May 17, 2008
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
DAGAARI, Somalia — The global food crisis has arrived at Safia Ali’s hut.
She cannot afford rice or wheat or powdered milk anymore.
At the same time, a drought has decimated her family’s herd of goats, turning their sole livelihood into a pile of bleached bones and papery skin.
The result is that Ms. Safia, a 25-year-old mother of five, has not eaten in a week. Her 1-year-old son is starving too, an adorable, listless boy who doesn’t even respond to a pinch.
Somalia — and much of the volatile Horn of Africa, for that matter — was about the last place on earth that needed a food crisis. Even before commodity prices started shooting up around the globe, civil war, displacement and imperiled aid operations had pushed many people here to the brink of famine.
But now with food costs spiraling out of reach and the livestock that people live off of dropping dead in the sand, villagers across this sun-blasted landscape say hundreds of people are dying of hunger and thirst.
This is what happens, economists say, when the global food crisis meets local chaos.
“We’re really in the perfect storm,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, a Columbia economist and top United Nations adviser, who recently visited neighboring Kenya.
There has been a collision of troubles throughout the region: skimpy rainfall, disastrous harvests, soaring food prices, dying livestock, escalating violence, out-of-control inflation, and shrinking food aid because of many of these factors.
Across the border in Ethiopia, in the war-racked Ogaden region, the situation sounds just as dire. In Darfur, the United Nations has had to cut food rations because of a rise in banditry that endangers aid deliveries. Kenya is looking vulnerable, too.
A recent headline in one of Kenya’s leading newspapers blared, “25,000 villagers risk starving,” referring to a combination of drought, higher fertilizer and fuel costs and postelection violence that displaced thousands of farmers. “These places aren’t on the brink,” Mr. Sachs said. “They’ve gone over the cliff.”
Many Somalis are trying to stave off starvation with a thin gruel made from mashed thorn-tree branches called jerrin. Some village elders said their children were chewing on their own lips and tongues because they had no food. The weather has been merciless — intensely hot days, followed by cruelly clear nights.
This week, Saida Mohamed Afrah, another emaciated mother, left her two children under a tree and went scavenging for food and water. When she came back two hours later, her children were dead.
She had little to say about the drought. “I just wish my children had died in my lap,” she said.
The United Nations has declared a wide swath of central Somalia a humanitarian emergency, the final stage before a full-blown famine. But Christian Balslev-Olesen, the head of Unicef operations in Somalia, said the situation was likely to become a famine in the coming weeks.
Famine is defined by several criteria, including malnutrition, mortality, food and water scarcity and destruction of livelihood. Some of those factors, like an acute malnutrition rate of 24 percent in some areas of Somalia, have already soared past emergency thresholds and are closing in on famine range. Mr. Balslev-Olesen said Unicef recently received reports of people dying from hunger and thirst. It is hard to know exactly how many, he said, though local elders have put the number in the mid-hundreds.
“We have all the indicators in place for a catastrophe,” Mr. Balslev-Olesen said. “We cannot call it that yet. But I’m very much concerned it’s just a matter of weeks until we have to.”
Many people already consider Somalia a catastrophe. It has some of the highest malnutrition rates anywhere in the world — in a good year. The collapse of the central government in 1991 plunged Somalia into a spiral of clan-driven bloodshed that it has yet to pull out of. The era began with a famine that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
The consensus now is that all the same elements of the early 1990s — high-intensity conflict, widespread displacement and drought — are lining up again, and at a time of the biggest spike in global food prices in more than 30 years. The United Nations says 2.6 million Somalis need assistance and the number could soon swell to 3.5 million, nearly half the estimated population. If there is excellent rain or a sudden peace, the crisis may ease. But weather projections and even the rosiest political forecasts do not predict that.
Whether Somalia slips into a famine may depend on aid, and right now, that does not look so good either. Eleven aid workers have been killed this year, and United Nations officials say Somalia is as complicated — and dangerous — as ever.
Beyond the warlord and clan fighting, there is now a budding conflict with Western aid workers. The Bush administration has said that terrorists with Al Qaeda are hiding in Somalia, sheltered by local Islamists, and has gone after them with American airstrikes. But a recent American attack on an Islamist leader in Dusa Marreb, a town in the center of the drought zone, has spawned a wave of revenge threats against Western aid workers. The United Nations and private aid organizations say it is now too dangerous to expand their life-saving work in Dusa Marreb.
“We’re in a different contextual environment right now,” said Chris Smoot, the program director for World Vision aid projects in Somalia. He said there were anti-Western “rogue elements that can shut you down, in any shape or form, at any time.”
Aid is also a serious problem in the contested Ogaden region of Ethiopia, across the border from here. A recent report written by a contractor working for the United States Agency for International Development said the drought there was “clearly worsening” and that the response by the Ethiopian government, one of America’s closest allies in Africa, was “absolutely abysmal.”
This may be no accident. The Ethiopian government is struggling with an insurgency in the Ogaden, and the report said that “food is clearly being used as a weapon,” with the government starving out rebel areas, while a mysterious warehouse of American-donated food was discovered across the road from an Ethiopian Army base. “The U.S.G.,” meaning the United States government, “cannot in good conscience allow the food operation to continue in its current manifestation,” the report said. “This situation would be absolutely shameful in any other country.”
The report was not made public, though a copy was provided to The New York Times. When asked about it, a senior American aid official characterized the report as “just a snapshot and one person’s observations and impressions.” But the senior aid official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also said: “We’re not saying there’s not a crisis in the Ogaden. We’re not saying the Ethiopian response has been satisfactory. But some progress has been made. And we need more.”
Ethiopian officials declined comment and have denied human rights abuses in the Ogaden.
All across this region, one of the poorest of the poor, people are left to the mercies of the desert. In central Somalia, for instance, fewer than five inches of rain have fallen in the past year and a half, aid officials say. The winds are harsh, throats are dry. This area, like much of the Horn of Africa, is too arid for farming. The people here, in lonely outposts like Dagaari, survive by grazing goats, sheep, cattle and camels, selling the animals for money they use to buy food.
“But nobody wants a skinny goat,” explained Abdul Kadir Nur, a herder in Dagaari.
That was about all he had left after the drought killed 400 of his 450 animals.
Not far from the pile of goat bones is a circle of stones. It is the grave of his toddler son.
Mr. Abdul Kadir said the boy had died of hunger and that he had been placed in his grave at an angle, “so he can sleep.”
He walked a few more steps, his flip-flops digging into the crunchy earth. He arrived at Ms. Safia’s hut, where several people were peering in the doorway, watching her sweat on the dirt floor. The nearest hospital was only a half hour away, but nobody had any money to pay for a ride.
“She will most likely die,” an elder said and walked away.
Ms. Safia’s son seemed to sense that. He curled up next to his mother while he still could, his face pressed against the damp cloth that covered her. Her ribs moved up and down, up and down, in quick shallow breaths.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
China Investigates Forced Child Labor
May 1, 2008
By DAVID BARBOZA
SHANGHAI — China said Wednesday that it had broken up a child labor ring that forced children from poor, inland areas to work in booming coastal cities, acknowledging that severe labor abuses extended into the heart of its export economy.
Authorities in southern China’s Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong, said they had made several arrests and had already “rescued” more than 100 children from factories in the city of Dongguan, one of the country’s largest manufacturing centers for electronics and consumer goods sold around the world. The officials said they were investigating reports that hundreds of other rural children had been lured or forced into captive, almost slavelike conditions for minimal pay.
The children, mostly between the ages of 13 and 15, were often tricked or kidnapped by employment agencies in an impoverished part of western Sichuan Province called Liangshan and then sent to factory towns in Guangdong, where they were sometimes forced to work 300 hours a month, according to government officials and accounts from the state-owned media. The legal working age in China is 16.
The labor scandal is the latest embarrassment for China as it prepares to host the Olympic Games this summer. For much of the past year, the country has been plagued by damaging reports about severe pollution, dangerous exports, riots in Tibet and the ensuing disruptions to its Olympic torch relay by Tibet’s sympathizers, among other groups.
The abuses may also reflect the combined pressures of worker shortages, high inflation and a rising currency that have reduced profit margins of some Chinese factories and forced them to scramble for an edge — even an illegal one — to stay competitive.
The child labor ring, which was first uncovered by Southern Metropolis, a crusading newspaper based in Guangzhou, came less than a year after China was rocked by exposure of a similar problem in a less developed part of central China. Last June, labor officials in Shanxi and Henan Provinces said they had rescued hundreds of people, including children, from slave labor conditions in rural brick kilns. Many of those workers said they had been kidnapped.
The earlier case, which local officials initially sought to keep quiet, set off a national uproar in China and prompted a sharp response from President Hu Jintao, who vowed a broad crackdown on labor abuses. Local officials in Guangdong may have moved quickly to acknowledge the latest incident to keep it from becoming a running scandal as the Olympics approach.
The police in Guangdong said Wednesday that they had formed teams to search for child laborers in several coastal cities, including Dongguan and Shenzhen, another big manufacturing center, but disclosed nothing about the companies involved in employing the children, or the extent of the problem.
Officials did not identify the specific factories or products involved, and it is unclear whether any of them were suppliers to global corporations. But many companies in Dongguan and Shenzhen, where land and labor costs are typically higher than elsewhere in the country, are part of the supply chain for the country’s export manufacturers. The authorities have also said little so far about the identities of the children they claim to have rescued.
“These youngsters have no ID cards, so it makes it difficult to identify them,” said Zhang Xiang, a spokesman for the Guangdong Labor Bureau.
In recent years, Beijing has stepped up its efforts to crack down on child labor and labor law violations. Last August, Beijing revoked the license of a factory accused of using child labor to produce Olympic merchandise. Several other suppliers were also punished for labor law violations.
But experts say rising costs of labor, energy and raw material, and labor shortages in some parts of southern China have forced some factory owners to cut costs or find new sources of cheap labor, including child labor.
Even factories that supply global companies, including Wal-Mart Stores, have been accused in recent years of using child labor and violating local labor laws. Big corporations have stepped up inspections of factories that produce goods for them. But suppliers have become adept at evading such scrutiny by providing fake wage and work schedule data that suggest they abide by labor laws. Experts say the labor problems discovered in Dongguan are not uncommon.
“The Liangshan child labor case is quite typical,” said Hu Xingdou, a professor of economics and social policy at the Beijing Institute of Technology. “China’s economy is developing at a
fascinating speed, but often at the expense of laws, human rights and environmental protection.”
Professor Hu said that while Beijing had pushed to improve labor conditions throughout the nation, local governments were still driven by incentives to grow their economy, and so they tried to lure cheap labor.
“Most of the work force comes from underdeveloped or poverty-stricken areas,” he said. “Some children are even sold by their parents, who often don’t have any idea of the working conditions.”
In a series of articles this week, journalists working for Southern Metropolis wrote that they had traveled to Liangshan Prefecture in Sichuan Province, an area of western China populated by ethnic minority groups and plagued by drugs and a lack of good jobs, to pose as recruiters and interview parents and residents.
The newspaper said recruiters and labor agencies working in Liangshan often selected and transported children south, where they were then “sold” to factories at virtual auctions in Guangdong Province.
At some coastal factories, children were even lined up and selected based on their body type, wrote the journalists, who also investigated factory areas in Guangdong.
The newspaper also said that children were paid about 42 cents an hour, far below the local minimum wage of about 64 cents an hour. By law, overtime pay is much higher.
Chen Fulin, a government spokesman in Liangshan Prefecture, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that the articles about child labor in Southern Metropolis were accurate.
“So far, we have detected and found four people in Zhaojue County suspected of luring the youngsters from Liangshan to Dongguan and forcing them to work in factories,” he said. “We are dealing with the illegal employment agencies and the labor dealers, according to the law.”
Officials in the city of Dongguan say they are now investigating all factories in the area to determine whether any are employing children.
In its report, Southern Metropolis said some children were threatened with death if they tried to escape.
The newspaper did not identify the coastal factories where the children worked, but the report said that one was a toy factory in Dongguan and that it had not been difficult for the journalists to uncover the labor scandal.
“Since journalists could discover the facts by secret interviews in a few days,” Southern Metropolis wrote in a separate editorial on Tuesday, “how could the labor departments show no interest in it and ignore it for such a long time?”
Chen Yang contributed research.
By DAVID BARBOZA
SHANGHAI — China said Wednesday that it had broken up a child labor ring that forced children from poor, inland areas to work in booming coastal cities, acknowledging that severe labor abuses extended into the heart of its export economy.
Authorities in southern China’s Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong, said they had made several arrests and had already “rescued” more than 100 children from factories in the city of Dongguan, one of the country’s largest manufacturing centers for electronics and consumer goods sold around the world. The officials said they were investigating reports that hundreds of other rural children had been lured or forced into captive, almost slavelike conditions for minimal pay.
The children, mostly between the ages of 13 and 15, were often tricked or kidnapped by employment agencies in an impoverished part of western Sichuan Province called Liangshan and then sent to factory towns in Guangdong, where they were sometimes forced to work 300 hours a month, according to government officials and accounts from the state-owned media. The legal working age in China is 16.
The labor scandal is the latest embarrassment for China as it prepares to host the Olympic Games this summer. For much of the past year, the country has been plagued by damaging reports about severe pollution, dangerous exports, riots in Tibet and the ensuing disruptions to its Olympic torch relay by Tibet’s sympathizers, among other groups.
The abuses may also reflect the combined pressures of worker shortages, high inflation and a rising currency that have reduced profit margins of some Chinese factories and forced them to scramble for an edge — even an illegal one — to stay competitive.
The child labor ring, which was first uncovered by Southern Metropolis, a crusading newspaper based in Guangzhou, came less than a year after China was rocked by exposure of a similar problem in a less developed part of central China. Last June, labor officials in Shanxi and Henan Provinces said they had rescued hundreds of people, including children, from slave labor conditions in rural brick kilns. Many of those workers said they had been kidnapped.
The earlier case, which local officials initially sought to keep quiet, set off a national uproar in China and prompted a sharp response from President Hu Jintao, who vowed a broad crackdown on labor abuses. Local officials in Guangdong may have moved quickly to acknowledge the latest incident to keep it from becoming a running scandal as the Olympics approach.
The police in Guangdong said Wednesday that they had formed teams to search for child laborers in several coastal cities, including Dongguan and Shenzhen, another big manufacturing center, but disclosed nothing about the companies involved in employing the children, or the extent of the problem.
Officials did not identify the specific factories or products involved, and it is unclear whether any of them were suppliers to global corporations. But many companies in Dongguan and Shenzhen, where land and labor costs are typically higher than elsewhere in the country, are part of the supply chain for the country’s export manufacturers. The authorities have also said little so far about the identities of the children they claim to have rescued.
“These youngsters have no ID cards, so it makes it difficult to identify them,” said Zhang Xiang, a spokesman for the Guangdong Labor Bureau.
In recent years, Beijing has stepped up its efforts to crack down on child labor and labor law violations. Last August, Beijing revoked the license of a factory accused of using child labor to produce Olympic merchandise. Several other suppliers were also punished for labor law violations.
But experts say rising costs of labor, energy and raw material, and labor shortages in some parts of southern China have forced some factory owners to cut costs or find new sources of cheap labor, including child labor.
Even factories that supply global companies, including Wal-Mart Stores, have been accused in recent years of using child labor and violating local labor laws. Big corporations have stepped up inspections of factories that produce goods for them. But suppliers have become adept at evading such scrutiny by providing fake wage and work schedule data that suggest they abide by labor laws. Experts say the labor problems discovered in Dongguan are not uncommon.
“The Liangshan child labor case is quite typical,” said Hu Xingdou, a professor of economics and social policy at the Beijing Institute of Technology. “China’s economy is developing at a
fascinating speed, but often at the expense of laws, human rights and environmental protection.”
