Dermod Travis: Stephen Harper must speak out forcefully on human rights in China
By Dermod Travis
On December 2, when Prime Minister Stephen Harper lands in Beijing for his first official visit to China, he could do far worse than emulating fellow conservative leader Ronald Reagan during the former president’s visit to West Berlin in 1987. Reagan’s trip will forever be etched in history by those famous four words: “tear down this wall”.
What words, indeed what acts, will define the prime minister’s visit to China? As Harper prepares to depart, he must be guided first and foremost by an impartial analysis of the interrelationship of Canada’s economic ties with China and the Communist regime’s brutal human-rights record. The two are as inseparable with China as they are with Zimbabwe or Burma.
Business groups such as the Canada China Business Council have argued forcefully that raising China’s human-rights record is bad for Canadian business. But if raising human-rights issues has had any impact on Canadian business, the record indicates that Canada should be doing it even more often and more loudly.
From 1997 to 2008, Canadian exports to China increased from $2 billion to nearly $12.7 billion in 2008. Exports are up a further seven percent for the first five months of 2009. The increase has been constant, except in 2002, when exports fell by $400 million. As a percentage of total Canadian exports, China’s share has tripled to 2.71 percent of total exports during this period.
Yet, when Prime Minister Harper meets with Chinese president Hu Jintao in Beijing, 1,381 imprisoned Tibetans will still be awaiting trials following last year’s predominately peaceful uprising across Tibet. Two others were executed by firing squad last month.
The few trials that have taken place have been conducted in secrecy and in the absence of basic legal oversight and due process. In 2008, a number of Chinese lawyers were even prevented from defending Tibetan citizens in court.
Human Rights Watch has revealed a judicial system in China so highly politicized as to preclude any possibility of fair trials for Tibetans. And while the Chinese regime rejects the term “political prisoners”, these 1,381 Tibetans are indeed political prisoners in their own homeland.
It’s unlikely that the prime minister will be allowed to travel freely to Tibet on this visit. However, if he were to visit Tibet he would find that religious repression in Tibet is “high” and that the Chinese government’s control over monasteries and other religious institutions is “extraordinarily tight”, as reported in October by the U.S. state department.
A common theme throughout the state department’s International Religious Freedom Report 2009 is the interference by Chinese authorities in the traditional norms and depth of study of Tibetan Buddhism. This includes limiting the number of monks at monasteries; limiting where monks can travel for religious training—ranging from refusing to issue passports for foreign travel through to refusing permission to travel within a single county; co-opting the education of young reincarnated lamas; and pressuring government employees to withdraw their children from all forms of religious education.
This report also documents numerous cases of Buddhist monks and nuns “subjected to extrajudicial punishments, such as beatings and deprivation of food, water, and sleep for long periods”, whereas “the bodies of some people...who died during interrogation were disposed of secretly rather than being returned to their families”.
The U.S. state department’s 2008 Human Rights Report on China notes that “other serious human rights abuses included...the use of forced labor, including prison labor” and that “The government continued to monitor, harass, detain, arrest, and imprison journalists, writers, activists, and defense lawyers and their families, many of whom were seeking to exercise their rights under the law.”
When the prime minister meets President Hu, he must move beyond pro forma statements of support for Tibet in order to make real progress toward a fair and lasting resolution for the Tibetan people and to make Tibet a substantive and results-oriented part of the visit’s agenda. We hope that he will also speak forcefully for the millions of Chinese reformers who seek a free and democratic future for China.
In 1990, Nelson Mandela visited Canada to pay special tribute to our government for continuing “along the path charted by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who acted against apartheid because he knew that no person of conscience could stand aside as a crime against humanity was committed”.
Canadians can only hope that the acts that will ultimately define the prime minister’s visit to China will clearly show with the Chinese government that Canada does not stand aside when crimes against humanity are committed.
Dermod Travis is the executive director of the Canada Tibet Committee.
Comments
7 Comments
daveA
Nov 23, 2009 at 4:19pm
This article reeks with hypocrisy. How convenient, to point the finger at the China situation, while Canadian mining companies and clothing companies, with not a word by our own media, tacitly support the Honduran crack-down on working people in that country, disappearances, outright murder of trade unionists and progressive-minded people, in order to keep wages at the poverty levlel so that these same companies will enjoy super profits. A coup, engineered by the ruling class, in order to remove a democratically-elected president. Shades of Haiti and Canadian complicity in human rights violations there, also. Let's have some real reportage for a change!
Dreamer
Nov 23, 2009 at 5:45pm
The elites could'nt care about issues like human-rights, and certaintly not Harper, as he stated there was no history of colonization in Canada, as I type this with my Indian status card, reminding me I am a ward of the Canadian State, and Canada continues to deny our rights to our lands and resources.
hypocrisy
Nov 23, 2009 at 6:50pm
Wouldn't hurt if Harper spoke out about the stick in his own eye (human rights here in Canada) before criticizing the spot of dust in your China's eye
Footpath
Nov 23, 2009 at 6:58pm
Walls of dictatorship always end up being useless and torn down. People from all continents start standing up, it's growing...
