Human Dignity Ultimately Indivisible
China's role in Sudan, Burma, North Korea, Iran and
Taiwan
Remarks by Hon. David Kilgour,
J.D.
In recent weeks, the world
has witnessed catastrophes of nature in China
and Burma
beyond the ability of most of us to comprehend. For what happened in Sichuan province, the thoughts, sympathies and prayers of
all of us here today and across Canada
go unreservedly to all families of the victims and survivors.
Let me also mention here my
strong respect for the people of China generally. Canadians identify
with their history, including their humiliation by major world powers during
more than a century, with their hard work, patience, arts, language, poetry and
literature, early exploration of much of the world, success with agriculture
and many other accomplishments. We are delighted that more than a million
Canadian citizens today are of origin in China.
People vs. Party-state
No-one should confuse the Chinese people with
their unelected government. The differences many of us have with the
latter in terms of human dignity, good governance, rule of law, freedom of
speech and democracy have nothing to do with our regard for the former. The
party-state of China
persecutes large communities of its own citizens: Falun
Gong, democracy activists, ethnic minorities, world religions - Tibetan
Buddhists, Muslim Uighurs and Christians, human
rights defenders, journalists who write the truth, and internet bloggers. The government of China is among the worst human
rights violators. In its encouragement of ‘anything goes” capitalism over three
decades, moreover, it has also allowed the air, soil and water to be polluted
incredibly, against the health and esthetic needs of all Chinese people.
The Falun Gong
community, which began in 1992 as a blend of ancient Chinese spiritual and
exercise traditions, since mid-1999 has been persecuted more and worse than any
other group. David Matas and
I concluded in an independent study after examining 53 kinds of
proof that since 2001 the government of China and its agencies have killed thousands
of Falun Gong practitioners, without any form of
prior trial, and then sold their vital organs for large sums of money, often to
'organ tourists' from wealthy countries (Our report is available in nineteen
languages at www.organharvestinvestigation.net).
How the International Olympic
Committee could award the 2008 Olympic Games to such a regime is thus difficult
to understand. The focus in this talk is on its close partnerships with
some of the most despotic governments on earth, which enable them to better
oppress their own people and to increase thereby the risk to world peace in
various regions of the world:
SUDAN
The genocide in Sudan's province of Darfur ongoing since April, 2003
has in all probability cost the lives of more than 400,000 African Darfurians from bombs, bullets and related causes, such as
starvation. Beijing continues to assist Sudan's president Omar al-Bashir
in numerous ways, including, financing and supplying arms in exchange for
taking most of Sudan's
oil production at much-reduced prices. It officially sold about $80 million in
weapons, aircraft and spare parts to Sudan during 2005 alone. This
included A-5 Fantan bomber aircraft, helicopter gunships, K-8 military attack aircraft and light weapons,
all of which are found in Darfur,
transferred there in violation of UN resolutions.
China's government has long used the threat of its
permanent veto at the UN Security Council to block effective UN peace activities
in Darfur. In
reality, this veto and many innocent lives are being traded for cheap oil.
Months ago, Bashir appointed Musa
Hilal, the one-time leader of the murderous militia,
the Janjaweed, to a position in his government. Hilal has been quoted expressing gratitude for "the
necessary weapons and ammunition to exterminate the African tribes in Darfur." Not long ago, the
Sudanese military ambushed a well-marked U.N. peacekeeping convoy in Darfur, later claiming it was a
mistake. Virtually every independent observer says it was a deliberate attack.
Darfur as “Crime Scene”
Bashir's refusal to accept the UN-proposed roster of troops
and civilian police-contributing countries, including an engineering battalion
from Sweden/ Norway, units from Nepal,
and a fully-equipped operation from Thailand,
reflect nothing other than his political decision to deny UNAMID the personnel
essential for an effective peace mission in Darfur. Last week, the chief prosecutor of the
International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-O’Campo,
told the Security Council: “The entire Darfur
region is a crime scene”, adding that 100,000 Dafurians
had been displaced so far this year. Explaining his comparison to Nazi Germany,
Ocampo added, according to the BBC, "Sudanese
officials protect the criminals and not the victims. Denial of crimes, cover
up, and attempts to shift responsibility are another characteristic of the
criminal plan in Darfur."