Professor Hu said that while Beijing had pushed to improve labor conditions throughout the nation, local governments were still driven by incentives to grow their economy, and so they tried to lure cheap labor.
“Most of the work force comes from underdeveloped or poverty-stricken areas,” he said. “Some children are even sold by their parents, who often don’t have any idea of the working conditions.”
In a series of articles this week, journalists working for Southern Metropolis wrote that they had traveled to Liangshan Prefecture in Sichuan Province, an area of western China populated by ethnic minority groups and plagued by drugs and a lack of good jobs, to pose as recruiters and interview parents and residents.
The newspaper said recruiters and labor agencies working in Liangshan often selected and transported children south, where they were then “sold” to factories at virtual auctions in Guangdong Province.
At some coastal factories, children were even lined up and selected based on their body type, wrote the journalists, who also investigated factory areas in Guangdong.
The newspaper also said that children were paid about 42 cents an hour, far below the local minimum wage of about 64 cents an hour. By law, overtime pay is much higher.
Chen Fulin, a government spokesman in Liangshan Prefecture, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that the articles about child labor in Southern Metropolis were accurate.
“So far, we have detected and found four people in Zhaojue County suspected of luring the youngsters from Liangshan to Dongguan and forcing them to work in factories,” he said. “We are dealing with the illegal employment agencies and the labor dealers, according to the law.”
Officials in the city of Dongguan say they are now investigating all factories in the area to determine whether any are employing children.
In its report, Southern Metropolis said some children were threatened with death if they tried to escape.
The newspaper did not identify the coastal factories where the children worked, but the report said that one was a toy factory in Dongguan and that it had not been difficult for the journalists to uncover the labor scandal.
“Since journalists could discover the facts by secret interviews in a few days,” Southern Metropolis wrote in a separate editorial on Tuesday, “how could the labor departments show no interest in it and ignore it for such a long time?”
Chen Yang contributed research.
From Auschwitz, a Torah as Strong as Its Spirit
April 30, 2008
From the NYTimes.com
By JAMES BARRON
The back story of how a Torah got from the fetid barracks of Auschwitz to the ark of the Central Synagogue at Lexington Avenue and 55th Street is one the pastor of the Lutheran church down the street sums up as simply “miraculous.”
It is the story of a sexton in the synagogue in the Polish city of Oswiecim who buried most of the sacred scroll before the Germans stormed in and later renamed the city Auschwitz. It is the story of Jewish prisoners who sneaked the rest of it — four carefully chosen panels — into the concentration camp.
It is the story of a Polish Catholic priest to whom they entrusted the four panels before their deaths. It is the story of a Maryland rabbi who went looking for it with a metal detector. And it is the story of how a hunch by the rabbi’s 13-year-old son helped lead him to it.
This Torah, more than most, “is such an extraordinary symbol of rebirth,” said Peter J. Rubinstein, the rabbi of Central Synagogue. “As one who has gone to the camps and assimilates into my being the horror of the Holocaust, this gives meaning to Jewish survival.”
On Wednesday, the restored Torah will be rededicated in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which for more than 20 years the congregation of Central Synagogue has observed in conjunction with its neighbor, St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, at Lexington Avenue and 54th Street. The senior pastor, the Rev. Amandus J. Derr, said that next to Easter, the Holocaust memorial is “the most important service I attend every year.”
The Torah from Auschwitz “is a very concrete, tactile piece of that remembrance — of what people, some of whom did it in the name of Christ, did to people who were Jewish,” Pastor Derr said, “and the remembrance itself enables us to be prepared to prevent that from happening again.”
A Torah scroll contains the five books of Moses, and observant Jews read a portion from it at services. Its ornate Hebrew must be hand-lettered by specially trained scribes, and it is considered unacceptable if any part is marred or incomplete. For years, Jews around the world have worked to recover and rehabilitate Torahs that disappeared or were destroyed during the Holocaust, returning them to use in synagogues.
This Torah remained hidden for more than 60 years, buried where the sexton had put it, until Rabbi Menachem Youlus, who lives in Wheaton, Md., and runs the nonprofit Save a Torah foundation, began looking for it about eight years ago. Over two decades, Rabbi Youlus said, the foundation has found more than 1,000 desecrated Torahs and restored them, a painstaking and expensive process. This one was elusive. But Rabbi Youlus was determined.
He had heard a story told by Auschwitz survivors: Three nights before the Germans arrived, the synagogue sexton put the Torah scrolls in a metal box and buried them. The sexton knew that the Nazis were bent on destroying Judaism as well as killing Jews.
But the survivors did not know where the sexton had buried the Torah. Others interested in rescuing the Torah after the war had not found it.
As for what happened during the war, “I personally felt the last place the Nazis would look would be in the cemetery,” Rabbi Youlus said in a telephone interview Tuesday, recalling his pilgrimage to Auschwitz, in late 2000 or early 2001, in search of the missing Torah. “So that was the first place I looked.”
With a metal detector, because, if the story was correct, he was hunting for a metal box in a cemetery in which all the caskets were made of wood, according to Jewish laws of burial. The metal detector did not beep. “Nothing,” the rabbi said. “I was discouraged.”
He went home to Maryland. One of his sons, Yitzchok, then 13, wondered if the cemetery was the same size as in 1939. They went online and found land records that showed that the present-day cemetery was far smaller than the original one.
Rabbi Youlus went back in 2004 with his metal detector, aiming it at the spot where the g’neeza — a burial plot for damaged Torahs, prayer books or other papers containing God’s name — had been. It beeped as he passed a house that had been built after World War II.
He dug near the house and found the metal box. But when he opened it, he discovered the Torah was incomplete. “It was missing four panels,” he said. “The obvious question was, why would the sexton bury a scroll that’s missing four panels? I was convinced those four panels had a story themselves.”
They did, as he learned when he placed an ad in a Polish newspaper in the area “asking if anyone had parchment with Hebrew letters.”
“I said I would pay top dollar,” Rabbi Youlus said. “The response came the next day from a priest. He said, ‘I know exactly what you’re looking for, four panels of a Torah.’ I couldn’t believe it.”
He compared the lettering and the pagination, and paid the priest. (How much, he would not say. The project was underwritten by David M. Rubenstein, a co-founder of the Carlyle Group. Mr. Rubenstein was tied at No. 165 on the Forbes 400 last year with a reported fortune of $2.5 billion; in December, he paid $21.3 million for a 710-year-old copy of the Magna Carta, a British declaration of human rights that served as the foundation for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.)
The priest “told me the panels were taken into Auschwitz by four different people,” Rabbi Youlus said. “I believe they were folded and hidden.” One of the panels contained the Ten Commandments from Exodus, a portion that, when chanted aloud each year, the congregation stands to hear. Another contained a similar passage from Deuteronomy.
The priest, who was born Jewish, was himself an Auschwitz survivor. He told Rabbi Youlus that the people with the four sections of the Torah gave them to him before they were put to death.
“He kept all four pieces until I put that ad in the paper,” Rabbi Youlus said. “As soon as I put that ad in the paper, he knew I must be the one with the rest of the Torah scroll.” (Rabbi Youlus said that the priest has since died.)
Rabbi Youlus said that nearly half the Torah’s lettering needed repair, work that the foundation has done over the past few years. Thirty-seven letters were left unfinished: 36, or twice the number that symbolizes “life” in Hebrew, will be filled in by members of the congregation before the service on Wednesday, the 37th at the ceremony.
Rabbi Youlus called it “a good sturdy Torah, even if it hasn’t been used in 65 years.” The plan is to make it available every other year to the March of the Living, an international educational program that arranges for Jewish teenagers to go to Poland on Holocaust Remembrance Day, to march from Auschwitz to its companion death camp, Birkenau.
“This really is an opportunity to look up to the heavens and say, he who laughs last, laughs best,” Rabbi Youlus said. “The Nazis really thought they had wiped Jews off the face of the earth, and Judaism. Here we are taking the ultimate symbol of hope and of Judaism and rededicating it and using it in a synagogue. And we’ll take it to Auschwitz. You can’t beat that.”
From the NYTimes.com
By JAMES BARRON
The back story of how a Torah got from the fetid barracks of Auschwitz to the ark of the Central Synagogue at Lexington Avenue and 55th Street is one the pastor of the Lutheran church down the street sums up as simply “miraculous.”
It is the story of a sexton in the synagogue in the Polish city of Oswiecim who buried most of the sacred scroll before the Germans stormed in and later renamed the city Auschwitz. It is the story of Jewish prisoners who sneaked the rest of it — four carefully chosen panels — into the concentration camp.
It is the story of a Polish Catholic priest to whom they entrusted the four panels before their deaths. It is the story of a Maryland rabbi who went looking for it with a metal detector. And it is the story of how a hunch by the rabbi’s 13-year-old son helped lead him to it.
This Torah, more than most, “is such an extraordinary symbol of rebirth,” said Peter J. Rubinstein, the rabbi of Central Synagogue. “As one who has gone to the camps and assimilates into my being the horror of the Holocaust, this gives meaning to Jewish survival.”
On Wednesday, the restored Torah will be rededicated in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which for more than 20 years the congregation of Central Synagogue has observed in conjunction with its neighbor, St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, at Lexington Avenue and 54th Street. The senior pastor, the Rev. Amandus J. Derr, said that next to Easter, the Holocaust memorial is “the most important service I attend every year.”
The Torah from Auschwitz “is a very concrete, tactile piece of that remembrance — of what people, some of whom did it in the name of Christ, did to people who were Jewish,” Pastor Derr said, “and the remembrance itself enables us to be prepared to prevent that from happening again.”
A Torah scroll contains the five books of Moses, and observant Jews read a portion from it at services. Its ornate Hebrew must be hand-lettered by specially trained scribes, and it is considered unacceptable if any part is marred or incomplete. For years, Jews around the world have worked to recover and rehabilitate Torahs that disappeared or were destroyed during the Holocaust, returning them to use in synagogues.
This Torah remained hidden for more than 60 years, buried where the sexton had put it, until Rabbi Menachem Youlus, who lives in Wheaton, Md., and runs the nonprofit Save a Torah foundation, began looking for it about eight years ago. Over two decades, Rabbi Youlus said, the foundation has found more than 1,000 desecrated Torahs and restored them, a painstaking and expensive process. This one was elusive. But Rabbi Youlus was determined.
He had heard a story told by Auschwitz survivors: Three nights before the Germans arrived, the synagogue sexton put the Torah scrolls in a metal box and buried them. The sexton knew that the Nazis were bent on destroying Judaism as well as killing Jews.
But the survivors did not know where the sexton had buried the Torah. Others interested in rescuing the Torah after the war had not found it.
As for what happened during the war, “I personally felt the last place the Nazis would look would be in the cemetery,” Rabbi Youlus said in a telephone interview Tuesday, recalling his pilgrimage to Auschwitz, in late 2000 or early 2001, in search of the missing Torah. “So that was the first place I looked.”
With a metal detector, because, if the story was correct, he was hunting for a metal box in a cemetery in which all the caskets were made of wood, according to Jewish laws of burial. The metal detector did not beep. “Nothing,” the rabbi said. “I was discouraged.”
He went home to Maryland. One of his sons, Yitzchok, then 13, wondered if the cemetery was the same size as in 1939. They went online and found land records that showed that the present-day cemetery was far smaller than the original one.
Rabbi Youlus went back in 2004 with his metal detector, aiming it at the spot where the g’neeza — a burial plot for damaged Torahs, prayer books or other papers containing God’s name — had been. It beeped as he passed a house that had been built after World War II.
He dug near the house and found the metal box. But when he opened it, he discovered the Torah was incomplete. “It was missing four panels,” he said. “The obvious question was, why would the sexton bury a scroll that’s missing four panels? I was convinced those four panels had a story themselves.”
They did, as he learned when he placed an ad in a Polish newspaper in the area “asking if anyone had parchment with Hebrew letters.”
“I said I would pay top dollar,” Rabbi Youlus said. “The response came the next day from a priest. He said, ‘I know exactly what you’re looking for, four panels of a Torah.’ I couldn’t believe it.”
He compared the lettering and the pagination, and paid the priest. (How much, he would not say. The project was underwritten by David M. Rubenstein, a co-founder of the Carlyle Group. Mr. Rubenstein was tied at No. 165 on the Forbes 400 last year with a reported fortune of $2.5 billion; in December, he paid $21.3 million for a 710-year-old copy of the Magna Carta, a British declaration of human rights that served as the foundation for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.)
The priest “told me the panels were taken into Auschwitz by four different people,” Rabbi Youlus said. “I believe they were folded and hidden.” One of the panels contained the Ten Commandments from Exodus, a portion that, when chanted aloud each year, the congregation stands to hear. Another contained a similar passage from Deuteronomy.
The priest, who was born Jewish, was himself an Auschwitz survivor. He told Rabbi Youlus that the people with the four sections of the Torah gave them to him before they were put to death.
“He kept all four pieces until I put that ad in the paper,” Rabbi Youlus said. “As soon as I put that ad in the paper, he knew I must be the one with the rest of the Torah scroll.” (Rabbi Youlus said that the priest has since died.)
Rabbi Youlus said that nearly half the Torah’s lettering needed repair, work that the foundation has done over the past few years. Thirty-seven letters were left unfinished: 36, or twice the number that symbolizes “life” in Hebrew, will be filled in by members of the congregation before the service on Wednesday, the 37th at the ceremony.
Rabbi Youlus called it “a good sturdy Torah, even if it hasn’t been used in 65 years.” The plan is to make it available every other year to the March of the Living, an international educational program that arranges for Jewish teenagers to go to Poland on Holocaust Remembrance Day, to march from Auschwitz to its companion death camp, Birkenau.
“This really is an opportunity to look up to the heavens and say, he who laughs last, laughs best,” Rabbi Youlus said. “The Nazis really thought they had wiped Jews off the face of the earth, and Judaism. Here we are taking the ultimate symbol of hope and of Judaism and rededicating it and using it in a synagogue. And we’ll take it to Auschwitz. You can’t beat that.”
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Chinese Students in U.S. Fight View of Their Home
April 29, 2008
By SHAILA DEWAN
LOS ANGELES — When the time came for the smiling Tibetan monk at the front of the University of Southern California lecture hall to answer questions, the Chinese students who packed the audience for the talk last Tuesday had plenty to lob at their guest:
If Tibet was not part of China, why had the Chinese emperor been the one to give the Dalai Lama his title? How did the tenets of Buddhism jibe with the “slavery system” in Tibet before China’s modernization efforts? What about the Dalai Lama’s connection to Hitler?
As the monk tried to rebut the students, they grew more hostile. They brandished photographs and statistics to support their claims. “Stop lying! Stop lying!” one young man said. A plastic bottle of water hit the wall behind the monk, and campus police officers hustled the person who threw it out of the room.
Scenes like this, ranging from civil to aggressive, have played out at colleges across the country over the past month, as Chinese students in the United States have been forced to confront an image of their homeland that they neither recognize nor appreciate. Since the riots last month in Tibet, the disrupted Olympic torch relays and calls to boycott the opening ceremony of the Games in Beijing, Chinese students, traditionally silent on political issues, have begun to lash out at what they perceive as a pervasive anti-Chinese bias.
Last year, there were more than 42,000 students from mainland China studying in the United States, an increase from fewer than 20,000 in 2003, according to the State Department.
Campuses including Cornell, the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of California, Irvine, have seen a wave of counterdemonstrations using tactics that seem jarring in the American academic context. At the University of Washington, students fought to limit the Dalai Lama’s address to nonpolitical topics. At Duke, pro-China students surrounded and drowned out a pro-Tibet vigil; a Chinese freshman who tried to mediate received death threats, and her family was forced into hiding.
And last Saturday, students from as far as Florida and Tennessee traveled to Atlanta to picket CNN after a commentator, Jack Cafferty, referred to the Chinese as “goons and thugs.” (CNN said he was referring to the government, not the people.)
