Beijing 2008: Does the world AGREE in Human Rights VIOLATIONS?

In der ARD Deutschland:
Kommentar von Christoph Lütgert, NDR
zu Olympia in Peking
"Funktionäre und Sponsoren sollten sich schämen"
Internationale Olympia-Funktionäre verteidigen eine verbrecherische Diktatur, die sich die Spiele ergaunert hat und Menschenrechte mit Füßen tritt. Und die Sponsoren verhalten sich, als wäre der chinesische Markt wichtiger als die Menschen.
Worüber soll man sich mehr empören: Über eine verbrecherische Diktatur in China, die einen aufrichtigen Menschen, wie so viele andere Bürgerrechtler ins Gefängnis wirft - eine Diktatur, die Verbesserungen bei Menschenrechten und Pressefreiheit versprochen hatte, um die Olympischen Spiele für dieses Jahr zu ergattern, und die diese verlogenen Versprechen jetzt weltöffentlich bricht?
Oder soll man sich mehr über die internationalen Olympia-Funktionäre, auch aus Deutschland, empören, die diese Diktatur geradezu ermutigen, ruhig so weiter zu machen, sie sogar noch verteidigen.
Oder soll man sich besonders empören über Sponsoren wie den deutschen Volkswagen-Konzern, der das ganze Olympia-Spektakel in China auch noch mit einem Millionen-Aufwand und fünftausend Fahrzeugen sponsert, weil der chinesische Markt ja so wichtig ist und Menschenrechte dagegen nichts zählen?
Ins Gefängnis für die Wahrheit
Der heute verurteilte Bürgerrechtler Hu Jia - das war sein Vergehen - hatte nur die Wahrheit gesagt, er hatte Korruption und Verlogenheit des chinesischen Systems offen benannt.
Und ausgerechnet heute hat das deutsche Mitglied des Internationalen Olympischen Komitees, Walter Tröger, den Sportlern mit dem Ausschluss von den Wettkämpfen gedroht, sollten die bei den Olympischen Spielen offen gegen Menschenrechtsverletzungen in China protestieren. Der Sport dürfe sich nicht in die Politik einmischen. Die Sportler als meinungslose Leistungsautomaten in den Stadien - diesem Ideal frönen auch andere deutsche Spitzenfunktionäre.
Hatten wir doch schon mal 1936 in Deutschland. Da gab sich der Sport - in sauberer Trennung zur Politik - auch für Olympische Spiele her, als sei Nazi-Deutschland ein ganz normales Land. Deshalb sollten sich heute vor allem deutsche Funktionäre und deutsche Sponsoren schämen, dass sie so gar nichts aus dieser schändlichen Historie gelernt haben.




Chinese dissident gets 3½ years for essays
By Jim Yardley
Published in IHT: April 3, 2008
BEIJING: A Chinese court Thursday sentenced an outspoken human rights advocate to three and a half years in prison after ruling that his critical essays and comments about Communist Party rule amounted to inciting subversion, his lawyer said.
The conviction of Hu Jia, 34, quickly brought outside criticism of China at a time when the government is already facing international concern over its handling of the Tibetan crisis. Hu's case has been followed closely, especially in Europe, and critics say his conviction is part of a government crackdown to silence dissidents before Beijing plays host to the Olympics in August.
Hu is one of the most prominent human rights advocates in China and has volunteered to help AIDS patients and plant trees to fight desertification. In recent years, he has maintained regular contacts with dissidents and other advocates on issues including environmental protection and legal reform.
He was detained Dec. 27 and later charged with "incitement to subvert state power," a charge based on six essays and interviews in which he criticized the Communist Party. Hu wrote a long, blistering essay detailing how the police had tortured two people who had protested about having their homes illegally seized in Beijing.
Last year, Hu also co-wrote an article that criticized the Communist Party for failing to fulfill its promises to improve human rights before the Beijing Games, though that article apparently was not included as evidence.

