Kenya, the WPF will be forced to start reducing food rations to almost four million people next month. And in the Central African Republic, a dangerous combination of high poverty levels, insecurity in the north of the country and a drop in diamond production due to falling demand for gems is leading to an alarming rate of malnutrition, according to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). Sadly, these are just a few examples of the dire need for humanitarian aid throughout the continent.
CARE International, in noting that more than 20 million in the Horn of Africa are in need of emergency food assistance, warns that the international community must act now in order to avoid a full-blown humanitarian disaster. In countries embroiled in conflict, such as Somalia or the Central Africa Republic, or in countries just recently recovering from internal turmoil, like Kenya, humanitarian aid agencies are often the only way that people can have access to food. The combination of rising world food prices, climate change and continuing violence and instability throughout the region will have serious repercussions on people’s ability to feed themselves.
Overheard
There is more than enough food in the world, yet today, more than one billion people are hungry. This is unacceptable […] the food crisis is far from over. Ever more people are denied the food they need because prices are stubbornly high, because their purchasing power has fallen due to the economic crisis, or because rains have failed and reserve stocks of grain have been eaten. – UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, September 26, 2009
Hunger is on the rise. More than a billion people wake up each day without enough to eat. The threat of continued record high food prices in the developing world and global recession have devastated poor nations and left populations weak and facing severe malnutrition and even starvation – Josette Sheeran, WFP Executive Director, September 26, 2009
Repeated drought, failed rains and harvests, and ongoing conflict and insecurity are destroying people’s coping mechanisms. If you have one bad year, people can survive. They sell some assets to buy food and make it through the hard times, and hope to make it back the next year. But three bad years? People can’t recover. – Mohammed Khaled, CARE Regional Emergency Coordinator for East Africa, September 23, 2009
September 28:Press Conference with Ms. Josette Sheeran, Executive Director, World Food Programme; and Mr. Jeffrey Sachs, Millennium Villages Project
September 28: Fourth round of U.N. Climate Change Talks in Bangkok (to Oct. 9).
September 29: U.N. Human Rights Council debates Goldstone report on war crimes in Gaza in Geneva
October 1: 60th Anniversary of Communist Party rule over mainland China
October 4: Deadline for militants in Niger delta to disarm in exchange for amnesty
October 5: Official celebrations for World Habitat Day will be held in Washington, DC. Amnesty International to launch campaign on Forced Evictions in Africa
Jennifer Ferreri and Juliette Rousselot contributed to this post.
Human Rights Flashpoints is a weekly column about countries at risk of escalating human rights violations and is brought to you by AIUSA’s Crisis Prevention and Response team.
Since July 8, Ilham Tohti, editor of the Web site Uighur Online and a professor at Central Nationalities University in Beijing, has been held incommunicado by Chinese authorities. He was interrogated after posting articles on the site and his personal blog about a clash between members of China’s majority ethnic Han group and Uighurs in Guangdong Province on June 26.
The Uighurs are a Muslim minority group in China most of whom live in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in northwestern China. For two decades now Chinese authoirities have been pursuing a campaign in the area against “terrorism, separatism and religious extremism,” in the process have diluting the Uighur population and severely restricting the civil and cultural rights of Uighurs. Ilham Tohti’s case is in no way isolated. Although authorities in XUAR set up a media center for foreign journalists in Urumqi during the recent violence, reporters have been prevented – by police, other security forces or even just people on the street – from reporting freely in the XUAR. One New York Times reporter described tour guides in Kashgar who refused to lead him around the city and translators who feared repercussions if they were to translate certain conversations. Clearly Chinese authorities fear what the people of Kashgar might say to journalists, but what’s even worse is that they’re causing residents in the XUAR to fear expressing their opinions.
All this repression suggests the unliklihood of an independent inquiry into the events last month in Xinjiang as well as open, fair trials for those who have been detained. Take action now for Ilham Tohti!
Saturday marks the 41st birthday of Chinese journalist and poet Shi Tao. It will be the fifth birthday he celebrates in prison. He is serving serving a 10-year prison term for sending an e-mail summarizing a memo advising journalists on how to handle the 15th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananman Square crackdown.
Chinese authorities have not lessened their restrictions on Internet freedom since Shi Tao was arrested on November 24, 2004. This was particularly apparent on the days immediately before and after June 4 of this year, the 20th anniversary of the Tiananman Square crackdown. The government blocked foreign news Web sites like CNN and the BBC and social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook in anticipation of the day. Controls over other media outlets, including newspapers and magazines, have also intensified in recent years.