I hope Canada is supporting
the long overdue Costa Rica
initiative on Darfur
underway now at the Security Council.
The ongoing support for the Darfur genocide by the government of China has caused
serious doubts among thoughtful people everywhere about the Beijing Olympics
so, as Eric Reeves documents, the party-state has launched a propaganda campaign
to reposition itself as a "friend of Darfur."
In this misinformation effort, no mention is made of China's
tiny humanitarian assistance in Darfur or of the fact
that numerous water sources in Darfur have been
destroyed by Sudan's
regular forces and its Janjaweed.
Water sources are targeted by Khartoum's
bombers; the Janjaweed have often denied civilian
access to water points, and have raped women and girls as young as eight
seeking to collect water for their desperate families. Darfurians
generally seem well aware of Beijing's
role in their ongoing torment and destruction.
Arming Khartoum
China’s role as the primary supplier of weapons to Khartoum over the past decade for use in Darfur was the subject of an investigation by
Amnesty International. Amnesty said in mid-2007: "The bulk [of the
military and related equipment] was transferred from China
and Russia,
two Permanent Members of the Security Council. The governments of these
supplier countries have been, or should have been, aware through the published
and unpublished reports of the UN Panel of Experts to the UN Sanctions
Committee on Sudan as well as the detailed report by Amnesty International
published in November 2004 that several types of military equipment including
aircraft have been deployed by the
Sudanese armed forces and
militia for direct attacks on civilians and indiscriminate attacks in Darfur, as well as for
logistical support for these attacks."
There is mounting concern
that the Khartoum-Beijing alliance will cause the UN peacekeeping force in Sudan to be as ineffective as it was in Rwanda and Bosnia. The ongoing role of the
party-state in China across Darfur remains far from the
conduct of a responsible member of the international community. Mia Farrow and
many others are quite correct in linking its activities to the "Genocide
Olympics". All concerned about this too must continue to 'name and shame'
the Bashir and Hu-Wen
governments about their joint inhumanity in Darfur before, during and after the Olympics.
We might also target the accessible corporate sponsors of these Games,
including Manulife, Visa, Kodak, Samsung, Panasonic,
Omega, Johnson & Johnson, McDonald's, General Electric, John Hancock and
Coca-Cola, making the obvious point that silence about human dignity implies acquiescence
with the practices of the government of the host country.
BURMA
It is easy to forget
important realities about Burma,
including the fact that its post-independence fledgling democracy was toppled
in 1962 by the military dictatorship of Ne Win, who
believed that he and the military would win the 1960 general election. In 1988,
there were widespread pro-democracy riots and an estimated 3000 students and
monks were killed by the army. A determined and brave Aung
San Suu Kyi made her first
speech during the '88 uprising as an opposition leader. The out-of-touch junta
called yet another election two years later in 1990. Suu
Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) won
81% of the seats and 67% of the votes cast in 1990. No-one was allowed to take
their seat by the generals and Suu Kyi has remained under house arrest for most of the past
eighteen years. The UN Special rapporteur confirmed
as a “state instigated massacre” the attack on Suu Kyi's procession in May 2003 northwest of Mandalay, when about 100 people were killed,
including the NLD photographers, and she was herself wounded.
In what later became
pro-democracy protests last September, junta troops fired automatic weapons at
peaceful demonstrators and entered monasteries to beat and murder Buddhist
monks who had protested. Nuns and monks who helped lead the demonstrations were
caged in barbed-wire enclosures. A foreign journalist was also killed. The
junta had earlier received a $1.4 billion package of arms from Beijing, so it seems clear where the fatal
bullets and guns were made.