China again cues up its propaganda machine
By Howard W. French
Published in IHT: Thursday, April 3, 2008
SHANGHAI: Mao Zedong announced the tune himself, in 1927, when he wrote: "A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay or painting a picture or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another."
For the next half-century, China was one of the most violent places on earth, and not just because of the vicious foreign invasion and civil war that swept the country, or the ceaseless purges of supposed traitors and class enemies. There was also the matter of language, which in China has been both an underrated means of violence and a vehicle for it.
Mao's state created a propaganda system built on a crude triage: a world of heroes who were unalterably and impossibly good, and an even larger one of villains who were irredeemably, cartoonishly bad. Over-the-top became the routine in official rhetoric. Enemies were called "monsters" and "cow ghosts," "snake spirits" and "running dogs." And in one campaign after another the public was called upon to "resolutely crush" or "relentlessly denounce" them.
This was a universe of variable geometry, where people were not to reason things out on their own, but to fall in line. Today's hero could be tomorrow's villain, with no clear evidence or explanation. The sole moral compass point was the immoral leader himself, Mao, who to this day remains a sacred cow whose likeness peers out from every bank note.
In recent years, it had seemed as if this movie had been retired, but last month the production was cued up once again. The bad guy this time has been the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, and the fact that outside China this villain is one of the world's most admired people has only caused the propagandists to ramp up the volume.
For the purpose of the cause he has been turned into a canine and called a "wolf in monk's robes," "a wolf with a human face and heart of a beast" and the "scum of Buddhism." In case anyone missed the message, the government has also called the struggle against the Dalai Lama "a life-and-death battle."
The Chinese public should by now recognize all the signs of an old-fashioned political campaign and, given the state's history of manipulation, immediately mark a long, skeptical pause.
It's not clear, though, if that's how it worked this time. The propaganda means of the Chinese state remain overwhelming, as is its inclination not just to shape opinion, but to corral it, playing on what the documentary filmmaker Tang Danhong called the "great Han chauvinism," referring to the dominant ethnic group, a chauvinism that has been evident throughout the Tibetan crisis.
After watching the first week of heavily propagandized television coverage here over dinner recently - reporting that focused almost exclusively on images of lawless Tibetan rioters smashing shops in Lhasa, along with the images of ethnic Han victims of the violence, typically recovering in the hospital - a senior Chinese newspaper editor eagerly questioned me about what was "really happening in Tibet."
The question was scarcely out of his mouth when he added: "When people see the kind of one-sided propaganda that's been in the media here, nobody trusts it anymore."
This might be reassuring, were it true, but the next few days provided many causes for doubt. A young Chinese acquaintance who is a journalist sounded a troubled note in an e-mail message to me: "I read some news reports recently and am confused why the Western media reports on Tibet are inconsistent with the facts? Like they only report on the Chinese police but not the thugs attack the innocent people and the police? And even worse, why are they reporting lot of false and prejudiced news?"
The irony here, of course, is that Western coverage, whatever its faults, generally detailed the street violence in Lhasa, despite being barred access to Tibet by a country that made a big to-do last year over having supposedly lifted restrictions on the movements of international journalists in China.
Unlike the heavily controlled domestic press, the Western media also reported on the largely peaceful sympathy protests that unfolded over a broad stretch of the Tibetan plateau. They generally sought to give at least two sides to the story and questioned Beijing's assertions about Tibetan protesters and about their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, in the textbook way an independent press should.
Beyond the headlines, though, this crisis tells us a lot about China, and although the government may still have the means to control opinion, the more strenuously it has pressed its case, the less the picture of the country concurs with the image that China so eagerly wishes to promote of itself to the world.
China has invested hugely in its hosting of the Olympic Games in August with the idea of introducing itself as an overwhelming success story: increasingly prosperous, harmonious and forward-looking. The first statement is certainly true, but one needn't be an enemy of China, as the propagandists would have it, to question the other two.
This may yet turn out to be China's century, but it seems clearer than ever there's a lot of work to do, reforming an awfully rickety system, rethinking policies built on bald fictions, such as the "autonomous regions" in China's west, and learning to deal with criticism without turning it into a matter of ethnic pride or betrayal.
The official slogan of the Games may be "one world, one dream," but that's not the feeling one gets listening to the state's organs. It is an ugly, wound-nursing nationalism one hears. "So strong," said the filmmaker Tang, "that there's almost no introspection, not even among Han intellectuals."