While prison conditions have improved slightly for Shi Tao in the past two years, freedom may still be as much as five years away. An appeal to review Shi Tao’s case was rejected last year. His mother’s request for medical parole for Shi Tao–because of a stomach condition that has worsened as a result of a poor prison diet–was also rejected. Don’t let Shi Tao spend any more birthdays in jail!
By Tony Cruz, AIUSA’s Business and Economic Relations Group
Yahoo! held its annual shareholder meeting on June 25th — the first meeting with the company’s new CEO, Carol Bartz. In the meeting, Ms. Bartz attempted to show a new face of Yahoo; a bolder and progressive “no-nonsense” Yahoo. It was my third Yahoo! shareholder meeting and a chance to see if Yahoo!’s new face meant new business practices that would respect human rights. I presented two questions:
Since 2006, what concrete steps has Yahoo taken to address the problem of Internet censorship in China?
Will you publicly support the Global Online Freedom Act; legislation that would give you the power to fight the Chinese government?
Okay, I’m going to go real simple here. Yahoo is not incorporated to fix China. I’m sorry. It wasn’t incorporated to fix China. It was incorporated to give people a free flow of information. Ten years ago the company made a mistake but you can’t hold us up as the bad boy forever. We have worked better, harder, faster than most companies to respect human rights and to try and make a difference. But it is not our job to fix the Chinese government. It’s that simple. We will respect human rights, we will do what’s right, but we’re not going to take on every government in the world as our mandate. That’s not the mandate that the shareholders gave us.
Not only did Ms. Bartz avoid answering my questions, she also seemed to have misconstrued their meaning. Amnesty International members are not asking Yahoo! to “fix” China. And we haven’t singled out Yahoo! in our campaign against Internet censorship. We’ve targeted Microsoft and Google, too. Because Yahoo!’s actions have led to the highly publicized imprisonment of two Chinese dissidents, we’ve asked the company to call for the release of Shi Tao and to adopt business practices that actively support human rights. You can take action right now to remind them.
After a civil suit was settled with Shi Tao’s family, Yahoo! attempted to “fix” itself. Yahoo! hired a new CEO and implemented a new marketing strategy to distance itself from its tarnished image. The company even created a Business and Human Rights Program. But Shi Tao remains in prison and Yahoo! continues to censor its search engine in China. (I wonder how that technology has helped the Chinese government to block browser searches using the key-word Uighur this week.) So, I still don’t understand how Yahoo! “will respect human rights” and “will do what’s right” when the company hasn’t addressed the problem of Internet censorship in China – a problem that limits innovation and restricts freedom of expression.
The Internet is vital in bringing change to China, and increasingly so around the world. It appears the Obama administration agree, since they objected to China’s mandated web filtering software. Former Amnesty USA Chair Chip Pitts has been blogging about tech companies and democratic rights and the reaction in the US Senate, following the news that Nokia provided technology to the Iranian government that was used to monitor and repress protesters and dissidents. Hmm… doesn’t that sound familiar?
Pitts makes a good point: whether the Internet’s “liberalizing effect” on the flow of information will continue greatly depends on how Internet technology companies, NGOs and governments interact. Take action and remind Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft that they, too, bear the burden of promoting the freedom of information no matter where they operate. It’s time to get behind the Global Online Freedom Act.
This question was part of the opening remarks in a talk given several years ago by one of the attorneys representing the Uighurs at Guantanamo. We didn’t know the answer. But since then we’ve learned a lot.
Over the past few years, information about the Guantanamo Uighurs has filtered out into the mainstream media. (After more than seven years, 13 Uighurs are still at Gitmo). While not exactly a household word, “Uighur” became something that people might have “heard something about somewhere.”
Now a frightful window has opened up on the Uighurs’ world in Western China. The ethnic violence that broke out this past weekend did not come out of nowhere. It came from years of brutal oppression. It erupted when Uighurs took to the streets (peacefully) to protest the stalled investigation into the deaths of two Uighur factory workers. The demonstration was violently suppressed, and the Uighurs fought back.
This is a Uighur woman desperate to find out what has happened to her husband and four brothers. The Chinese came into their home while they were eating dinner and took them away.
