THE American government has a responsibility to force the prc to honor the agreement to protect Chen Guangchen and his family. Sec of State Clinton has an extraordinary opportunity to keep human rights at the forefront of her meetings with the prc government. The greedy interest of corporate America, supporters of the brutality and repression of the current government in Beijing, must not dictate our government's agenda in these meetings with the prc government. Human rights must be front and center, and Chen and his family and associates must be protected, and if that can not be guaranteed then they must be granted asylum in the U.S. This latest update from the Washington Post....
As he left the protection of the U.S. Embassy in China early
Wednesday, blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng startled his hosts
with an unexpected request: He asked whether he could have a word with
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose team apparently had
just negotiated his safe reentry into Chinese society.
“I want to kiss you,” Chen, speaking in broken English, told
Clinton after a phone connection was hastily made from the back of an
embassy van, according to an account from senior State Department
officials.
But just hours later, a friend of Chen’s tweeted a
clarification of the dissident’s words. Chen, the friend said after
speaking to him by phone, had tried to tell Clinton: “I want to see you”
— suggesting not merely gratitude for the American intervention but
also a desire to secure an even higher guarantor against possible
mistreatment by Chinese authorities.
And so a remarkable drama,
begun more than a week earlier when Chen escaped from house arrest in
his provincial village and made his way toward the U.S. Embassy,
culminated not in the diplomatic coup of an American-brokered deal but
in confusion.
Chen left his American protectors behind soon after
making his request for a hearing with Clinton and was admitted to a
hospital for treatment of a foot injury incurred during his escape.
Despite promises from the Chinese government that Chen and his family
could live in peace, plainclothes Chinese agents reportedly surrounded
Chen in his hospital room.
With Chen’s fate suddenly unclear, his
attorney soon accused China of reneging on the deal that hours earlier
had been hailed as a triumph.
“The Chinese government has made many promises on many things, but they never keep their promises,” said the lawyer, Teng Biao.
Seeking a more normal life
The incident began, State Department officials said, when Chen, a
self-taught lawyer and an internationally known dissident who publicly
criticized Chinese policies on abortion and forced sterilzations, turned
up at the U.S. Embassy injured and pleading for help. Despite the risks
to diplomatic relations, Chen — who hurt himself while climbing a wall
during his escape in Shangdong province — was granted admission on what
U.S. officials described as “humanitarian grounds.”
“We assisted
Mr. Chen in entering our facilities and allowed him to remain on a
temporary basis,” a senior State Department official told reporters.
The
official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the
sensitive events, declined to elaborate on how Chen was able to enter
the walled, closely watched U.S. compound. But he said the activist was
given medical tests and “appropriate treatment.”
Chen made clear
from the start that he wished neither to stay in the embassy nor to flee
to the United States, the official said. Instead, Chen wanted U.S. help
in guaranteeing the safety of family members who he believed were at
risk of persecution because of his escape. He also asked that his family
be relocated to a new home in China, far from the provincial village
where he said his family was being imprisoned and mistreated by local
authorities.
U.S. diplomats relayed his requests to Chinese
officials in a series of meetings that were described as cordial but
tense. Further complicating matters, Chen’s arrival came days before a
high-level visit to China by Clinton and other top U.S. officials.
While
unhappy about the circumstances, Chinese officials expressed sympathy
for Chen’s predicament as the talks progressed, said Assistant Secretary
of State Kurt Campbell, who arrived in Beijing on Sunday. The U.S.
negotiators who sat with Chen for hours at a time — often holding his
hands as they talked — also were moved by his story, he said.
“I
probably was in 30 or 40 hours of conversation with him,” Campbell told
CNN in an interview broadcast from China. “Every single discussion was
about the possibility of how to go back and live a more normal life in
China and what we could do to help in that effort. Never once did he
talk about asylum or coming to the United States.”
As the hours
passed, Chen would ask about famous dissidents from recent history,
including former South African president Nelson Mandela. Chen seemed
particularly curious about the experiences of Aung San Suu Kyi, a
Burmese pro-democracy activist who spent years under house arrest,
Campbell said.
“He asked me many questions about her,” he
recalled. “He asked me, ‘Does she ever feel low? Did she ever question
her choices?’ ”
Worried about family
By Tuesday, all sides appeared to have settled on an unusual deal
that would allow Chen to relocate to a city near Beijing, where he
could attend law school under Chinese guarantees of protection. Jerome
A. Cohen, an American lawyer long acquainted with Chen, said that when
the two spoke by phone, the activist was nervous but eager to move
forward.