The student anger, stoked through e-mail messages sent to large campus mailing lists, stems not so much from satisfaction with the Chinese government but from shock at the portrayal of its actions, as well as frustration over the West’s long-standing love affair with Tibet — a love these students see as willfully blind.
By and large, they do not acknowledge the cultural and religious crackdown in Tibet, insisting that ordinary Tibetans have prospered under China’s economic development, and that only a small minority are unhappy.
“Before I came here, I’m very liberal,” said Minna Jia, a graduate student in political science at U.S.C. who encouraged fellow students to attend the monk’s lecture. “But after I come here, my professor told me that I’m nationalist.”
“I believe in democracy,” Ms. Jia added, “but I can’t stand for someone to criticize my country using biased ways. You are wearing Chinese clothes and you are using Chinese goods.”
Students interviewed for this article deplored the more extreme expressions of anger, like death threats against the Duke freshman and the tossing of the water bottle, and pointed out that Chinese students had little experience in the art of protest. But, they said, they could also understand them.
“We’ve been smothered for too long time,” said Jasmine Dong, another graduate student who attended the U.S.C. lecture.
By that, Ms. Dong did not mean that Chinese students had been repressed or censored by their own government. She meant that the Western news media had not acknowledged the strides China had made or the voices of overseas Chinese. “We are still neglected or misunderstood as either brainwashed or manipulated by the government,” she said.
No matter what China does, these students say, it cannot win in the arena of world opinion. “When we have a billion people, you said we were destroying the planet./ When we tried limiting our numbers, you said it is human rights abuse,” reads a poem posted on the Internet by “a silent, silent Chinese” and cited by some students as an accurate expression of their feelings. “When we were poor, you thought we were dogs./ When we loan you cash, you blame us for your debts./ When we build our industries, you called us polluters./ When we sell you goods, you blame us for global warming.”
Rather than blend in to the prevailing campus ethos of free debate, the more strident Chinese students seem to replicate the authoritarian framework of their homeland, photographing demonstration participants and sometimes drowning out dissent.
A Tibetan student who declined to be identified for fear of harassment said he decided not to attend a vigil for Tibet on his campus, which he also did not want identified because there are so few Tibetans there. “It’s not that I didn’t want to, I really did want to go — it’s our cause,” he said. “At the same time, I have to consider that my family’s back there, and I’m going back there in May.”
Another factor fueling the zeal of many Chinese demonstrators could be that they, too, intend to return home; the Chinese government is widely believed to be monitoring large e-mail lists.
Universities have often tried to accommodate the anger of their Chinese students. Before the Dalai Lama’s visit to the University of Washington, the campus Chinese Students and Scholars Association wrote to the university president expressing hopes that the visit would focus only on nonpolitical issues and not arouse anti-China sentiments. According to a posting on the group’s Web site, the university president, Mark A. Emmert, told them in a meeting that no political questions would be raised at the Dalai Lama’s speech. A spokesman said the university, which opened an office in Beijing last fall, had prescreened student questions before the Chinese students voiced their concerns.
Some experts say that colleges feel constrained from reining in the more extreme protests through a combination of concerns about cultural sensitivity and a desire to expand their own ties with China.
“I think there tends to be a great deal of self-censorship,” said Peter Gries, director of the Institute for U.S.-China Issues at the University of Oklahoma, “and not just among American China scholars but among the whole web of people who do business with China, including school administrators.”
At the U.S.C. lecture, the Chinese students arrived early to distribute handouts on Tibet and China that contained a jumble of abbreviated history, slogans and maps with little context. A chart showing that infant mortality in Tibet had plummeted since 1951, when the Communist Chinese government asserted control, did not provide any means for comparison with mortality rates in China or other countries.
One photograph showed the Dalai Lama with Heinrich Harrer, author of “Seven Years in Tibet” and a one-time member of the Nazi Party — hence the question about the Dalai Lama’s connection to Hitler, who died when the Dalai Lama was nine. The question about slavery referred to the feudal system in place in Tibet until the mid-20th century. Another photograph purported to show a Tibetan drum that, according to the caption, was covered with “a virgin girl’s skin.”
The students said they were frustrated by a sense that many accounts of the recent riots did not reflect the violence and destruction by the Tibetan protesters, who vandalized shops owned by Han Chinese (the ethnic majority in China). According to official Chinese news sources, 22 died in the rioting.
Much of the anger has the tenor of disillusionment. During the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, the Western news media was seen as a source of otherwise elusive truth.
“We thought Western media is very objective,” said Chou Wu, a 28-year-old working on his doctorate in material science, “and what it turned out is that Western media is even more biased than Chinese media. They’re no better, and even more, they’re against us.”
Students argue that China has spent billions on Tibet, building schools, roads and other infrastructure. Asked if the Tibetans wanted such development, they looked blankly incredulous. “They don’t ask that question,” said Lionel Jensen, a China scholar at Notre Dame. “They’ve accepted the basic premise of aggressive modernization.”
That may be, some experts suggest, because the students whose families can afford to send them abroad are the ones who have benefited the most from China’s economic liberalization.
Spring Zheng, 27, another graduate student at U.S.C., dismissed the notion that her patriotism stemmed from the government’s efforts to use the schools to instill national pride, particularly after Tiananmen Square.
Rather, Ms. Zheng said, “We have witnessed with our own eyes about the rapid change of China. China is developing fast, and Chinese people’s lives” are “becoming better and better, fast.”
As the U.S.C. session wound to a close, the organizer, Lisa Leeman, a documentary film instructor, pleaded for a change in tone. “My hope for this event, which I don’t totally see happening here, is for people on both, quote, sides to really hear each other and maybe learn from each other,” Ms. Leeman said. “Are there any genuine questions that don’t stem from a political point of view, that are really not here to be on a soap box?”
At that moment, the bottle hit the wall.
Michael Anti contributed reporting from Cambridge, Mass.
By SHAILA DEWAN
LOS ANGELES — When the time came for the smiling Tibetan monk at the front of the University of Southern California lecture hall to answer questions, the Chinese students who packed the audience for the talk last Tuesday had plenty to lob at their guest:
If Tibet was not part of China, why had the Chinese emperor been the one to give the Dalai Lama his title? How did the tenets of Buddhism jibe with the “slavery system” in Tibet before China’s modernization efforts? What about the Dalai Lama’s connection to Hitler?
As the monk tried to rebut the students, they grew more hostile. They brandished photographs and statistics to support their claims. “Stop lying! Stop lying!” one young man said. A plastic bottle of water hit the wall behind the monk, and campus police officers hustled the person who threw it out of the room.
Scenes like this, ranging from civil to aggressive, have played out at colleges across the country over the past month, as Chinese students in the United States have been forced to confront an image of their homeland that they neither recognize nor appreciate. Since the riots last month in Tibet, the disrupted Olympic torch relays and calls to boycott the opening ceremony of the Games in Beijing, Chinese students, traditionally silent on political issues, have begun to lash out at what they perceive as a pervasive anti-Chinese bias.
Last year, there were more than 42,000 students from mainland China studying in the United States, an increase from fewer than 20,000 in 2003, according to the State Department.
Campuses including Cornell, the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of California, Irvine, have seen a wave of counterdemonstrations using tactics that seem jarring in the American academic context. At the University of Washington, students fought to limit the Dalai Lama’s address to nonpolitical topics. At Duke, pro-China students surrounded and drowned out a pro-Tibet vigil; a Chinese freshman who tried to mediate received death threats, and her family was forced into hiding.
And last Saturday, students from as far as Florida and Tennessee traveled to Atlanta to picket CNN after a commentator, Jack Cafferty, referred to the Chinese as “goons and thugs.” (CNN said he was referring to the government, not the people.)
The student anger, stoked through e-mail messages sent to large campus mailing lists, stems not so much from satisfaction with the Chinese government but from shock at the portrayal of its actions, as well as frustration over the West’s long-standing love affair with Tibet — a love these students see as willfully blind.
By and large, they do not acknowledge the cultural and religious crackdown in Tibet, insisting that ordinary Tibetans have prospered under China’s economic development, and that only a small minority are unhappy.
“Before I came here, I’m very liberal,” said Minna Jia, a graduate student in political science at U.S.C. who encouraged fellow students to attend the monk’s lecture. “But after I come here, my professor told me that I’m nationalist.”
“I believe in democracy,” Ms. Jia added, “but I can’t stand for someone to criticize my country using biased ways. You are wearing Chinese clothes and you are using Chinese goods.”
Students interviewed for this article deplored the more extreme expressions of anger, like death threats against the Duke freshman and the tossing of the water bottle, and pointed out that Chinese students had little experience in the art of protest. But, they said, they could also understand them.
“We’ve been smothered for too long time,” said Jasmine Dong, another graduate student who attended the U.S.C. lecture.
By that, Ms. Dong did not mean that Chinese students had been repressed or censored by their own government. She meant that the Western news media had not acknowledged the strides China had made or the voices of overseas Chinese. “We are still neglected or misunderstood as either brainwashed or manipulated by the government,” she said.
No matter what China does, these students say, it cannot win in the arena of world opinion. “When we have a billion people, you said we were destroying the planet./ When we tried limiting our numbers, you said it is human rights abuse,” reads a poem posted on the Internet by “a silent, silent Chinese” and cited by some students as an accurate expression of their feelings. “When we were poor, you thought we were dogs./ When we loan you cash, you blame us for your debts./ When we build our industries, you called us polluters./ When we sell you goods, you blame us for global warming.”
Rather than blend in to the prevailing campus ethos of free debate, the more strident Chinese students seem to replicate the authoritarian framework of their homeland, photographing demonstration participants and sometimes drowning out dissent.
A Tibetan student who declined to be identified for fear of harassment said he decided not to attend a vigil for Tibet on his campus, which he also did not want identified because there are so few Tibetans there. “It’s not that I didn’t want to, I really did want to go — it’s our cause,” he said. “At the same time, I have to consider that my family’s back there, and I’m going back there in May.”
Another factor fueling the zeal of many Chinese demonstrators could be that they, too, intend to return home; the Chinese government is widely believed to be monitoring large e-mail lists.
Universities have often tried to accommodate the anger of their Chinese students. Before the Dalai Lama’s visit to the University of Washington, the campus Chinese Students and Scholars Association wrote to the university president expressing hopes that the visit would focus only on nonpolitical issues and not arouse anti-China sentiments. According to a posting on the group’s Web site, the university president, Mark A. Emmert, told them in a meeting that no political questions would be raised at the Dalai Lama’s speech. A spokesman said the university, which opened an office in Beijing last fall, had prescreened student questions before the Chinese students voiced their concerns.
Some experts say that colleges feel constrained from reining in the more extreme protests through a combination of concerns about cultural sensitivity and a desire to expand their own ties with China.
“I think there tends to be a great deal of self-censorship,” said Peter Gries, director of the Institute for U.S.-China Issues at the University of Oklahoma, “and not just among American China scholars but among the whole web of people who do business with China, including school administrators.”
At the U.S.C. lecture, the Chinese students arrived early to distribute handouts on Tibet and China that contained a jumble of abbreviated history, slogans and maps with little context. A chart showing that infant mortality in Tibet had plummeted since 1951, when the Communist Chinese government asserted control, did not provide any means for comparison with mortality rates in China or other countries.
One photograph showed the Dalai Lama with Heinrich Harrer, author of “Seven Years in Tibet” and a one-time member of the Nazi Party — hence the question about the Dalai Lama’s connection to Hitler, who died when the Dalai Lama was nine. The question about slavery referred to the feudal system in place in Tibet until the mid-20th century. Another photograph purported to show a Tibetan drum that, according to the caption, was covered with “a virgin girl’s skin.”
The students said they were frustrated by a sense that many accounts of the recent riots did not reflect the violence and destruction by the Tibetan protesters, who vandalized shops owned by Han Chinese (the ethnic majority in China). According to official Chinese news sources, 22 died in the rioting.
Much of the anger has the tenor of disillusionment. During the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, the Western news media was seen as a source of otherwise elusive truth.
“We thought Western media is very objective,” said Chou Wu, a 28-year-old working on his doctorate in material science, “and what it turned out is that Western media is even more biased than Chinese media. They’re no better, and even more, they’re against us.”
Students argue that China has spent billions on Tibet, building schools, roads and other infrastructure. Asked if the Tibetans wanted such development, they looked blankly incredulous. “They don’t ask that question,” said Lionel Jensen, a China scholar at Notre Dame. “They’ve accepted the basic premise of aggressive modernization.”
That may be, some experts suggest, because the students whose families can afford to send them abroad are the ones who have benefited the most from China’s economic liberalization.
Spring Zheng, 27, another graduate student at U.S.C., dismissed the notion that her patriotism stemmed from the government’s efforts to use the schools to instill national pride, particularly after Tiananmen Square.
Rather, Ms. Zheng said, “We have witnessed with our own eyes about the rapid change of China. China is developing fast, and Chinese people’s lives” are “becoming better and better, fast.”
As the U.S.C. session wound to a close, the organizer, Lisa Leeman, a documentary film instructor, pleaded for a change in tone. “My hope for this event, which I don’t totally see happening here, is for people on both, quote, sides to really hear each other and maybe learn from each other,” Ms. Leeman said. “Are there any genuine questions that don’t stem from a political point of view, that are really not here to be on a soap box?”
At that moment, the bottle hit the wall.
Michael Anti contributed reporting from Cambridge, Mass.
Monday, April 7, 2008
Olympic Torch Relay Faces Protests
From the New York Times
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
April 8, 2008
Olympic Torch Relay in Paris Halted as Protests Spread
By KATRIN BENNHOLD and JOHN F. BURNS
PARIS — What was supposed to be a majestic procession for the Olympic torch through the French capital turned into chaos Monday as thousands of people from around Europe, many with Tibetan flags, massed to protest the passage of the flame. The torch went out several times, and police officers had to put it onto a bus to try to protect it as demonstrators swarmed the security detail. In the end, organizers canceled the final leg of the procession.
A police spokeswoman, speaking on the condition of anonymity in accordance with policy, said the torch went out “for technical reasons” unrelated to the protests, without offering further clarification. CNN reported that the torch was extinguished at least twice amid the melee, and The Associated Press said officials were forced to extinguish the flame five times to carry it in the safety of the bus.
Despite tremendous security, at least two protesters got within almost an arm’s length of the flame before they were grabbed by police officers, The A.P. reported. Officers tackled numerous protesters to the ground and carried some away.
It was yet another unscripted moment in the passage of the Olympic flame, and the second time in two days that the torch relay had been disrupted in a European capital.
Some 3,000 police officers in Paris — on foot, horseback, in-line skates and motorbikes and even in boats on the Seine — tried to prevent a repeat of the scenes in London on Sunday, when the torch’s progression through the streets turned into a tumult of scuffles. One man broke through a tight security cordon in the London protests and made a failed grab for the torch, and 35 people were arrested.
China’s official Xinhua news agency on Monday condemned the “vile misdeeds” of protesters in London.
Before the torch encountered problems in France, a spokeswoman in Beijing for the city’s Olympic organizing committee said at a hurriedly organized news conference that the relay would continue on its international route regardless of protests. “The torch represents the Olympic spirit, and people welcome the torch,” said Wang Hui, the spokeswoman.
The news conference was apparently intended to address Sunday’s protests in London. Ms. Wang blamed the disruptions in London on a “few Tibet separatists” and described their actions as the work of saboteurs. She said Beijing’s Olympic organizers “strongly condemned” the Tibetan protesters.
“The general public is very angry at this sabotage by a few separatists,” she said. “During the torch relay, we met with some disturbances, but we believe that all the peace-loving people in the world will support the torch relay.”
Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, used a meeting in Beijing to criticize the London protests, but also to call for a rapid and peaceful solution to confrontations in Tibet.
French authorities appeared determined to try to spare China — and Paris —embarrassment or disorder similar to London’s, resorting to measures normally reserved for a visiting head of state. A police helicopter circled overhead, for example. Their efforts drew scorn from the French protesters who angrily noted the heavy police presence.
