Bush faults China over rights and detentions

Bush faults China over rights and detentions
By Steven Lee Myers
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
SEOUL: On the eve of his arrival in Beijing for the opening of the Olympic Games, President George W. Bush on Wednesday raised "deep concerns" about freedoms and human rights in China and said the United States opposed China's detention of political activists and dissidents.
The White House on Wednesday released the critical remarks, which are in a speech Bush is to give in Bangkok on Thursday before he heads to Beijing.
"The United States believes the people of China deserve the fundamental liberty that is the natural right of all human beings," Bush says in the speech. "So America stands in firm opposition to China's detention of political dissidents, human rights advocates and religious activists."
Bush has undertaken a balancing act in recent days toward China and its human rights record, meeting with a prominent dissident in Washington but brushing aside calls for him to boycott the Olympics' opening ceremonies on Friday, as some other world leaders are doing.
The idea of giving a Reaganesque "tear down this wall" speech on human rights in China - as members of Congress and others have called for Bush to do - has been abandoned as potentially insulting to the president's hosts.
The timing of the release of the speech may suggest that Bush was still mindful of the pressures on him, wanting to air some stark public criticisms while he was in Asia but also putting some time between them and his arrival in Beijing. In the speech, Bush said China would change "on its own terms and in keeping with its own history and traditions. Yet change will arrive." The White House said the speech by Bush, to be made during his last trip to Asia as president, "puts together what the president has been saying for seven and a half years, but does it in a very focused way in a few paragraphs in a speech." The text of the speech was released as Bush flew from South Korea to Thailand.
Earlier on Wednesday in South Korea, his first stop on a visit to Asia focused on the Olympics, Bush also chided China for restricting religious freedoms, while at the same time insisting that his attendance at the Games was a gesture of respect for the Chinese people.
In Seoul, Bush said that the Olympics should not be used as an occasion to criticize the country's authoritarian policies. But the main speech in Bangkok - which is being seen as his main address of his Asia tour - contains more direct criticisms of China.
For the most part, during his stop in South Korea, Bush focused on relations with North Korea, saying that North Korea had not yet done enough to merit removal from an American list of governments that sponsor terrorism, raising the prospect of new delays in the dismantling of North Korea's nuclear program.
Appearing in Seoul with President Lee Myung Bak of South Korea, Bush spoke in unusually personal terms about North Korea - a country he once included in an "axis of evil" with Iran and Iraq - and its leader, Kim Jong Il.
He suggested that the country's commitment to giving up nuclear weapons remained unclear even to two leaders involved in the talks that led to an agreement to do so.
"I don't know whether or not they're going to give up their weapons," he said, speaking to reporters with Lee in a garden at the Blue House, the compound here that is now the office of the South Korean president. "I really don't know. I don't think either of us knows."
For the first time in years, Bush also discussed at length the phrase "axis of evil," a wording that has been widely criticized as brazen and simplistic.
When asked whether North Korea had fundamentally changed since he first linked it to Iraq and Iran in 2002 as an axis of the world's most dangerous countries, Bush said that North Korea continued to have a repressive government and that its leader had yet to disclose fully the country's nuclear weapons work.
But he added that there were signs of progress, including the destruction of the cooling tower at the plutonium reactor at Yongbyon, which was filmed by television crews invited for the occasion.
"And my hope is that the 'axis of evil' list no longer exists," Bush said, referring somewhat ambiguously to the current status of North Korea and Iran as international pariahs. "That's my hope, for the sake of peace. And it's my hope for, you know, for the sake of our children."
In June, the Bush administration announced it intended to remove North Korea from a list of countries designated as enemies and sponsors of terrorism, at least symbolically lifting some sanctions after North Korea produced a declaration of its secretive nuclear work.
In a series of reciprocal measures, the North Koreans were then supposed to agree to a system of verifying the dismantlement of all nuclear programs, something that conservative critics of the agreement view with deep suspicion.
The administration was required to give Congress 45 days' notice of the removal from the designation as a terrorist sponsor. That deadline expires Sunday, and Bush made it clear that he would not formally remove North Korea until its government agreed to the verification measures, which remain the subject of negotiations, according to administration officials.
"In order to get off the list, the axis-of-evil list, the North Korean leader's going to have to make some certain decisions," he said.
Bush has rarely repeated the phrase after he first introduced it in the State of the Union address more than six years ago.
North Korea went on to test a nuclear weapon in 2006, and the Bush administration then joined South Korea, Japan, China and Russia in "six party" talks to persuade North Korea to reverse its decision to become a nuclear power.
Bush arrived in Seoul on Tuesday night for a visit that has highlighted his close relationship with Lee, a conservative elected only five months ago. He was greeted by sizable protests both for and against the United States and his policies more specifically.
Both leaders made note of the protests the night before. Lee noted the thousands who rallied in favor of closer relations. "And, of course, behind those people, there were those who were sort of opposed," he went on, prompting laughter. "However, the number was minimal, sir."
Having recently resolved disputes over the import of U.S. beef and the formal naming of islands disputed between Korea and Japan, the two men appeared closely aligned on North Korea, trade and other issues.
In a joint statement, the two leaders also included a call for improved human rights in North Korea, a significant diplomatic gesture that Lee's liberal predecessors had shunned as too confrontational with the North. North Korea reacts angrily to any outside criticism of its rights record, considering it interference in internal affairs.
Choe Sang-hun contributed reporting from Seoul and Graham Bowley from New York.