March 10, 2008, marked the beginning of a wave of protests against the repressive policies of the Chinese government in Tibet. Since then a large number of Tibetans have been silenced by the Chinese authorities. Many of them "disappeared" or have been detained simply because of peacefully voicing their dissent with the Chinese government”˜s repressive policies in Tibet.
By March 2009, one year since the demonstrations, more than 1200 are believed to be held in detention or their whereabouts are unknown. This campaign is a symbol of solidarity for these Tibetans. Their missing voices must be heard again. And you can help! Speak out for the silenced prisoners in Tibet.
Visit Missing Voices at http://www.missingvoices.net/ to find out how you can speak out for silenced prisoners in Tibet!
For additional information, visit http://www.savetibet.org/action-center/protest-logs to view ICT's protest logs and political prisoner list.
bigdaddy
Nov 24, 2009 at 1:54pm
wander why those tibetans are in the prison at the first place? They are the f*cking roiters and murders. they killed innoncent people to get
attention to their seperation goal. Canadia has Quebec problems too,
wandering what Canandian govenment will do if the french in Quebec
start burning and killing...
bigdady's mom
Nov 25, 2009 at 2:09am
Comeon, PRC has specialized in killing, not the Tibetans. The PRC has killed hundreds of thousand Tibetans at the time of invading Tibet (between 1949 to 1959), on the name of cultural revolution hundreds more were massacred, in 1987 and 1989 many more peaceful protesters who were struggling for just greater freedom were killed, starting from March 2008 hundreds more Tibetans were killed for their involvement in peaceful protest and after that killing occurred in Xinjiang as well. Those were the cases of minorities... the PRC even hadn't shown a slightest sympathy towards its own nationality by killing countless at Tainaman Square... If you go on digging more about it ... somewhere you may also find your own relative killed under PRC's regime.
Tom Brodbeck
Nov 12, 2010 at 3:24pm
Look, there you guys go again just assuming that China is some sort of totalitarian state. Good grief, you guys are totally clueless .
I live here in China. It’s FAR from a totalitarian state. Want to know something that’s going to surprise you? It’s freer than Canada because the rules and laws governing this country are less “developed” than those of western nations. There is no need to “defect” as though this nation was even remotely similar to, say, 1960?s East Germany. There are no secret police abducting people in the middle of the night. There are no bread lines. There are no armed soldiers standing on every street corner. In fact, it’s MUCH safer than Canada. You can walk in any neighbourhood at any time of day or night whether it’s poor or affluent (although there really aren’t neighbourhoods the same way you might think of them ) It doesn’t matter if you live in Uruumqi or Hangzhou, Haerbin or Hainan”¦ this place is perfectly safe and remarkably harmonious especially when compared to Canada . The ONLY thing that you can’t do where the government is concerned is act to undermine it. That’s it. So it’s one-party-rule”¦ so what ? Look at what we get for having multiple parties arguing with each other over even the most trivial of things in Canada. Nothing gets done quickly and now they’re starting to micro-manage our lives more and more with the introduction of the nanny state.
Human Rights abuses? Why, because they “stole” Tibe ? Gee”¦ why does that sound familiar? Three continents were stolen and attempts were made to steal two others. Further, you’re living on one of those stolen continents and to this day the people it was stolen from live in misery, poverty, and violence. Get off your high horse. The real irony is that those same people have more reason to “defect” to China than the other way around these days.
Maybe you’re too old to realize this but it’s not 1960 and China has come a long, long way since then. Nobody gets executed for trying to defect (if they ever actually did)
This guy came out of Hong Kong. Hong Kong is no gulag. I’m not sure how many ways there are to say that but you guys just can’t seem to get it through your heads. Mainland Chinese need a passport to go to Hong Kong which, if this guy was wanted for being a political “criminal”, he never would have come into possession of one. Assuming of course that he’s not actually from Hong Kong in fact. Hong Kong itself is far more “developed” than the average Canadian city and to use the word defect in that case is like saying that somebody from New York wanted to defect to Winnipeg.
You guys really have no clue at all about China or life in it. You seem to think it’s roughly 1960 and that there are Chinese secret police on every street corner. You go yet even further by raising some human rights issues which, last I checked, were just as much a part of Canadian life to this day. Then you try to claim moral superiority by virtue of being Canadian and being, therefore , from a more ”˜enlightened’ society. You don’t really know what is actually illegal in terms of political crimes in China. Before you go on about the human rights abuses as you see them, maybe you should research what is actually illegal to do here and what isn’t.