Officers with machine guns guarded sensitive Metro exits along the 17-mile route.
“One would almost think oneself in Lhasa,” said Jean-Paul Ribes, leader of the Support Committee of the Tibetan People in France, who was among the thousands massed on the Trocadero square, across the Seine from the Eiffel tower, where the flame began its passage through Paris. “It snowed last night, now the sky is blue — and police are everywhere,” Mr. Ribes said.
Many protesters — demonstrating against China’s human rights policies in general, or for a free Tibet, or simply for a boycott of the Olympics in Beijing — echoed a headline emblazoned across the front page of the left-wing daily Liberation, under a picture of the Olympic rings restyled as handcuffs: “Liberate The Olympic Games!”
Protesters came from all around Europe, including four busloads from Belgium. Lobsang Dechen, a 29-year-old Tibetan refugee living in Belgium for 4 ½ years, said Europeans should help the cause of Tibet by boycotting the Games. ‘’China does not deserve to be the host,” she said. ‘’They have to first learn to respect human rights in Tibet.’
Kevin Khayat, 19, a design student in Paris and a member of the International Federation for Human Rights, said sports should be separated from politics. “I am against a boycott, and in favor of human rights,” he said. He handed stickers to demonstrators urging: “Let’s keep our eyes open.”
In London on Sunday, the torch was relayed on a seven-hour journey from the new Wembley soccer stadium in the city’s northwest to the principal site for the 2012 Summer Olympics in Stratford in the east.
Along the way, numerous protesters seeking to reach the torch were wrestled to the ground by police officers. One man carrying a fire extinguisher narrowly failed to reach the person carrying the torch, but he set off the extinguisher anyway, dousing police officers with foam.
The torch’s London relay was the fourth stop of a global itinerary that began last month in Greece, where pro-Tibetan demonstrators briefly interrupted the torch’s lighting and its subsequent progress through Athens.
Tibetan organizations have said they plan protests at every stop on the torch’s 21-nation tour. After Paris, it moves to San Francisco, its only American stop, on Wednesday. The monthlong tour is scheduled to end in Vietnam; it is to be followed by a six-week, 46-stop tour of China.
The tour could prove jarring for Beijing. What organizers had billed as an occasion to celebrate the Olympics’ sporting ideals of peace and harmony is turning into a contest between China’s supporters and critics.
In London, more than 2,000 police officers were deployed; the security cordon around the torch was so dense that the flame and those carrying it were often barely visible to crowds.
Caught in the middle are foreign governments. Both Britain and France sought to protect delicate trade and diplomatic relations with China while supporting the Games and yet to also placate those who oppose holding the Olympics in a country with a harsh record for punishing dissent. The centerpiece of the torch parade Sunday was 10 Downing Street, where the Chinese contingent was greeted by Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Mr. Brown, like President Bush, has said he plans to attend the Games’ opening ceremonies in Beijing in August. That stand has drawn contrasts with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who has hinted he may not attend if China’s recent crackdown on Tibetans does not relent.
Under pressure from human rights groups in Britain, Mr. Brown has voiced sympathy for the Tibetan protests. He has also said that he will meet the Dalai Lama in Britain next month, and that he has informed China’s leaders.
The most intense scuffles in London occurred as the torch moved through the heart of the city. The torch, which was carried by a chain of British sports heroes and television celebrities, was protected by an inner guard of Chinese security men in blue and white Olympic tracksuits and an outer cordon of yellow-jacketed British police officers. Some were on foot, while others rode bicycles, motorbikes or horses.
For one long stretch, where streets narrowed and crowds were heavy, the torch was placed in the back of a single-decker bus and driven past the crowds until the police judged it safe for the runners to resume.
The warmest reception for the torch came as it passed through the Chinatown area of central London -- a diversion adopted to let the Chinese ambassador to Britain carry the torch.
A Chinese spokesman, Qu Yingpu, said Chinese officials were grateful to the police “for their efforts to keep order.” He added: “This is not the right time, the right platform, for any people to voice their political views.”
One protester who broke through the police cordon, David Allen, said his anger flared at the sight of British sports stars being guarded in London by Chinese security men.
“It makes us complicit in the regime’s repression,” Allen said. ”You have to ask: Where were these security men last week? Beating up people in the villages of China, no doubt.”
Katrin Bennhold reported from Paris, and John F. Burns from London. Jim Yardley contributed reporting from Beijing.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
April 8, 2008
Olympic Torch Relay in Paris Halted as Protests Spread
By KATRIN BENNHOLD and JOHN F. BURNS
PARIS — What was supposed to be a majestic procession for the Olympic torch through the French capital turned into chaos Monday as thousands of people from around Europe, many with Tibetan flags, massed to protest the passage of the flame. The torch went out several times, and police officers had to put it onto a bus to try to protect it as demonstrators swarmed the security detail. In the end, organizers canceled the final leg of the procession.
A police spokeswoman, speaking on the condition of anonymity in accordance with policy, said the torch went out “for technical reasons” unrelated to the protests, without offering further clarification. CNN reported that the torch was extinguished at least twice amid the melee, and The Associated Press said officials were forced to extinguish the flame five times to carry it in the safety of the bus.
Despite tremendous security, at least two protesters got within almost an arm’s length of the flame before they were grabbed by police officers, The A.P. reported. Officers tackled numerous protesters to the ground and carried some away.
It was yet another unscripted moment in the passage of the Olympic flame, and the second time in two days that the torch relay had been disrupted in a European capital.
Some 3,000 police officers in Paris — on foot, horseback, in-line skates and motorbikes and even in boats on the Seine — tried to prevent a repeat of the scenes in London on Sunday, when the torch’s progression through the streets turned into a tumult of scuffles. One man broke through a tight security cordon in the London protests and made a failed grab for the torch, and 35 people were arrested.
China’s official Xinhua news agency on Monday condemned the “vile misdeeds” of protesters in London.
Before the torch encountered problems in France, a spokeswoman in Beijing for the city’s Olympic organizing committee said at a hurriedly organized news conference that the relay would continue on its international route regardless of protests. “The torch represents the Olympic spirit, and people welcome the torch,” said Wang Hui, the spokeswoman.
The news conference was apparently intended to address Sunday’s protests in London. Ms. Wang blamed the disruptions in London on a “few Tibet separatists” and described their actions as the work of saboteurs. She said Beijing’s Olympic organizers “strongly condemned” the Tibetan protesters.
“The general public is very angry at this sabotage by a few separatists,” she said. “During the torch relay, we met with some disturbances, but we believe that all the peace-loving people in the world will support the torch relay.”
Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, used a meeting in Beijing to criticize the London protests, but also to call for a rapid and peaceful solution to confrontations in Tibet.
French authorities appeared determined to try to spare China — and Paris —embarrassment or disorder similar to London’s, resorting to measures normally reserved for a visiting head of state. A police helicopter circled overhead, for example. Their efforts drew scorn from the French protesters who angrily noted the heavy police presence.
Officers with machine guns guarded sensitive Metro exits along the 17-mile route.
“One would almost think oneself in Lhasa,” said Jean-Paul Ribes, leader of the Support Committee of the Tibetan People in France, who was among the thousands massed on the Trocadero square, across the Seine from the Eiffel tower, where the flame began its passage through Paris. “It snowed last night, now the sky is blue — and police are everywhere,” Mr. Ribes said.
Many protesters — demonstrating against China’s human rights policies in general, or for a free Tibet, or simply for a boycott of the Olympics in Beijing — echoed a headline emblazoned across the front page of the left-wing daily Liberation, under a picture of the Olympic rings restyled as handcuffs: “Liberate The Olympic Games!”
Protesters came from all around Europe, including four busloads from Belgium. Lobsang Dechen, a 29-year-old Tibetan refugee living in Belgium for 4 ½ years, said Europeans should help the cause of Tibet by boycotting the Games. ‘’China does not deserve to be the host,” she said. ‘’They have to first learn to respect human rights in Tibet.’
Kevin Khayat, 19, a design student in Paris and a member of the International Federation for Human Rights, said sports should be separated from politics. “I am against a boycott, and in favor of human rights,” he said. He handed stickers to demonstrators urging: “Let’s keep our eyes open.”
In London on Sunday, the torch was relayed on a seven-hour journey from the new Wembley soccer stadium in the city’s northwest to the principal site for the 2012 Summer Olympics in Stratford in the east.
Along the way, numerous protesters seeking to reach the torch were wrestled to the ground by police officers. One man carrying a fire extinguisher narrowly failed to reach the person carrying the torch, but he set off the extinguisher anyway, dousing police officers with foam.
The torch’s London relay was the fourth stop of a global itinerary that began last month in Greece, where pro-Tibetan demonstrators briefly interrupted the torch’s lighting and its subsequent progress through Athens.
Tibetan organizations have said they plan protests at every stop on the torch’s 21-nation tour. After Paris, it moves to San Francisco, its only American stop, on Wednesday. The monthlong tour is scheduled to end in Vietnam; it is to be followed by a six-week, 46-stop tour of China.
The tour could prove jarring for Beijing. What organizers had billed as an occasion to celebrate the Olympics’ sporting ideals of peace and harmony is turning into a contest between China’s supporters and critics.
In London, more than 2,000 police officers were deployed; the security cordon around the torch was so dense that the flame and those carrying it were often barely visible to crowds.
Caught in the middle are foreign governments. Both Britain and France sought to protect delicate trade and diplomatic relations with China while supporting the Games and yet to also placate those who oppose holding the Olympics in a country with a harsh record for punishing dissent. The centerpiece of the torch parade Sunday was 10 Downing Street, where the Chinese contingent was greeted by Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Mr. Brown, like President Bush, has said he plans to attend the Games’ opening ceremonies in Beijing in August. That stand has drawn contrasts with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who has hinted he may not attend if China’s recent crackdown on Tibetans does not relent.
Under pressure from human rights groups in Britain, Mr. Brown has voiced sympathy for the Tibetan protests. He has also said that he will meet the Dalai Lama in Britain next month, and that he has informed China’s leaders.
The most intense scuffles in London occurred as the torch moved through the heart of the city. The torch, which was carried by a chain of British sports heroes and television celebrities, was protected by an inner guard of Chinese security men in blue and white Olympic tracksuits and an outer cordon of yellow-jacketed British police officers. Some were on foot, while others rode bicycles, motorbikes or horses.
For one long stretch, where streets narrowed and crowds were heavy, the torch was placed in the back of a single-decker bus and driven past the crowds until the police judged it safe for the runners to resume.
The warmest reception for the torch came as it passed through the Chinatown area of central London -- a diversion adopted to let the Chinese ambassador to Britain carry the torch.
A Chinese spokesman, Qu Yingpu, said Chinese officials were grateful to the police “for their efforts to keep order.” He added: “This is not the right time, the right platform, for any people to voice their political views.”
One protester who broke through the police cordon, David Allen, said his anger flared at the sight of British sports stars being guarded in London by Chinese security men.
“It makes us complicit in the regime’s repression,” Allen said. ”You have to ask: Where were these security men last week? Beating up people in the villages of China, no doubt.”
Katrin Bennhold reported from Paris, and John F. Burns from London. Jim Yardley contributed reporting from Beijing.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Cesar Chavez march
Cesar Chavez Pilgrimage March on Saturday, April 5
On Behalf Of OPR Pitzer Office of Public Relations
Speakers, Singers, and Music to Highlight Cesar Chavez Pilgrimage March
As part of celebrating the legacy of civil rights leader Cesar Chavez,
the Latina/o Roundtable and LCLAA (Labor Council for Latin American
Advancement) are holding the sixth annual Cesar Chavez Pilgrimage
March on Saturday April 5, beginning at 9:30 a. m., from Pomona City
Hall (Mission and Garey) to Cesar Chavez Park (Valley Blvd. and 57
Freeway). The speakers include: Paul Chavez, son of Cesar Chavez and
President of the National Farmworker's Service Center, Amanda Figueroa,
SEIU United Long Term Care Worker's Secretary-Treasurer, and Father
Patricio Guillen. The musical groups include: La Paz, a hip-hop group
from the farmworker movement; Trio del Pueblo, a group celebrating its
20 years of presentations throughout the Southwest and Mexico; and Las
Hermanas Arteaga, three Latina women singers from the city of Pomona.
Throughout the history of Cesar Chavez's community organizing efforts,
he used long pilgrimages as a means of bringing attention to the many
issues facing our communities. As part of commemorating the life of
Cesar Chavez, the pilgrimage march in Pomona will remember his legacy
through promoting non-violence and peace in our communities and abroad,
using our lives in building unity among people of all backgrounds, and
in supporting legalization rights for immigrants. The march will begin
at Pomona city hall with speakers and music. The procession will
proceed on the sidewalk west on Mission Blvd. to White Ave., North on
White Ave., and East on Holt Ave. (which becomes Valley Blvd. to Cesar
Chavez Park. The march will end at Cesar Chavez park with speakers,
musical groups, and poetry. The celebration is co-sponsored by the
Pomona Economic Opportunity Center and Campus Life Committee.
On Behalf Of OPR Pitzer Office of Public Relations
Speakers, Singers, and Music to Highlight Cesar Chavez Pilgrimage March
As part of celebrating the legacy of civil rights leader Cesar Chavez,
the Latina/o Roundtable and LCLAA (Labor Council for Latin American
Advancement) are holding the sixth annual Cesar Chavez Pilgrimage
March on Saturday April 5, beginning at 9:30 a. m., from Pomona City
Hall (Mission and Garey) to Cesar Chavez Park (Valley Blvd. and 57
Freeway). The speakers include: Paul Chavez, son of Cesar Chavez and
President of the National Farmworker's Service Center, Amanda Figueroa,
SEIU United Long Term Care Worker's Secretary-Treasurer, and Father
Patricio Guillen. The musical groups include: La Paz, a hip-hop group
from the farmworker movement; Trio del Pueblo, a group celebrating its
20 years of presentations throughout the Southwest and Mexico; and Las
Hermanas Arteaga, three Latina women singers from the city of Pomona.
Throughout the history of Cesar Chavez's community organizing efforts,
he used long pilgrimages as a means of bringing attention to the many
issues facing our communities. As part of commemorating the life of
Cesar Chavez, the pilgrimage march in Pomona will remember his legacy
through promoting non-violence and peace in our communities and abroad,
using our lives in building unity among people of all backgrounds, and
in supporting legalization rights for immigrants. The march will begin
at Pomona city hall with speakers and music. The procession will
proceed on the sidewalk west on Mission Blvd. to White Ave., North on
White Ave., and East on Holt Ave. (which becomes Valley Blvd. to Cesar
Chavez Park. The march will end at Cesar Chavez park with speakers,
musical groups, and poetry. The celebration is co-sponsored by the
Pomona Economic Opportunity Center and Campus Life Committee.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Modern Slaves: An Interview with Benjamin Skinner
From Salon.com
Hardly a thing of the past, slavery thrives in our world. Investigative reporter Benjamin Skinner tells Salon the shocking truth about human trafficking.
By Hannah Wallace
Mar. 27, 2008 | During the four years that Benjamin Skinner researched modern-day slavery for his new book, "A Crime So Monstrous," he posed as a buyer at illegal brothels on several continents, interviewed convicted human traffickers in a Romanian prison and endured giardia, malaria, dengue and a bad motorcycle accident. But Skinner, an investigative journalist, is most haunted by his experience in a seedy brothel in Bucharest, Romania, where he was offered a young woman with Down syndrome in exchange for a used car.
"There are more slaves today than at any point in human history," writes Skinner, citing a recent estimate that there are currently 27 million worldwide. One hundred and forty-three years after the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed in 1865 and 60 years after the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights banned the slave trade worldwide, slavery -- or, as it is euphemistically called, human trafficking -- is actually thriving. It is, as Hillary Clinton has said, "the dark underbelly of globalization."