Meanwhile at the United
Nations Security Council, the representatives of China
and Russia, who had earlier
used their vetoes to remove Burma
from its agenda (after keeping it off continuously since the crises of 1990 and
1988 in the country until late 2005) prevented the Council from considering
sanctions against the perpetrators. The two governments even managed to keep
the Council from issuing a condemnation of the junta’s use of deadly force. China provided no leadership towards a peaceful
resolution of the uprising in what has become in effect, like Sudan, a client state of Beijing.
Next came
the Nargis cyclone in the Irrawaddy delta in early May, which the junta first
pretended had not struck by continuing to broadcast an opera on government
television. The regime newspaper later suggested that foreign humanitarian aid
was unnecessary because the victims could live on frogs. Its priority was
attempting to bully citizens into making dictatorship constitutional in a
referendum on the military-drafted proposed constitution. A saffron democratic
revolution would be unacceptable to both the generals and to the party-state in
Beijing.
Hundreds of thousands of desperate Burmese have now needed food and other help
for more than a month.
“Blood for Oil”
As Dr. Peter Navarro puts the
situation in the new edition of his book, The Coming China Wars, what we
have currently in Burma
is another "blood for oil" deal. Beijing
protects the generals in exchange for the lion's share of the country's natural
gas, which measure over a half a trillion cubic meters, and, far more
importantly, it gets to build a $2 billion oil pipeline from Burma's coast on the Bay of Bengal to China's Yunnan province. This will allow China to take delivery of Middle East oil
without passing through the narrow Strait of Malacca,
which could be shut down in the case of a serious conflict with the West.
All governments which respect
human dignity must push harder and more effectively to persuade the regime in Burma to show
respect for the lives and well-being of its own people. A special UN rapporteur reported in 2006 that fully 3000 villages in
eastern Burma
were destroyed by the junta. Where is Canada’s Responsibility to Protect
(R2P) doctrine, which has been adopted by the UN? Might it not be applied in
some way to the crisis in the delta?
NORTH KOREA
The hermit kingdom of Kim Jong Il rivals that of Robert Mugabe’s
Zimbabwe for any “worst governance” award today (It is no coincidence that
Beijing supports both regimes, although its attempt to ship $70 million in arms
to Mugabe after he lost the recent first round of the
presidential election was blocked when dock workers in South Africa refused to
unload ships carrying the weapons and were supported by their national
courts.). According to the International Crisis Group (ICG) in Brussels, China
now does about $2 billion in annual bilateral and investment—approx. 40% of the
kingdom’s foreign trade—with North Korea. About 150 Chinese companies operate
in North Korea.
There are currently about two million ethnic Koreans living in China and
10,000-100,000 refugees at any point in time.
The ICG asserts that the
government of China’s
priorities with the government in Pyong Yang
currently includes:
-avoiding the costs of an
explosion on the Korean peninsula,
-preventing the U.S. from dominating a unified Korea,
-incorporating North Korea
into the development plans of its three north eastern provinces to help them
achieve stability,
-achieving credit in China, in the region and in the US for being
engaged in achieving denuclearization,
-maintaining the two-Korea
status quo, as long as it can maintain influence in both capitals as leverage
with the US on the Taiwan issue, and
-avoiding a situation where a
nuclear North Korea leads Japan and/or Taiwan to become nuclear powers.
In mid-October, 2006, after
North Korea completed an underground test on nuclear weapons, the
Economist magazine called on the US, China and Russia to make
sacrifices to avoid a nuclear arms race in Asia and the Middle East. The
magazine argued that some response was necessary because Iran, among
other countries, could go nuclear despite the warnings from the UN and the
three other major players. “The Chinese could, if they wished, starve North Korea’s
people and switch off the lights”, noted its lead editorial, but added that
pressure of any kind was unlikely to persuade Kim to give up his bomb.