The Uighurs call their homeland — a vast, resource-rich region of central Asia — East Turkistan. Since it was annexed by China, it is formally known as the Xinjian Uyghur “Autonomous” Region. There is no “autonomy.” You can read all about it:
Video below on YouTube. The men on the ground are Uighurs, the others are shouting in Chinese, “….. you …. Uighurs…..” Warning: Video contains graphic content
By Tony Cruz, Amnesty International USA’s Business & Economic Relations Group
Starting July 1, 2009, the Chinese government is mandating all PC makers such as Hewlett Packard and Dell install software that filters Internet content. The government says it is to help give parents control over inappropriate material, such as pornography, but Business Week reports that the software blocks political and religious websites. And after the government of China’s recent internet crackdown on the 20th anniversary of Tienanmen Square earlier this month, and the widely known controversial self-censorship of companies such as Yahoo and Google, it is clear that the Chinese government continues to use technology to suppress freedom of expression.
For the last three years, I’ve represented Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) at Yahoo! and Google’s shareholder meetings addressing their decisions to self-censor. I’ve asked executives to support freedom of expression on the Internet through such legislation as the Global Online Freedom Act (H.R. 275) which could help IT companies resist information requests by the Chinese government.
Imagine this scenario: if Yahoo! and Google backed this legislation three years ago, the choice facing HP and Dell today would be an easy one — respect human rights or go to jail. But they have not taken concrete steps to rectify their decision to self-censor, a decision that even Google co-founder Sergei Brin calls a “mistake”. In fact, AIUSA recently pulled out of the multi-stakeholder initiative we joined in 2007, with the goal of establishing voluntary principles to promote and respect human rights on the Internet, because we saw no tangible results.
This week we’re able to see in real-time how critical the Internet is for Iranians as a forum for protest and communication. In China, the Internet is equally vital in voicing dissent and discussing justice and rights. If PC companies cave into the Chinese government’s demands to install software that filters internet content, then it could be the next step towards stifling this budding online democratic movement towards accountability, transparency, citizens’ right to participate.
So what’s next for PC companies? Will they be pioneers in socially responsible business practices or will they bend to the Great Firewall of China?
It seems Chinese authorities were busy today. While people around the world commemorated the 20th anniversary of the pro-democracy demonstrations and ensuing massacre at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, police reportedly swarmed into the sqaure, in order to nip any potential protest in the bud. Numerous websites were blocked, including Twitter, Hotmail, and Flickr, along with many Chinese blogs and other sites. A former Tiananmen protester was sent on a government-sponsored “vacation” to keep him from carrying out a hunger strike.
Although the Chinese government seems to be doing all it can to help people forget about the people who died in the massacre, that didn’t stop 150,000 people from attending a vigil in Hong Kong, and it didn’t stop supporters in Washington, DC, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, from speaking out about human rights in China.
Regardless of what one thinks of the demands the protesters were making 20 years ago today, no one can deny that there was a massacre, and nothing can justify killing peaceful protesters. The country may have come a long way economically since 1989, but China’s human rights record still leaves a lot to be desired.
As I’m sure many of you know, June 3-4, 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of the 1989 military crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.
Two decades after the crackdown, about 50 people who were involved in the demonstrations are believed to remain in prison. The Chinese authorities continue to refuse to carry out an open, independent and impartial inquiry into the events of 1989, and no one has been brought to justice for their role in the crackdown. Attempts to mark the anniversary of the crackdown have been suppressed, and public debate or discussion of the events is banned.
This Thursday, Amnesty International is co-sponsoring an event on Capitol Hill to commemorate the 20th anniversary. Speakers will include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as well as survivors of the Tiananmen crackdown and other prominent faith, government and human rights leaders, as well as Amnesty’s own T. Kumar.
As some people have alluded to in the comments to this post by the Editors, bloggers are most definitely in need of press freedom just as much as “regular” journalists. Just take a look at Shi Tao, a blogger who’s been in prison in China since 2004 for sending an email.
Every time I read a blog, or post to one, I think about how lucky I am to be able to say what I want in those posts and comments, and how glad I am that those other bloggers whose thought-provoking words I read have not been silenced or jailed by their governments. But there are so many bloggers and other journalists who are not free to share their ideas with us, whose ability to shine the light on human rights abuses has been cut off.
On this day, I not only want to remember Shi Tao and the others and hope they are soon freed–I want to do something to make that happen!
Amnesty International works to protect human rights worldwide. We have more than 2.2 million supporters, activists and volunteers in over 150 countries, and are completely independent from government, corporate or national interests.
Learn more about us at AmnestyUSA.org »
Simon Maghakyan is a Eurasia country specialist with Amnesty International USA. He is a Political Science graduate student at University of Colorado where he studies international relations, ethnic conflict, foreign policy, and indigenous peoples’ political structures. See all »