That slavery in its many forms -- debt bondage, forced domestic servitude and forced prostitution -- still exists is, indeed, shocking, mostly because it is invisible to those of us who don't know where to look for it. Skinner's great achievement is that he shines a light on the international slave trade, exposing the horrors of bondage not only through assiduous reporting and interviews with modern-day abolitionists and government officials, but by sharing the stories of several survivors. These poignant tales -- of people like Muong, a 12-year-old Dinka boy from southern Sudan, who is abducted (with his brother and mother) by an Arab slave driver; Tatiana, an Eastern European woman who is tricked into slavery when her boyfriend of six months finds her an "au pair" job in Amsterdam; and Gonoo, an Indian man in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh who inherits a debt from his father and spends his days working it off at a stone quarry -- illustrate the harsh realities of slavery while also offering some hope that former slaves can rebuild their lives.
Salon sat down with Skinner to talk about modern-day abolitionists, what's wrong with redemptions (also called "buy backs"), and why he's optimistic that slavery can be eradicated.
You infiltrated many dangerous underworlds to get these stories, often putting your life at risk by chatting up child slave brokers and negotiating to buy young women from a Russian mobster in Istanbul who'd just been released from prison. Which situation, in retrospect, was the most harrowing?
There were definitely some moments where I felt I'd made a mistake in terms of personal safety. At this point, though, I have to say that the people who are most in danger in these situations are the slaves themselves. My greatest concern going in was not "Am I going to come out whole?" but "Is there going to be some retaliation against the slaves if my cover is blown?"
I had a principle that I would not pay for a human life. You buy a human being and you can't just set them free and dump them on the economy with no resources, no support system, no rehabilitation.
When I was offered this young woman in trade for a used car at the Romani brothel in Bucharest, I could have done one of a few things: I could've paid to redeem her. I was with a couple of guys and I could've fought physically with the traffickers to get her out. Or I could've gone to the police the next day to tell them, which is what I did.
Very unsatisfying, that. You want to rip this guy's head off, right? I was shown this woman who had scars all over her arm -- she was clearly trying to kill herself to escape daily rape, and she had Down syndrome. I was so in shock. I was undercover and I had this moment where I thought, "What would my character be doing in this situation?" So I tried to smile. And I physically couldn't. I was so horrified. I looked at my translator, who had not done this kind of work before, and there was just sheer horror on his face as well. To see somebody who is in such a condition. They had put makeup on her and her makeup was running because she was crying so much.
Did the police do anything?
The response from the police was, "These are the Roma, they have their laws, they have their blood." The Roma are this incredibly oppressed and marginalized community within Romania -- and have been for centuries. That's why, I think, the major human traffickers in Romania over the past several years have been Roma.
I kept thinking of Samantha Power's book as I was reading this because you describe the reluctance of government officials to use the term "slavery" to describe what is obviously exactly that. (Power describes the same studied avoidance of the word "genocide" in "A Problem From Hell.") Colin Powell didn't use "slavery" in 2001 when he released the first Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report. Even the major piece of U.S. anti-slavery legislation, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, doesn't use the word "slavery."
There are over a dozen universal conventions and over 300 international treaties that have been signed banning slavery and the slave trade. We've all agreed that this is a crime of universal concern and it requires a robust response to stop it.
The U.S. has actually gotten better at using the term "slavery" when it's appropriate. One group that has not gotten better in this regard -- they've taken baby steps -- has been the U.N. They are so tepid and afraid of offending member states. Even in a case like Sudan, which was as egregious a form of slavery and slave raiding as you've had in the late 20th century. In 1999, at the height of slave raiding, the U.N. Human Rights Commission said, "OK, we will no longer refer to slavery, we will refer to intertribal abductions." And if you talk to U.N. officials behind the scenes, they'll say that the logic behind this is that in order to move the issue forward, we had to be diplomatic and reach this middle ground. The problem with that logic is that you lose all leverage. Abduction is not a crime against humanity -- slavery is. If it's a crime against humanity, you get hit pretty hard.
How would you get hit very hard?
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 4, says slavery and the slave trade are banned worldwide. But actually, you're bringing up a good point. In terms of enforcement, the U.N. doesn't have the kind of systems built into it which can really deal with this, and that's a problem.
The U.N., which has, as part of its original mandate, the eradication of slavery and the slave trade, finds itself now at a stage where there are more slaves today than at any point in human history. And it really makes you question the viability of the model and the strength of the system.
There are philosophical differences about how to combat slavery. Some people, such as Michael Horowitz (the neocon abolitionist), have focused exclusively on sex trafficking, hoping there will be a "ripple effect" with other forms of slavery such as debt bondage and forced domestic servitude.
Nonsense.
But how do you explain this myopia? You cite so much research that shows that the other forms of slavery are even more prevalent -- in the U.S., you say, less than half of American slaves are forced prostitutes.
I don't think enough reports have come out and the ones that have come out haven't been in the right places. I think when you start getting the 700 Club talking about how the slavery of a young man in a quarry in India -- or in a brick kiln or on a farm -- is equivalent to the slavery of the Israelites and you start quoting Bible verses, then maybe we'll be getting somewhere.
Another philosophical divide among modern-day abolitionists has to do with the role of poverty. The late Senator Wellstone, who co-sponsored the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000, was adamant that poverty was a central factor but Horowitz disagreed, vehemently. Why do you think that is? It seems so obvious that poverty is the very reason so many people are forced and hoodwinked into slavery.
Paul Wellstone's view of this was basically that you can't address slavery without having targeted anti-poverty programs. When I presented this to Horowitz, he slammed his desk and said something to the effect of "The Paul Krugmans of the world would love for this to be a means for me redistributing my income to Sri Lanka." And I'll give him this: I understand his point that the end of slavery cannot wait for the end of poverty. That's not what I'm calling for and I don't think that's what Senator Wellstone was calling for.
But if you don't recognize that the primary driver of slavery today is the nexus between withering poverty of extreme marginalized communities with unscrupulous criminals, and you don't address both sides of it -- the criminal side and the socioeconomic side -- you're not going to solve this problem. As long as there's a ready source of people who are so desperate for survival that they will sell their children into slavery, as long as you don't address that, you will always have slavery. And I fundamentally feel that slavery can be ended.
Do you think the TVPA's three-tiered anti-slavery system, which evaluates countries' efforts to eradicate slavery and imposes non-trade sanctions on those who don't do anything to abolish it, works?
I think it's a good thing, but I honesty feel it has outlived its usefulness. You can only slap a country lightly on its wrists so many times and have them notice. After a while it totally loses its effectiveness.
Let's talk about the practice of Redemptions. Are these still going on and is it a viable way to chip away at slavery, buying a slave's freedom one at a time?
There's a long history of it, and not all of it is bad. I find it a very imperfect and unjust way of freeing people. You are essentially acknowledging the right of property in man, by buying them. In recent history, I can't think of any instances where it has worked and been unproblematic.
It's mostly happening in Sudan, right?
New York Times columnist Nick Kristof did it, of course, in Cambodia where he went in and bought two girls in a brothel. And he went back a year later and found that one of the girls was back in the brothel and hooked on methamphetamines.
To take our own history, Lincoln had contemplated buying all slaves from their masters and then setting them free in either Haiti or Liberia. But I think at a certain point -- and I defer to civil war scholars on this -- he realized that this was very much an imperfect justice and what needed to happen was the remaking, through force, of a society that would acknowledge that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, which was the initial promise, of course, of the Declaration of Independence.
What you have in Sudan are these evangelicals coming over with tons of hard currency in the middle of a war zone, going to one of the combatants -- in particular, one small faction of the combatants -- and saying, "OK, here's a ton of money, now go get us some slaves."
Basically funding the militia.
Exactly. And even if every one of those people was a slave and everything was on the up and up ... the devil is in the details.
You'd think that the hardest part would be freeing slaves. But once they're free, their lives are never easy. At one point in the Sudan section you say "free, but free to starve." What seems to you the best solution for helping former slaves deal with their new-found freedom?
Giving them some access to credit, healthcare, property rights and education. And psychological help.
In many of these far-off places where I was, the arbiters of law -- the people who set the rules -- are people who are benefiting from a slave economy. As long as that's the situation, you need to break the grip of those people over the system.
In your epilogue, you say, "George W. Bush did more to free modern-day slaves than any other president." However, you also criticize the Bush administration for focusing on sex trafficking to the exclusion of other forms of bondage.
The bar isn't very high. Only at the end of the Clinton years was there a recognition on the part of the executive branch that this was really an issue. But Bush deserves credit. He did more to free slaves than any president in modern history. But history doesn't grade on a curve on the subject of abolition. And he could have and should have done much more -- there's no question. The fact that there was such a narrow focus really hamstrung his efficacy on this.
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has called trafficking "the dark underbelly of globalization."
Which presidential candidate -- Clinton, Obama or McCain -- do you think is most passionate about abolishing modern-day slavery?
Listen, I'm not going to give Obama a pass on this. It's not clear to me that he cares about modern-day slavery -- he hasn't said a word about it. And Hillary has, certainly in the last couple of years. Though not on the trail.
But I think it is a mistake to make this a campaign issue. I think it has to be a big piece of our American foreign policy platform. It needs to be fundamentally a central piece of any meaningful new American foreign policy.
And what about John McCain?
Well, he blurbed my book. John McCain is very close with John Miller, the former head of the TIP office, which is a good sign. But no, he hasn't been a leader on this.
One of the things I found hopeful about the book is that while it's important to make policy changes and create tough anti-slavery laws, NGOs and individuals clearly play a vital role in exposing slavery. People like Rampal in India (the activist who runs Sankalp) and the Amsterdam taxi driver who helps Kayta, a sex slave, buy her freedom. So the role of the individual is important.
It is, it's extremely important. If there's a critical thing from that U.S. chapter that I was trying to get across, it's that this doesn't have to be some kind of neo-McCarthyism where you are spying on your neighbors, but just be aware of what's going on in your community.
I talk about three things that individuals can and should do. The first is becoming conscious of the reality of slavery -- becoming more attuned to the signs of what may be a trafficking or slavery situation. A key part of that is getting educated about slavery. The second thing is pressing elected officials and candidates for office on what they're going to do about it -- what creative approaches they have for combatting modern-day slavery and ending it within a generation. The third things is supporting groups like Free the Slaves (Kevin Bales' group) and Anti-Slavery International.
Abolishing slavery is clearly an all-consuming issue, something that often drives people who are involved with it to burn out or go crazy or both. How have you kept your sanity during the four years of researching this book?
The question is really how these people that operate at the pointed end of the spear keep their sanity. And the people who run trafficking shelters in Romania -- who have weekly or monthly threats from traffickers -- how they keep their sanity. For me it was much easier. You go into these situations and certainly it stays with you. When you meet somebody like this young woman in the Bucharest brothel or Gonoo or the trafficker in Haiti who offered to sell me a child for $50.
What drove you to take on this project?
You could say that abolition is in my blood. My great-great-grandfather fought with the Union Army in the Siege of Petersburg [Va.]. His uncle was a rabble-rousing abolitionist in Connecticut. And I was raised Quaker. The Quakers were the heart of the abolitionist movement in the late 18th century, early 19th century.
Fast-forward to 1999. I read Kevin Bales' "Disposable People," which is an incredibly good, earnest take on modern-day slavery worldwide. Bales' estimate of total number of slaves was 27 million -- a staggering number. The one thing that I wanted to do was to put a human face on that: to tell the stories of the slaves, the slave masters and the slave traders. And to tell the stories of those who try to free them.
Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc.
Hardly a thing of the past, slavery thrives in our world. Investigative reporter Benjamin Skinner tells Salon the shocking truth about human trafficking.
By Hannah Wallace
Mar. 27, 2008 | During the four years that Benjamin Skinner researched modern-day slavery for his new book, "A Crime So Monstrous," he posed as a buyer at illegal brothels on several continents, interviewed convicted human traffickers in a Romanian prison and endured giardia, malaria, dengue and a bad motorcycle accident. But Skinner, an investigative journalist, is most haunted by his experience in a seedy brothel in Bucharest, Romania, where he was offered a young woman with Down syndrome in exchange for a used car.
"There are more slaves today than at any point in human history," writes Skinner, citing a recent estimate that there are currently 27 million worldwide. One hundred and forty-three years after the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed in 1865 and 60 years after the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights banned the slave trade worldwide, slavery -- or, as it is euphemistically called, human trafficking -- is actually thriving. It is, as Hillary Clinton has said, "the dark underbelly of globalization."
That slavery in its many forms -- debt bondage, forced domestic servitude and forced prostitution -- still exists is, indeed, shocking, mostly because it is invisible to those of us who don't know where to look for it. Skinner's great achievement is that he shines a light on the international slave trade, exposing the horrors of bondage not only through assiduous reporting and interviews with modern-day abolitionists and government officials, but by sharing the stories of several survivors. These poignant tales -- of people like Muong, a 12-year-old Dinka boy from southern Sudan, who is abducted (with his brother and mother) by an Arab slave driver; Tatiana, an Eastern European woman who is tricked into slavery when her boyfriend of six months finds her an "au pair" job in Amsterdam; and Gonoo, an Indian man in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh who inherits a debt from his father and spends his days working it off at a stone quarry -- illustrate the harsh realities of slavery while also offering some hope that former slaves can rebuild their lives.
Salon sat down with Skinner to talk about modern-day abolitionists, what's wrong with redemptions (also called "buy backs"), and why he's optimistic that slavery can be eradicated.
You infiltrated many dangerous underworlds to get these stories, often putting your life at risk by chatting up child slave brokers and negotiating to buy young women from a Russian mobster in Istanbul who'd just been released from prison. Which situation, in retrospect, was the most harrowing?
There were definitely some moments where I felt I'd made a mistake in terms of personal safety. At this point, though, I have to say that the people who are most in danger in these situations are the slaves themselves. My greatest concern going in was not "Am I going to come out whole?" but "Is there going to be some retaliation against the slaves if my cover is blown?"
I had a principle that I would not pay for a human life. You buy a human being and you can't just set them free and dump them on the economy with no resources, no support system, no rehabilitation.
When I was offered this young woman in trade for a used car at the Romani brothel in Bucharest, I could have done one of a few things: I could've paid to redeem her. I was with a couple of guys and I could've fought physically with the traffickers to get her out. Or I could've gone to the police the next day to tell them, which is what I did.
Very unsatisfying, that. You want to rip this guy's head off, right? I was shown this woman who had scars all over her arm -- she was clearly trying to kill herself to escape daily rape, and she had Down syndrome. I was so in shock. I was undercover and I had this moment where I thought, "What would my character be doing in this situation?" So I tried to smile. And I physically couldn't. I was so horrified. I looked at my translator, who had not done this kind of work before, and there was just sheer horror on his face as well. To see somebody who is in such a condition. They had put makeup on her and her makeup was running because she was crying so much.
Did the police do anything?
The response from the police was, "These are the Roma, they have their laws, they have their blood." The Roma are this incredibly oppressed and marginalized community within Romania -- and have been for centuries. That's why, I think, the major human traffickers in Romania over the past several years have been Roma.
I kept thinking of Samantha Power's book as I was reading this because you describe the reluctance of government officials to use the term "slavery" to describe what is obviously exactly that. (Power describes the same studied avoidance of the word "genocide" in "A Problem From Hell.") Colin Powell didn't use "slavery" in 2001 when he released the first Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report. Even the major piece of U.S. anti-slavery legislation, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, doesn't use the word "slavery."
There are over a dozen universal conventions and over 300 international treaties that have been signed banning slavery and the slave trade. We've all agreed that this is a crime of universal concern and it requires a robust response to stop it.