As Peter Navarro notes,
nothing is likely to dissuade Kim from his bad habits, which include
counterfeiting U.S.
currency, acting as a conduit for drug and arms commerce, and periodically
threatening South Korea with
an invasion of Seoul.
Navarro: “North Korea
is able to engage in all this rogue behaviour
precisely because of its ability to hide behind Chinese skirts. China currently provides the Pyongyang regime with two-thirds of its fuel
and one third of its food…The one certainty in this relationship is its lack of
any certainty. This translates into high risk—the proverbial nuclear joker in
the deck. Should famine, a dictator’s whim, or any number of random events
trigger a North Korean military outburst, it would force China to take
sides. The result may well be “the Korean War, Part Deux.”.
A cheerless thought indeed!
IRAN
Human dignity abuses by the
Iranian government currently include persecution of ethnic and religious
minorities (Arabs, Azeri, Kurds, Turks, Baha'is, Jews
and Christians), women in a species of gender apartheid (under Sharia law the life of a woman is worth half that of a
man), imprisonment, torture and execution of political prisoners and prisoners
of conscience and complete control over the media.
In trading with Iran, China and other countries doing so legitimize
its government and help to maintain regime officials in positions of absolute
power. Trade and investment from abroad also provide to Tehran funds that often are not used for the
health, education and general welfare of Iranians but instead for funding
terrorist groups abroad, including Hezbollah and Hamas,
under the mantle of "expanding the Islamic Empire".
China-Iranian trade has grown
from $200 million in 1990 to $10 billion in 2005. This includes conventional
arms and ballistic missiles for Iran
despite Tehran's declared hostility to 'godless
communism" and Beijing's
continuing severe persecution of its Uyghur Muslims. Beijing simply ignores theocratic rule in Tehran. A major attraction for Tehran is Beijing's
permanent seat on the UN Security Council, which is useful for resisting
Western pressure on nuclear and other issues.
Ali Hashemi
Rafsanjani pushed the relationship while Iran's president (1989-1997) and
became a stakeholder in it. A Chinese contract to build the Tehran metro has as its local partner a
company headed by his oldest son. He and others in Iran
strongly favour the 'China model' of air tight political
control while encouraging economic growth.
In the mid 1990's, China became the leading supplier of
conventional arms to Iran
and has since provided assistance on developing dual use technology that can be
converted to developing nuclear weapons. In 1995, China under pressure from the U.S. did stop the sale of nuclear reactors to Iran.
There appears little doubt that China
has since resumed nuclear weapon technology sales to Iran.
There are also indications
that China has helped with Iran’s Shahab-3
and Shahab-4 medium range ballistic missiles. Both are capable of hitting any
state in the Middle East; the Shahab-4 could hit significant portions of Europe. Two years ago, the U.S.
imposed penalties on eight Chinese companies for exporting material that can be
used to improve Iran's
ballistic missile capability. China's
nuclear weapons technology exports to Pakistan
had a similar objective, to prevent either a United
States or Soviet Union dominance of the subcontinent
along China's
southern border. As a result, Pakistan
is now a nuclear power, facing nuclear-armed India. In the Middle East, China's policy of providing Iran with
nuclear weapons technology is injecting a highly-destabilizing element in the
region.
By providing Iran with
weapons that could be used in support of Islamic fundamentalism, the potential
for religious conflict becomes greater. Old hatreds between Iranian and Iraqi
religious groups could flare up in the future. Nuclear weapons would give Iran a
strategic reserve that could allow its regime to act even more aggressively. Israel could
also be unintentionally brought into the scenario, believing that the only
reason an Islamic state would want a nuclear weapon is to use it against
Israelis. China's goal
of securing a reliable source of cheap oil and gas is probably being hindered
rather than helped by its weapons sales to Iran
by inserting a destabilizing element into Middle East domestic affairs, but
also encouraging the United States
to continue its extensive military presence there to deter Iran's use of
force.