The U.S. has actually gotten better at using the term "slavery" when it's appropriate. One group that has not gotten better in this regard -- they've taken baby steps -- has been the U.N. They are so tepid and afraid of offending member states. Even in a case like Sudan, which was as egregious a form of slavery and slave raiding as you've had in the late 20th century. In 1999, at the height of slave raiding, the U.N. Human Rights Commission said, "OK, we will no longer refer to slavery, we will refer to intertribal abductions." And if you talk to U.N. officials behind the scenes, they'll say that the logic behind this is that in order to move the issue forward, we had to be diplomatic and reach this middle ground. The problem with that logic is that you lose all leverage. Abduction is not a crime against humanity -- slavery is. If it's a crime against humanity, you get hit pretty hard.
How would you get hit very hard?
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 4, says slavery and the slave trade are banned worldwide. But actually, you're bringing up a good point. In terms of enforcement, the U.N. doesn't have the kind of systems built into it which can really deal with this, and that's a problem.
The U.N., which has, as part of its original mandate, the eradication of slavery and the slave trade, finds itself now at a stage where there are more slaves today than at any point in human history. And it really makes you question the viability of the model and the strength of the system.
There are philosophical differences about how to combat slavery. Some people, such as Michael Horowitz (the neocon abolitionist), have focused exclusively on sex trafficking, hoping there will be a "ripple effect" with other forms of slavery such as debt bondage and forced domestic servitude.
Nonsense.
But how do you explain this myopia? You cite so much research that shows that the other forms of slavery are even more prevalent -- in the U.S., you say, less than half of American slaves are forced prostitutes.
I don't think enough reports have come out and the ones that have come out haven't been in the right places. I think when you start getting the 700 Club talking about how the slavery of a young man in a quarry in India -- or in a brick kiln or on a farm -- is equivalent to the slavery of the Israelites and you start quoting Bible verses, then maybe we'll be getting somewhere.
Another philosophical divide among modern-day abolitionists has to do with the role of poverty. The late Senator Wellstone, who co-sponsored the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000, was adamant that poverty was a central factor but Horowitz disagreed, vehemently. Why do you think that is? It seems so obvious that poverty is the very reason so many people are forced and hoodwinked into slavery.
Paul Wellstone's view of this was basically that you can't address slavery without having targeted anti-poverty programs. When I presented this to Horowitz, he slammed his desk and said something to the effect of "The Paul Krugmans of the world would love for this to be a means for me redistributing my income to Sri Lanka." And I'll give him this: I understand his point that the end of slavery cannot wait for the end of poverty. That's not what I'm calling for and I don't think that's what Senator Wellstone was calling for.
But if you don't recognize that the primary driver of slavery today is the nexus between withering poverty of extreme marginalized communities with unscrupulous criminals, and you don't address both sides of it -- the criminal side and the socioeconomic side -- you're not going to solve this problem. As long as there's a ready source of people who are so desperate for survival that they will sell their children into slavery, as long as you don't address that, you will always have slavery. And I fundamentally feel that slavery can be ended.
Do you think the TVPA's three-tiered anti-slavery system, which evaluates countries' efforts to eradicate slavery and imposes non-trade sanctions on those who don't do anything to abolish it, works?
I think it's a good thing, but I honesty feel it has outlived its usefulness. You can only slap a country lightly on its wrists so many times and have them notice. After a while it totally loses its effectiveness.
Let's talk about the practice of Redemptions. Are these still going on and is it a viable way to chip away at slavery, buying a slave's freedom one at a time?
There's a long history of it, and not all of it is bad. I find it a very imperfect and unjust way of freeing people. You are essentially acknowledging the right of property in man, by buying them. In recent history, I can't think of any instances where it has worked and been unproblematic.
It's mostly happening in Sudan, right?
New York Times columnist Nick Kristof did it, of course, in Cambodia where he went in and bought two girls in a brothel. And he went back a year later and found that one of the girls was back in the brothel and hooked on methamphetamines.
To take our own history, Lincoln had contemplated buying all slaves from their masters and then setting them free in either Haiti or Liberia. But I think at a certain point -- and I defer to civil war scholars on this -- he realized that this was very much an imperfect justice and what needed to happen was the remaking, through force, of a society that would acknowledge that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, which was the initial promise, of course, of the Declaration of Independence.
What you have in Sudan are these evangelicals coming over with tons of hard currency in the middle of a war zone, going to one of the combatants -- in particular, one small faction of the combatants -- and saying, "OK, here's a ton of money, now go get us some slaves."
Basically funding the militia.
Exactly. And even if every one of those people was a slave and everything was on the up and up ... the devil is in the details.
You'd think that the hardest part would be freeing slaves. But once they're free, their lives are never easy. At one point in the Sudan section you say "free, but free to starve." What seems to you the best solution for helping former slaves deal with their new-found freedom?
Giving them some access to credit, healthcare, property rights and education. And psychological help.
In many of these far-off places where I was, the arbiters of law -- the people who set the rules -- are people who are benefiting from a slave economy. As long as that's the situation, you need to break the grip of those people over the system.
In your epilogue, you say, "George W. Bush did more to free modern-day slaves than any other president." However, you also criticize the Bush administration for focusing on sex trafficking to the exclusion of other forms of bondage.
The bar isn't very high. Only at the end of the Clinton years was there a recognition on the part of the executive branch that this was really an issue. But Bush deserves credit. He did more to free slaves than any president in modern history. But history doesn't grade on a curve on the subject of abolition. And he could have and should have done much more -- there's no question. The fact that there was such a narrow focus really hamstrung his efficacy on this.
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has called trafficking "the dark underbelly of globalization."
Which presidential candidate -- Clinton, Obama or McCain -- do you think is most passionate about abolishing modern-day slavery?
Listen, I'm not going to give Obama a pass on this. It's not clear to me that he cares about modern-day slavery -- he hasn't said a word about it. And Hillary has, certainly in the last couple of years. Though not on the trail.
But I think it is a mistake to make this a campaign issue. I think it has to be a big piece of our American foreign policy platform. It needs to be fundamentally a central piece of any meaningful new American foreign policy.
And what about John McCain?
Well, he blurbed my book. John McCain is very close with John Miller, the former head of the TIP office, which is a good sign. But no, he hasn't been a leader on this.
One of the things I found hopeful about the book is that while it's important to make policy changes and create tough anti-slavery laws, NGOs and individuals clearly play a vital role in exposing slavery. People like Rampal in India (the activist who runs Sankalp) and the Amsterdam taxi driver who helps Kayta, a sex slave, buy her freedom. So the role of the individual is important.
It is, it's extremely important. If there's a critical thing from that U.S. chapter that I was trying to get across, it's that this doesn't have to be some kind of neo-McCarthyism where you are spying on your neighbors, but just be aware of what's going on in your community.
I talk about three things that individuals can and should do. The first is becoming conscious of the reality of slavery -- becoming more attuned to the signs of what may be a trafficking or slavery situation. A key part of that is getting educated about slavery. The second thing is pressing elected officials and candidates for office on what they're going to do about it -- what creative approaches they have for combatting modern-day slavery and ending it within a generation. The third things is supporting groups like Free the Slaves (Kevin Bales' group) and Anti-Slavery International.
Abolishing slavery is clearly an all-consuming issue, something that often drives people who are involved with it to burn out or go crazy or both. How have you kept your sanity during the four years of researching this book?
The question is really how these people that operate at the pointed end of the spear keep their sanity. And the people who run trafficking shelters in Romania -- who have weekly or monthly threats from traffickers -- how they keep their sanity. For me it was much easier. You go into these situations and certainly it stays with you. When you meet somebody like this young woman in the Bucharest brothel or Gonoo or the trafficker in Haiti who offered to sell me a child for $50.
What drove you to take on this project?
You could say that abolition is in my blood. My great-great-grandfather fought with the Union Army in the Siege of Petersburg [Va.]. His uncle was a rabble-rousing abolitionist in Connecticut. And I was raised Quaker. The Quakers were the heart of the abolitionist movement in the late 18th century, early 19th century.
Fast-forward to 1999. I read Kevin Bales' "Disposable People," which is an incredibly good, earnest take on modern-day slavery worldwide. Bales' estimate of total number of slaves was 27 million -- a staggering number. The one thing that I wanted to do was to put a human face on that: to tell the stories of the slaves, the slave masters and the slave traders. And to tell the stories of those who try to free them.
Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Help Kentucky Divest for Darfur!
The Kentucky Senate will vote on a crucial divestment resolution THIS WEEK. We need your help to make sure the Kentucky Senate approves the resolution and passes it into law!
Call 800-372-7181 to send your senators a message TODAY!
24 states have already divested for Darfur and now it's Kentucky's turn!
Kentucky's House of Representatives has passed a resolution to withdraw public funds from companies that work with Sudan's genocidal government. The state Senate must now make the resolution legally binding so Kentucky can divest from genocide.
The Kentucky Senate will vote on this resolution THIS WEEK. Please call your state senator today to help Kentucky divest for Darfur!
Just follow these simple steps:
1. Call 800-372-7181 between 9 a.m. and 11 p.m.
2. Tell the staffer who answers the phone that you are calling to urge all senators to:
1. Support H.B. 703, Kentucky's targeted Sudan divestment resolution that the House of Representatives passed two weeks ago.
2. Strengthen the resolution to make it legally binding.
3. Click here to report your call back to us (this step is extremely important for organization purposes. Please don't skip it.)
Strong divestment legislation in Kentucky can create economic pressure on Khartoum to end the genocide. It will require Kentucky's pension funds to divest from companies that have a business relationship with the Sudanese government, fail to support Sudanese civilians, and fail to enact strong corporate governance policies regarding the genocide in Darfur.
Divestment strategies helped end apartheid in South Africa, and they can help end genocide in Sudan.
Make sure the Kentucky Senate meets our responsibility to act against genocide. Click here to send your message TODAY!
After you have sent your message, please click here to ask your friends and family to join you in urging their senators to help Kentucky divest for Darfur.
Thank you for your continued commitment to the people of Darfur.
Best regards,
Colleen Connors
Save Darfur Coalition
The Save Darfur Coalition is an alliance of over 180 faith-based, advocacy and human rights organizations whose mission is to raise public awareness about the ongoing genocide in Darfur and to mobilize a unified response to the atrocities that threaten the lives of more than two million people in the Darfur region. To learn more, please visit http://www.SaveDarfur.org.
Call 800-372-7181 to send your senators a message TODAY!
24 states have already divested for Darfur and now it's Kentucky's turn!
Kentucky's House of Representatives has passed a resolution to withdraw public funds from companies that work with Sudan's genocidal government. The state Senate must now make the resolution legally binding so Kentucky can divest from genocide.
The Kentucky Senate will vote on this resolution THIS WEEK. Please call your state senator today to help Kentucky divest for Darfur!
Just follow these simple steps:
1. Call 800-372-7181 between 9 a.m. and 11 p.m.
2. Tell the staffer who answers the phone that you are calling to urge all senators to:
1. Support H.B. 703, Kentucky's targeted Sudan divestment resolution that the House of Representatives passed two weeks ago.
2. Strengthen the resolution to make it legally binding.
3. Click here to report your call back to us (this step is extremely important for organization purposes. Please don't skip it.)
Strong divestment legislation in Kentucky can create economic pressure on Khartoum to end the genocide. It will require Kentucky's pension funds to divest from companies that have a business relationship with the Sudanese government, fail to support Sudanese civilians, and fail to enact strong corporate governance policies regarding the genocide in Darfur.
Divestment strategies helped end apartheid in South Africa, and they can help end genocide in Sudan.
Make sure the Kentucky Senate meets our responsibility to act against genocide. Click here to send your message TODAY!
After you have sent your message, please click here to ask your friends and family to join you in urging their senators to help Kentucky divest for Darfur.
Thank you for your continued commitment to the people of Darfur.
Best regards,
Colleen Connors
Save Darfur Coalition
The Save Darfur Coalition is an alliance of over 180 faith-based, advocacy and human rights organizations whose mission is to raise public awareness about the ongoing genocide in Darfur and to mobilize a unified response to the atrocities that threaten the lives of more than two million people in the Darfur region. To learn more, please visit http://www.SaveDarfur.org.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Boingboing.net covers Tibet protests
Tibet: China blocks YouTube, protests spread, bloggers react
Posted by Xeni Jardin, March 16, 2008 9:50 AM | permalink
Here is a phonecam video of protests in Amdo, Tibet, over the weekend.
* According to Shanghaiist (and now, mainstream news outlets), YouTube was blocked in China over the weekend, likely because of content related to the flood of pro-Tibetan-sovereignty protests in Tibet and elsewhere:
* John Kennedy at Global Voices confirms the YouTube block:
* Rebecca McKinnon at Global Voices has an excellent roundup of reactions in the Chinese blogosphere:
"Davesgonechina" at the Tenement Palm blog has been translating the chatter coming from Chinese netizens on Fanfou and Jiwai - Chinese versions of Twitter. Click here, here, and here, specifically. Dave has done more than translate: he points out that this Tibet situation is a real challenge to all people who believe that the Internet can help foster free speech and bring about better global understanding. Here is his challenge to all of us...
* On Friday, protest in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, erupted into violence when police, army troops, and ethnic Tibetan demonstrators clashed. Some accounts place the death toll at 30, some at 100, some at 300. It's hard to separate rumor from truthful first-hand account, and hard to know exactly how many have been killed or injured, because communication in the region is so difficult. Foreign journalists are not allowed in, unaccompanied by official escorts. Internet and phone communications are routinely blocked by Chinese authorities when unrest occurs; some blogging tourists in Lhasa wanting to upload photos of what they witnessed have reported the presence of authorities inside 'net cafes. Pro-Tibetan-sovereignty sites like TCHRD, SFT, and Phayul are posting first-person accounts online. Some of those reports are difficult to independently confirm, given the circumstances. The website of the Central Tibetan Administration (part of the government in exile, led by the Dalai Lama, based in India) posts this update.
* The unrest spread this weekend to regions outside Lhasa: police and protesters also clashed in China's Sichuan and Qinghai provinces, and Gansu province, all of which have large ethnic Tibetan populations. On Saturday...
Residents in Xiahe, reached by telephone, heard loud noises similar to gunshots or explosions. A waitress described the scene as “chaos” and said many injured people had been sent to a local hospital.
* China's government has declared a "people's war" against the Tibetan independence movement, in "propaganda and security" measures, and has implemented what amounts to martial law in Lhasa.
* China's governor in Tibet promises harsh consequences for protest participants who do not turn themselves in by Tuesday.
* Speaking to reporters today in Dharamsala, India, the home of the Tibetan Government in Exile, the Dalai Lama called for an international inquiry into the current human rights conditions in Tibet.
* George Bush removed China from a human rights blacklist just three days before the bloodshed in Lhasa.
UPDATE: Boing Boing reader Adam writes,
* Reports estimate that 20,000 Chinese troops have now been deployed to Lhasa (thanks, Christal).
* UPDATE 2 (8pm PT Sunday March 16): BB reader Nick Dobson says,
Besides Youtube, it appears The Guardian and Boingboing have been added to the blocked list in China. ([I'm in] Suzhou, Jiangsu, China)
Posted by Xeni Jardin, March 16, 2008 9:50 AM | permalink
Here is a phonecam video of protests in Amdo, Tibet, over the weekend.
* According to Shanghaiist (and now, mainstream news outlets), YouTube was blocked in China over the weekend, likely because of content related to the flood of pro-Tibetan-sovereignty protests in Tibet and elsewhere:
International news channels such as CNN and BBC are also getting routinely blacked out. While we think this is a really poor way to deal with all the shit that's going on, we have been there many, many times, and survived. Time to turn on your VPN again, people! An
* John Kennedy at Global Voices confirms the YouTube block:
As Tibet transitioned into total lockdown and videos of the violent situation proliferated on YouTube, people began noticing Saturday afternoon in China that the video-sharing website could not be accessed. Tech blogger Rick Martin on the CNET Asia Little Red Blog has done some tests which confirm what many have assumed.
* Rebecca McKinnon at Global Voices has an excellent roundup of reactions in the Chinese blogosphere:
For those living in the West who didn't realize that there's little sympathy for Tibet independence among ethnic Chinese in the PRC, this blog post on Global Voices will be a shocker. John Kennedy has translated chatter from Chinese blogs and chatrooms that generally runs along the lines of: those ungrateful minorities, we give them modern conveniences and look how they thank us... where have we heard this before? Reuters has a roundup on the Washington Post that begins: "a look at Chinese blogs reveals a vitriolic outpouring of anger and nationalism directed against Tibetans and the West." (...)
"Davesgonechina" at the Tenement Palm blog has been translating the chatter coming from Chinese netizens on Fanfou and Jiwai - Chinese versions of Twitter. Click here, here, and here, specifically. Dave has done more than translate: he points out that this Tibet situation is a real challenge to all people who believe that the Internet can help foster free speech and bring about better global understanding. Here is his challenge to all of us...
* On Friday, protest in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, erupted into violence when police, army troops, and ethnic Tibetan demonstrators clashed. Some accounts place the death toll at 30, some at 100, some at 300. It's hard to separate rumor from truthful first-hand account, and hard to know exactly how many have been killed or injured, because communication in the region is so difficult. Foreign journalists are not allowed in, unaccompanied by official escorts. Internet and phone communications are routinely blocked by Chinese authorities when unrest occurs; some blogging tourists in Lhasa wanting to upload photos of what they witnessed have reported the presence of authorities inside 'net cafes. Pro-Tibetan-sovereignty sites like TCHRD, SFT, and Phayul are posting first-person accounts online. Some of those reports are difficult to independently confirm, given the circumstances. The website of the Central Tibetan Administration (part of the government in exile, led by the Dalai Lama, based in India) posts this update.
* The unrest spread this weekend to regions outside Lhasa: police and protesters also clashed in China's Sichuan and Qinghai provinces, and Gansu province, all of which have large ethnic Tibetan populations. On Saturday...
Demonstrations erupted for the second consecutive day in the city of Xiahe in Gansu Province, where an estimated 4,000 Tibetans gathered near the Labrang Monastery. Local monks had held a smaller protest on Friday, but the confrontation escalated Saturday afternoon, according to witnesses and Tibetans in India who spoke with protesters by telephone.
Residents in Xiahe, reached by telephone, heard loud noises similar to gunshots or explosions. A waitress described the scene as “chaos” and said many injured people had been sent to a local hospital.
* China's government has declared a "people's war" against the Tibetan independence movement, in "propaganda and security" measures, and has implemented what amounts to martial law in Lhasa.
"Fight a people's war to oppose separatism and protect stability ... expose and condemn the malicious actions of these forces and expose the hideous face of the Dalai clique to broad daylight," senior regional and security officials announced after a meeting, according to the official Tibet Daily on Sunday.
* China's governor in Tibet promises harsh consequences for protest participants who do not turn themselves in by Tuesday.
* Speaking to reporters today in Dharamsala, India, the home of the Tibetan Government in Exile, the Dalai Lama called for an international inquiry into the current human rights conditions in Tibet.
''Whether intentionally or unintentionally, some kind of cultural genocide is taking place,'' said the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader. He was referring to China's policy of encouraging the ethnic Han majority to migrate to Tibet, restrictions on Buddhist temples and re-education programs for monks.
* George Bush removed China from a human rights blacklist just three days before the bloodshed in Lhasa.
UPDATE: Boing Boing reader Adam writes,
I am visiting Beijing on business, and staying at a hotel that caters to Westerners. There have been reports that China was loosening controls on the media ahead of the Olympic games, in order to give visitors the impression that the media is unrestricted, but that is not the case in the last day.
While watching CNN in my hotel room, the station goes dark during the top-of-the-hour news flash on the riots, then returns when the synopsis of "what's to come" is given about other stories, and then goes dark again while the coverage switches to Lhasa.
Coverage returns with the anchor asking users to send in their first-hand reports to ireport.com, after all mention of the incident is over. Same results for BBC as well.
The China Daily newspaper I grabbed from the lounge has a small article on the bottom of the front page, titled "Dalai Lama behind sabotage", and states that his "clique" has "organized, premeditated, and masterminded" the beatings, looting, and arson, which "has aroused the indignation of, and is strongly condemned by, the people of all ethnic groups in Tibet."
* Reports estimate that 20,000 Chinese troops have now been deployed to Lhasa (thanks, Christal).
* UPDATE 2 (8pm PT Sunday March 16): BB reader Nick Dobson says,
Besides Youtube, it appears The Guardian and Boingboing have been added to the blocked list in China. ([I'm in] Suzhou, Jiangsu, China)
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Protests in Tibet
The above video is a rare recording of a protest in Tibet against Chinese rule, taken by a tourist. Check out Students for a Free Tibet for more information.
Saturday, March 8, 2008
A Chance to Reclaim Moral Leadership: Vetoed
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/08/AR2008030800304.html?hpid=topnews
Bush today vetoed a bill that would have explicitly banned the torture technique of waterboarding. I am disgusted and worry about our nation's moral leadership. America grew into a world leader, inspiring the world with our ideals. Human dignity is a chief component of American ideology. We cannot sacrifice an ideal to defend it.
We can redeem our government if we, as a nation, recognize the hypocrisy in the government's actions. We can restore out integrity. Past presidents have done so, including President Theodore Roosevelt. Upon hearing about abuses; the use of waterboarding, actually; Roosevelt investigated, and made sure that those responsible were punished so that others would know that human rights abuses are unacceptable. (see http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1007/6647.html)
A very poignant line in the Washington Post, article, is actually about the security dangers of using such techniques:
"Retired Army Lt. Gen. Harry E. Soyster, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, suggested that those who support harsh methods simply lack experience and do not know what they are talking about. 'If they think these methods work, they're woefully misinformed,"'Soyster said at a news briefing called in anticipation of the veto. 'Torture is counterproductive on all fronts. It produces bad intelligence. It ruins the subject, makes them useless for further interrogation. And it damages our credibility around the world.'"
I worry for our country. Let me end with a Lincoln quote that is supported by Lt. Gen. Soyster's argument:
"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."
Bush today vetoed a bill that would have explicitly banned the torture technique of waterboarding. I am disgusted and worry about our nation's moral leadership. America grew into a world leader, inspiring the world with our ideals. Human dignity is a chief component of American ideology. We cannot sacrifice an ideal to defend it.
We can redeem our government if we, as a nation, recognize the hypocrisy in the government's actions. We can restore out integrity. Past presidents have done so, including President Theodore Roosevelt. Upon hearing about abuses; the use of waterboarding, actually; Roosevelt investigated, and made sure that those responsible were punished so that others would know that human rights abuses are unacceptable. (see http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1007/6647.html)
A very poignant line in the Washington Post, article, is actually about the security dangers of using such techniques:
"Retired Army Lt. Gen. Harry E. Soyster, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, suggested that those who support harsh methods simply lack experience and do not know what they are talking about. 'If they think these methods work, they're woefully misinformed,"'Soyster said at a news briefing called in anticipation of the veto. 'Torture is counterproductive on all fronts. It produces bad intelligence. It ruins the subject, makes them useless for further interrogation. And it damages our credibility around the world.'"
I worry for our country. Let me end with a Lincoln quote that is supported by Lt. Gen. Soyster's argument:
"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Students Craft Internships to Fit Interests
Today's Wall Street Journal featured the HGHR Center's Student Advisory Board member Ritika Puri. Ritika actually was offered an AnneMerie Donoghue Fellowship grant for this internship but opted to take the McKenna International instead (she won both) so that more people could receive funding from the Center for human rights internships. Congratulations on the article, Ritika, and on creating such an amazing internship!
Job Description? Some Applicants Write Their Own
By ANJALI ATHAVALEY
From The Wall Street Journal
Heather Day's ideal summer internship didn't exist. So she created it herself.
A junior at Connecticut College in New London, Conn., Ms. Day wanted to combine her love for hip-hop music with her interest in helping children. After being unable to find a suitable program, she sent out cover letters and résumés to eight nonprofit art-education groups in New York, Washington and Atlanta, none of which had a formal internship program.
Art Start, a New York nonprofit that educates disadvantaged children about the arts, agreed to take her on as an intern this summer. In addition to planning a fund-raiser and creating a curriculum for the nonprofit's fall session of classes, she will be running a monthlong hip-hop workshop for children.
Ritika Puri interned at Adharshila, a New Delhi-based nonprofit that offers health and education services for residents of a local slum.
"Hip hop is a great way to relate to a lot of people," says Ms. Day, an American studies major with a minor in human development. Although the internship is unpaid, Connecticut College is giving Ms. Day, 20 years old, a $3,000 stipend to help cover her living expenses.
Special Interests
With education growing more specialized, students are increasingly looking for internships that allow them to focus on their specific areas of study. When those opportunities aren't available, they are approaching companies and nonprofits to create their own internships, colleges and universities say.
The option "appeals to almost any liberal-arts student who isn't interested in going the business route because gaining experience in the field that you are interested in is challenging, often," says Beth Ricca, associate director of career services and director of internships and volunteer programs at Claremont McKenna College, a liberal-arts college in Claremont, Calif.
The trend comes at a time when employers are increasingly looking for new hires with internship experience. Often, a summer job can turn into a full-time one. Employers hired 47% of their interns from the class of 2006, up from 36% in 2000, according to a National Association of Colleges and Employers survey released in June. On average, 62% of college hires have had some internship experience in the past, according to the survey.
But convincing an employer to create an internship can be difficult -- especially for students with focused majors and interests. Stew Peckham, director of career development at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, says students often submit proposals to employers stating goals and specific areas of interest. "If the student outlines that a bit, it could get them further along," he says.
While some students sit down with an employer and design a set of tasks, the internship often evolves on its own. Last summer, Ritika Puri, a 21-year-old junior and literature major at Claremont McKenna, wanted an internship related to social and economic development in India. She was particularly interested in exploring the relationship between socioeconomic status and access to education and health-care facilities. Rather than look for an established internship, "I was really interested in designing my own," says Ms. Puri.
Ms. Puri contacted Adharshila, an organization in New Delhi that assists about 400 residents in a local slum, through a family friend. She was hired to assess Adharshila's existing programs and help choose new initiatives for the organization. She went door-to-door to ask residents what services they needed the most. People said they wanted better access to health care and better tutoring services for children, she says. She obtained a $500 donation, which she used to buy school supplies for 100 children. She also helped start a health center, which receives about 20 patients a day. "My role just sort of grew while on the job," she says.
The process of creating an internship comes with challenges, though. For instance, targeting employers willing to offer specialized internships can be tough. Frannie Noble, 22, a government major at Connecticut College, wanted to find a group that would allow her to research children's rights in Africa. She sent out 20 cover letters and résumés to nonprofits in Mali and Senegal. None responded. Then, she went to Mali during the spring semester last year as part of a study-abroad program and visited some of the groups in person, trying to spark their interest.
Working in Mali
In April, the Coalition of African NGOs Working with Children invited her in for an interview and offered her a position for the summer. As part of her internship, she visited nonprofits to gather information about the biggest challenges to children's rights in Mali, including flaws in the education system, child trafficking and child labor. At the end of the internship, she submitted a research paper on her findings.
Finding funding can be difficult because it is far less likely these internships will pay. Some schools provide financial assistance, albeit to only a handful of students. Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., provide funding for select students doing unpaid internships. Individual grants are usually about $2,000 but can range up to $6,000, depending on the student's financial need.
Colleges that offer grants require students to submit proposals indicating what they hope to gain out of the internship and how it relates to their majors and career goals. The schools also help students design their programs and locate companies and groups.
Corporate Prospects
While many of the internships involve nonprofits or small companies, some students have pitched internships to larger employers -- even if their interests are unrelated to the company's core business. David Fine, who graduated last year from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., with a degree in social policy, "was pretty dead-set" on creating an internship in corporate philanthropy the summer before his senior year. Mr. Fine, 23, proposed an internship to companies in the Bay Area -- such as Levi Strauss & Co., Gap Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. -- that listed charitable initiatives on their Web sites. He told employers he wanted to learn how the private sector could address social issues.
He was hired at San Francisco natural-gas and electric utility company Pacific Gas & Electric Co., a subsidiary of PG&E Corp. His task was to restructure the company's employee-volunteer program. He also helped set up an internal site where employees could post volunteer opportunities and worked on a company initiative to help fund the creation of parks in the Bay Area. He submitted a research paper to his school at the end of the summer and received course credit for the internship.
Creating an internship tailored to his interests made him better equipped to find a full-time job in the same field, he says. Mr. Fine now works at the Center for Companies That Care, a Chicago nonprofit that helps businesses become socially responsible. "It helped me realize that this is a feasible interest to pursue and a feasible career field," he says."
Job Description? Some Applicants Write Their Own
By ANJALI ATHAVALEY
From The Wall Street Journal
Heather Day's ideal summer internship didn't exist. So she created it herself.
A junior at Connecticut College in New London, Conn., Ms. Day wanted to combine her love for hip-hop music with her interest in helping children. After being unable to find a suitable program, she sent out cover letters and résumés to eight nonprofit art-education groups in New York, Washington and Atlanta, none of which had a formal internship program.
Art Start, a New York nonprofit that educates disadvantaged children about the arts, agreed to take her on as an intern this summer. In addition to planning a fund-raiser and creating a curriculum for the nonprofit's fall session of classes, she will be running a monthlong hip-hop workshop for children.
Ritika Puri interned at Adharshila, a New Delhi-based nonprofit that offers health and education services for residents of a local slum.
"Hip hop is a great way to relate to a lot of people," says Ms. Day, an American studies major with a minor in human development. Although the internship is unpaid, Connecticut College is giving Ms. Day, 20 years old, a $3,000 stipend to help cover her living expenses.
Special Interests
With education growing more specialized, students are increasingly looking for internships that allow them to focus on their specific areas of study. When those opportunities aren't available, they are approaching companies and nonprofits to create their own internships, colleges and universities say.
The option "appeals to almost any liberal-arts student who isn't interested in going the business route because gaining experience in the field that you are interested in is challenging, often," says Beth Ricca, associate director of career services and director of internships and volunteer programs at Claremont McKenna College, a liberal-arts college in Claremont, Calif.
The trend comes at a time when employers are increasingly looking for new hires with internship experience. Often, a summer job can turn into a full-time one. Employers hired 47% of their interns from the class of 2006, up from 36% in 2000, according to a National Association of Colleges and Employers survey released in June. On average, 62% of college hires have had some internship experience in the past, according to the survey.
But convincing an employer to create an internship can be difficult -- especially for students with focused majors and interests. Stew Peckham, director of career development at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, says students often submit proposals to employers stating goals and specific areas of interest. "If the student outlines that a bit, it could get them further along," he says.
While some students sit down with an employer and design a set of tasks, the internship often evolves on its own. Last summer, Ritika Puri, a 21-year-old junior and literature major at Claremont McKenna, wanted an internship related to social and economic development in India. She was particularly interested in exploring the relationship between socioeconomic status and access to education and health-care facilities. Rather than look for an established internship, "I was really interested in designing my own," says Ms. Puri.
Ms. Puri contacted Adharshila, an organization in New Delhi that assists about 400 residents in a local slum, through a family friend. She was hired to assess Adharshila's existing programs and help choose new initiatives for the organization. She went door-to-door to ask residents what services they needed the most. People said they wanted better access to health care and better tutoring services for children, she says. She obtained a $500 donation, which she used to buy school supplies for 100 children. She also helped start a health center, which receives about 20 patients a day. "My role just sort of grew while on the job," she says.
The process of creating an internship comes with challenges, though. For instance, targeting employers willing to offer specialized internships can be tough. Frannie Noble, 22, a government major at Connecticut College, wanted to find a group that would allow her to research children's rights in Africa. She sent out 20 cover letters and résumés to nonprofits in Mali and Senegal. None responded. Then, she went to Mali during the spring semester last year as part of a study-abroad program and visited some of the groups in person, trying to spark their interest.