Canada initiated the successfully-passed UN General Assembly
resolution in late 2007, which drew attention to numerous human rights abuses
in Iran,
including confirmed instances of:
(a) Torture and cruel,
inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,
Including, flogging and
amputations;
(b) Public executions,
including multiple public executions, and of other executions carried out in
the absence of respect for internationally recognized safeguards;
(c) Stoning as a method of
execution, and the continued issuing of sentences of stoning;
(d) Execution of persons who
were under the age of 18 at the time their offence was committed, contrary to
the obligations of the Islamic Republic of Iran under article 37 of the
Convention on the Rights of the Child and article 6 of the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights;
(e) Arrests, violent
repression, and sentencing of women exercising their right to peaceful
assembly, a campaign of intimidation against women’s human rights defenders,
and continuing discrimination against women and girls in law and in practice;
(f) Increasing discrimination
and other human rights violations against persons belonging to religious,
ethnic, linguistic or other minorities, recognized or otherwise, including,
inter alia, Arabs, Azeri’s, Baluchis,
Kurds, Christians, Jews, Sufis and Sunni Muslims and their defenders, and, in
particular, attacks on Baha’is and their faith in
State-sponsored media, increasing evidence of efforts by the State to identify
and monitor Baha’is and prevention of the Baha’i faith from attending university and from sustaining
themselves economically; an increase in cases of arbitrary arrest and
detention;
(g) Ongoing, systemic and
serious restrictions of freedom of peaceful assembly and association, and
freedom of opinion and expression, including those imposed on the media and
trade unions, and increasing harassment, intimidation and persecution of
political opponents and human rights defenders, from all sectors of Iranian
society, including arrests and violent repression of labour
leaders, labour members peacefully assembling and
students;
(h) Persistent failure to
uphold due process of law rights, and violation of the rights of detainees,
including the systematic and arbitrary use of prolonged solitary confinement.
We might all keep in mind too
on the issue of Sino-Iranian relations and their current negative implications
for world security that in the past few weeks alone the Government in Tehran has locked up all
seven senior leaders of the country's 300,000-member Baha'i
spiritual community. Not a word has been heard about them for almost four
weeks. It also fired missiles at the approx 4000 UN-protected residents,
including about sixty Canadians, living in Ashraf
city, Iraq.
This second act was clearly an act of war; the first violated a host of
international covenants, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
which protects freedom of religion.
Taiwan
It is probably just as well
that my time is now up because for various reasons my comments on Taiwan will be
very brief.
Like many others around the
world, I welcome the recent signs of good will expressed by the governments of China and Taiwan
towards each other and would urge those in Beijing to seize a golden opportunity to
improve cross-strait relations. Four ways of doing so would be:
1. Respect the status
quo of cross- strait relations and put the sovereignty issue over Taiwan on hold,
2. As the new
Taiwanese government has given its pledge to adhere to the principle of
"no unification, no independence and no use of force", China’s government should scale down and then
withdraw all of the more than 1300 ballistic missiles targeted at Taiwan,
3. Begin good
faith consultations with Taiwan’s
government over its international space and wish to play a constructive role in
the world community, seeking a possible cross-strait peace accord, and pledging
that
4. The future
status of Taiwan
will be resolved by peaceful means in accordance with the will of the 23
million residents of the island.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Mia Farrow, Steven
Spielberg, Uma Thulman and
many others have already stood up for human dignity at the 2008 Olympics. Is Minky Worden of Human Rights Watch not correct when she
says that corporate sponsors, governments and National Olympic Committees should
urge Beijing to improve human rights conditions
in China?
"Olympic corporate sponsors are putting their reputations at risk unless
they work to convince the Chinese government to uphold the human rights pledges
it made to bring the Games to Beijing,"
she said. "Human rights are under attack in China,
and Olympic sponsors should use their considerable leverage to persuade Beijing to change
policy."
The rest of us should too. We are asking the
government of China
to honour the promises made when it bid for the
Games. If you agree, please press our own government and our own national
Olympic Committee to urge the government of China to fulfill it commitments