Working in Mali
In April, the Coalition of African NGOs Working with Children invited her in for an interview and offered her a position for the summer. As part of her internship, she visited nonprofits to gather information about the biggest challenges to children's rights in Mali, including flaws in the education system, child trafficking and child labor. At the end of the internship, she submitted a research paper on her findings.
Finding funding can be difficult because it is far less likely these internships will pay. Some schools provide financial assistance, albeit to only a handful of students. Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., provide funding for select students doing unpaid internships. Individual grants are usually about $2,000 but can range up to $6,000, depending on the student's financial need.
Colleges that offer grants require students to submit proposals indicating what they hope to gain out of the internship and how it relates to their majors and career goals. The schools also help students design their programs and locate companies and groups.
Corporate Prospects
While many of the internships involve nonprofits or small companies, some students have pitched internships to larger employers -- even if their interests are unrelated to the company's core business. David Fine, who graduated last year from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., with a degree in social policy, "was pretty dead-set" on creating an internship in corporate philanthropy the summer before his senior year. Mr. Fine, 23, proposed an internship to companies in the Bay Area -- such as Levi Strauss & Co., Gap Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. -- that listed charitable initiatives on their Web sites. He told employers he wanted to learn how the private sector could address social issues.
He was hired at San Francisco natural-gas and electric utility company Pacific Gas & Electric Co., a subsidiary of PG&E Corp. His task was to restructure the company's employee-volunteer program. He also helped set up an internal site where employees could post volunteer opportunities and worked on a company initiative to help fund the creation of parks in the Bay Area. He submitted a research paper to his school at the end of the summer and received course credit for the internship.
Creating an internship tailored to his interests made him better equipped to find a full-time job in the same field, he says. Mr. Fine now works at the Center for Companies That Care, a Chicago nonprofit that helps businesses become socially responsible. "It helped me realize that this is a feasible interest to pursue and a feasible career field," he says."
Good New: Karlo Will Live
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: March 6, 2008
From The New York Times
NUBA MOUNTAINS, Sudan
The farm families living in these rocky hills in central Sudan confront every disease imaginable, from leprosy to malaria, and perhaps one-quarter of children die by the age of five.
Yet this is a “good news” column. Karlo will live.
The number of children who die worldwide each year before the age of five has dropped below 10 million for the first time in recorded history — compared with 20 million annually in 1960 — Unicef noted in a report last month, “Child Survival.” Now the goal is to cut the death toll to four million by 2015.
Think about that accomplishment: The lives of 10 million children saved each year, 100 million lives per decade.
To put it another way, the late James P. Grant, a little-known American aid worker who headed Unicef from 1980 to 1995 and launched the child survival revolution with vaccinations and diarrhea treatments, probably saved more lives than were destroyed by Hitler, Mao and Stalin combined.
One of the lives saved this year seems to be that of Karlo, an 8-month-old baby boy who lives in a thatch-roof hut here. His older brother, Kuti, had died a few days before I arrived: Kuti was taken to the hospital and tested positive for malaria, but the doctor believed that he probably died from meningitis.
Then Karlo fell sick, and his mother was frantic at the thought that he would die as well. The father, Bolus Abdullah, was more fatalistic.
“Many children die here,” Mr. Bolus explained to me as volunteers with an American aid group, Samaritan’s Purse, drove the family to the nearest hospital over a fantastically rutted road. “But if that’s the will of God, then there’s nothing we can do.”
Yet there are things we can do — and that brings us to the American presidential campaign.
African children like Karlo may actually have more at stake in the outcome of the presidential election than children in the United States. Just imagine if the next president were to wage a serious war on malaria. At a tiny fraction of the cost of the war in Iraq (or a war on Iran!) such a campaign would save millions of lives and be a huge boost to African economies whose productivity is sapped by diseases.
The hospital to which we took Karlo is run by an aid group, German Emergency Doctors, and is run by a husband-wife team of physicians, Karl Eiter and Gabi Kortmann. The hospital, whose “wards” are thatch-roof huts with no electricity, is perched on a rural mountainside to protect it from aerial bombings by the Sudanese government. (Sudan’s main involvement in health care in contested areas like this has been to strafe hospitals.)
Dr. Eiter ordered a blood test for Karlo, and it came back positive for malaria. He gave Karlo a medication that is almost always effective against malaria here, artemisinin combination therapy, costing just 50 cents for an entire course of treatment.
Saving children’s lives in rural Africa or Asia, where millions die of ailments as simple as diarrhea, pneumonia or measles, is achingly simple and inexpensive. The starting point is vaccinations and basic sanitation.
“We never have all the vaccines that are required,” Dr. Eiter said.
For years, the rationale for opposing foreign assistance has been that it doesn’t work. It’s true that humanitarian aid is devilishly difficult to get right, money is squandered and the impact of aid is often oversold.
But President Bush’s record underscores that other policies are difficult to get right as well: Iraq is a mess, and social security reform and immigration reform both failed. Mr. Bush’s greatest single accomplishment is that his AIDS program in Africa is saving millions of lives.
That makes it all the more stunning that Mr. Bush’s proposed budget for 2009 cuts U.S. funding for child and maternal health programs around the world by nearly 18 percent.
Fortunately, all the candidates are saying the right things about malaria, AIDS and support for education in Africa (although John McCain is fuzzier about commitments). You can compare the candidates’ positions on global humanitarian issues at www.onevote08.org.
Voters should remember this: A president may or may not be able to improve schools or protect manufacturing jobs in Ohio, but a president probably could help wipe out malaria. Compared with other challenges a president faces, saving a million children’s lives a year is the low-hanging fruit.
Karlo, bouncing in his mother’s lap, underscores the hope. With the medicine, he recovered quickly and was sent home from the hospital after a few days. The news here is simple and giddy ... he’s alive!
China and Human Rights Symposium Starts Today!
CHINA AND HUMAN RIGHTS: A SYMPOSIUM
Sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights, the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies, the Berger Institute for Work, Family, and Children, and the Kravis Leadership Institute
To be held at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, Claremont McKenna College
Thursday, March 6, 2008
3:00–4:45 pm: China, Economics, and Human Rights
Panel sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights
William Ascher, Donald C. McKenna Professor of Government and Economics, Claremont McKenna College; How So-Called "Economic Rights" Have Infringed upon Political and Human Rights
Richard Burdekin, Jonathan B. Lovelace Professor of Economics, Claremont McKenna College; Financial Market Fluctuations and Chinese Government Policy Shifts
Jerry Fowler, Executive Director, Save Darfur Coalition; China and Darfur
Jonathan Petropoulos, John V. Croul Professor of European History and Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights, Claremont McKenna College; Moderator
Evening keynote speaker at the Athenaeum, 6:00–8:00 pm:
Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director, Center for U.S.-China Relations, Asia Society; former Dean (1996–2006), Graduate School of Journalism, U.C. Berkeley; author, Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood (2000) and Mandate of Heaven: A New Generation ofEntrepreneurs, Dissidents, Technocrats, and Bohemians Grasp for Power in China (1995); "The Global Environmental Consequences of China's "Right" to Development." Sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies
Friday, March 7, 2008
9:00–10:30 am: China: State, Human Rights, and the Beijing Olympics
Panel sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies
Richard Baum, Professor of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles; Human Rights and the Beijing Olympics
Stanley Rosen, Professor of Political Science and Director of the East Asian Studies Center, University of Southern California; Changing State-Society Relations and the Rights of Chinese Citizens
Chae-Jin Lee, BankAmerica Professor of Pacific Basin Studies and Director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies, Claremont McKenna College; Moderator
10:30–10:45 am: Coffee break
10:45 am–12:15 pm: Intellectual Life and Politics in Contemporary China
Panel sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies
Gao ErTai, Writer/Painter/Art Critic; The Artist in Chinese Society
Wang Chaohua, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; Civil Rights and Human Rights: Before and After Tiananmen
Lindsay Waters, Executive Director for Humanities, Harvard University Press; Confucianism, Humanism, and Democracy
Gloria Davies, Associate Professor, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University; Affirming the Human in Chinese Intellectual Discourse
Kang Zhengguo, Senior lector, East Asian languages and literature, Yale University
Theodore Huters, Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA; Co-moderator
Robert Faggen, Barton Evans and H. Andrea Neves Professor of Literature and Director of the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, Claremont McKenna College; Co-moderator
12:15–1:30 pm: Lunch
1:30–3:00 pm: Society and Human Rights I
Panel sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights and the Berger Institute for Work, Family, and Children
Melinda Herrold-Menzies, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, Pitzer College; Human Rights and Nature Preserves in China
Theresa Harris, Director, International Justice Project at the World Organization for Human Rights; China and the Internet
Susan Greenhalgh, Professor of Anthropology, University of California-Irvine; China's "One Child" Policy
Sherylle Tan, Associate Director of the Berger Institute for Work, Family and Children, Claremont McKenna College; Moderator
3:15–4:45 pm: Society and Human Rights II
Panel sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies
Dai Qing, Journalist/Activist; The Three Gorges Dam and Human Survival
Han Dongfang, Workers' Rights Activist; Labor Movements in China
Dorothy Solinger, Professor of Political Science, University of California, Irvine; The Right to Livelihood: Is It Being Met?
Thomas Bernstein, Professor of Political Science, Columbia University; Peasants, Human Rights, and Abusive Officials
Arthur Rosenbaum, Associate Professor of History, Claremont McKenna College; Moderator
Evening keynote speaker at the Athenaeum, 6:00–8:00 pm:
Roderick MacFarquhar, Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science; director, John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University; coauthor, Mao's Last Revolution (2006) and editor, The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng (1997); "Political Reform: Past, Present—Future?" Sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies
Sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights, the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies, the Berger Institute for Work, Family, and Children, and the Kravis Leadership Institute
To be held at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, Claremont McKenna College
Thursday, March 6, 2008
3:00–4:45 pm: China, Economics, and Human Rights
Panel sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights
William Ascher, Donald C. McKenna Professor of Government and Economics, Claremont McKenna College; How So-Called "Economic Rights" Have Infringed upon Political and Human Rights
Richard Burdekin, Jonathan B. Lovelace Professor of Economics, Claremont McKenna College; Financial Market Fluctuations and Chinese Government Policy Shifts
Jerry Fowler, Executive Director, Save Darfur Coalition; China and Darfur
Jonathan Petropoulos, John V. Croul Professor of European History and Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights, Claremont McKenna College; Moderator
Evening keynote speaker at the Athenaeum, 6:00–8:00 pm:
Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director, Center for U.S.-China Relations, Asia Society; former Dean (1996–2006), Graduate School of Journalism, U.C. Berkeley; author, Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood (2000) and Mandate of Heaven: A New Generation ofEntrepreneurs, Dissidents, Technocrats, and Bohemians Grasp for Power in China (1995); "The Global Environmental Consequences of China's "Right" to Development." Sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies
Friday, March 7, 2008
9:00–10:30 am: China: State, Human Rights, and the Beijing Olympics
Panel sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies
Richard Baum, Professor of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles; Human Rights and the Beijing Olympics
Stanley Rosen, Professor of Political Science and Director of the East Asian Studies Center, University of Southern California; Changing State-Society Relations and the Rights of Chinese Citizens
Chae-Jin Lee, BankAmerica Professor of Pacific Basin Studies and Director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies, Claremont McKenna College; Moderator
10:30–10:45 am: Coffee break
10:45 am–12:15 pm: Intellectual Life and Politics in Contemporary China
Panel sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies
Gao ErTai, Writer/Painter/Art Critic; The Artist in Chinese Society
Wang Chaohua, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; Civil Rights and Human Rights: Before and After Tiananmen
Lindsay Waters, Executive Director for Humanities, Harvard University Press; Confucianism, Humanism, and Democracy
Gloria Davies, Associate Professor, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University; Affirming the Human in Chinese Intellectual Discourse
Kang Zhengguo, Senior lector, East Asian languages and literature, Yale University
Theodore Huters, Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA; Co-moderator
Robert Faggen, Barton Evans and H. Andrea Neves Professor of Literature and Director of the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, Claremont McKenna College; Co-moderator
12:15–1:30 pm: Lunch
1:30–3:00 pm: Society and Human Rights I
Panel sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights and the Berger Institute for Work, Family, and Children
Melinda Herrold-Menzies, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, Pitzer College; Human Rights and Nature Preserves in China
Theresa Harris, Director, International Justice Project at the World Organization for Human Rights; China and the Internet
Susan Greenhalgh, Professor of Anthropology, University of California-Irvine; China's "One Child" Policy
Sherylle Tan, Associate Director of the Berger Institute for Work, Family and Children, Claremont McKenna College; Moderator
3:15–4:45 pm: Society and Human Rights II
Panel sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies
Dai Qing, Journalist/Activist; The Three Gorges Dam and Human Survival
Han Dongfang, Workers' Rights Activist; Labor Movements in China
Dorothy Solinger, Professor of Political Science, University of California, Irvine; The Right to Livelihood: Is It Being Met?
Thomas Bernstein, Professor of Political Science, Columbia University; Peasants, Human Rights, and Abusive Officials
Arthur Rosenbaum, Associate Professor of History, Claremont McKenna College; Moderator
Evening keynote speaker at the Athenaeum, 6:00–8:00 pm:
Roderick MacFarquhar, Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science; director, John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University; coauthor, Mao's Last Revolution (2006) and editor, The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng (1997); "Political Reform: Past, Present—Future?" Sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Cuba and Human Rights: A Shift?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7270179.stm
This is good news to hear. Although it leaves me with more questions than answers, a question on the possibility of improved human rights is better than certainty of their denial.
As would be expected, the Cuban government denies this is a shift and asserts this is merely a formality. Of course no government, especially a totalitarian one, is going to admit guilt for a half century of human rights abuses while the same people are in power. So, we can write the denial of shift off as what is actually a mere formality.
So the question has become, was the signing of the agreement a mere PR scheme, or was it the sign that some people in the Cuban administration are actually seeking a change of direction? The release of prisoners might be one test to see if a real shift is in the works. However, perhaps the Cuban government will hold on to these prisoners to save face and be more lax on future dissidents. Let me elaborate: if those in prison are released, it would signify a shift that is being denied. Thus, to "prove" that they were not denied their rights, the Cuban government keep them in jail, with Raul and company claiming to carry out justice. However, they may become more lax on future political dissidents.
All this is mere speculation. Obviously, I would like to see a major shift including the release of all political prisoners. I see this as unlikely, as the shift in power didn't seem to be a very meaningful one. Yet, this article surprised me and caught my attention. These were just some some thoughts on a possible scenario off the top of my head. What do you think? Leave a comment.
This is good news to hear. Although it leaves me with more questions than answers, a question on the possibility of improved human rights is better than certainty of their denial.
As would be expected, the Cuban government denies this is a shift and asserts this is merely a formality. Of course no government, especially a totalitarian one, is going to admit guilt for a half century of human rights abuses while the same people are in power. So, we can write the denial of shift off as what is actually a mere formality.
So the question has become, was the signing of the agreement a mere PR scheme, or was it the sign that some people in the Cuban administration are actually seeking a change of direction? The release of prisoners might be one test to see if a real shift is in the works. However, perhaps the Cuban government will hold on to these prisoners to save face and be more lax on future dissidents. Let me elaborate: if those in prison are released, it would signify a shift that is being denied. Thus, to "prove" that they were not denied their rights, the Cuban government keep them in jail, with Raul and company claiming to carry out justice. However, they may become more lax on future political dissidents.
All this is mere speculation. Obviously, I would like to see a major shift including the release of all political prisoners. I see this as unlikely, as the shift in power didn't seem to be a very meaningful one. Yet, this article surprised me and caught my attention. These were just some some thoughts on a possible scenario off the top of my head. What do you think? Leave a comment.
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