Chen “was open to this idea of going out and studying law
and trying to make a career again outside Shandong province,” said
Cohen, a law professor at New York University and an expert on Chinese
law. But he acknowledged that such a move would be “very, very
dangerous,” given the chances of being detained again.
“We went back and forth,” Cohen said. “He was worried about his family.”
By
Wednesday, U.S. officials began to put the plan into place. Campbell,
in a statement, said Chen freely decided to leave the embassy after
being assured that his wife and children were safe and waiting at a
Beijing hospital.
“After twice being asked by [U.S. Ambassador to
China Gary] Locke if he was ready to go, he said, ‘Zou’ — let’s go,”
Campbell said. “We were all there as witnesses to his decision, and he
hugged and thanked us all.
Locke phoned The Washington Post’s
Beijing bureau at 3:20 p.m. local time to say he was in a van with Chen,
stuck in traffic but en route to the hospital. The ambassador then
handed the phone to Chen, who introduced himself: “This is Chen
Guangcheng.” But the call ended soon after.
Embassy officials said
they scrambled to see if one of their cellphones could be used to allow
Chen to speak to his attorney and Clinton. His words to the chief U.S.
diplomat — “I want to kiss you” — were “quite touching at the time and
quite emotional,” the senior State Department official said.
U.S.
diplomats did not accompany Chen after he arrived at the hospital, where
the first signs of trouble surfaced. Around 8:30 p.m., Zeng Jihyan, the
wife of Chinese activist Hu Jia, began tweeting that Chen was
surrounded by plainclothes officials and fearful that the deal was
unraveling. Videotape purportedly made at the Beijing hospital showed
Chen in a wheelchair being followed by men recording his movements.
“At
dusk when I left the hospital his entire family was waiting in the
outpatient ward # 9,” Zheng tweeted. “The kids couldn’t go out and the
son was crying really hard.”
Bob Fu, director of ChinaAid, a
Christian activist group based in Texas, said he had received reports
that Chen had been directly threatened in the hospital as soon as he was
alone and that his whereabouts were not clear. Fu said Chen was warned
that unless he accepted the proposed deal, he would “never see his wife
and two children again.”
Hours after announcing the deal for Chen’s freedom, U.S. officials found themselves defending their actions.
“At
no time did any U.S. official speak to Chen about physical or legal
threats to his wife and children,” said Victoria Nuland, a State
Department spokeswoman, traveling with Clinton in Beijing. “Nor did
Chinese officials make any such threats to us.”
Other Chinese
activists and Chen’s attorney now contend that Chen began having second
thoughts at the hospital and wants to seek asylum in the United States.
But the accounts could not be independently verified.
Chen could not be reached again.
“The
situation seems to be evolving in a confused way,” said Cohen, the law
professor, faulting U.S. officials. “The first mistake was they couldn’t
leave or didn’t leave anybody in the hospital with him. Maybe he gets a
report from his wife about threats, and his fears overcome him. This
gets us off to a bad start on what was a daring deal.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/chinese-dissidents-fate-in-limbo-as-diplomatic-deal-appears-to-fray/2012/05/02/gIQANXLmxT_print.html
Chinese activist Chen leaves U.S. Embassy for hospital, is surrounded by police
BEIJING — The blind legal activist
Chen Guangcheng left
the refuge of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing for a hospital on Wednesday,
but he was quickly cordoned off by Chinese police and reportedly seized
by misgivings about his decision, as an apparent diplomatic triumph
risked dissolving into a damaging episode in U.S.-China relations.
After four days of secret negotiations, U.S. diplomats on Wednesday
initially touted then later scrambled to defend their role in forging
an agreement that they said contained extraordinary Chinese promises to
allow Chen — a self-taught lawyer known for criticizing Chinese policies
on abortion — to move his family to Beijing, where he would begin a new
life as a university student.
Chinese officials, by contrast,
broke their official silence on Chen by firing a broadside complaining
about U.S. interference in China’s internal affairs. The Foreign
Ministry demanded an apology, which State Department officials declined
to give.
The confusing, chaotic episode coincided with
a visit to China by
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary
Timothy F. Geithner, who arrived in Beijing on Wednesday with an
entourage of diplomatic and trade officials intent on smoothing
relations and increasing economic and cultural ties.
The Obama
administration wants greater cooperation from China on trade, currency
rates, Iran oil sanctions and North Korean nuclear weapons, but with the
Chen case, the issue of human rights threatens to overtake that agenda.
Chen’s case also quickly entered the presidential campaign. “I really love America,”
Mitt Romney,
the presumptive Republican nominee, said at a Virginia fundraiser
Wednesday night. “I love what it represents, and I love that a Chinese
dissident who fled the policies in his country, I love where he went —
to our embassy.”
Chen revived the human rights issue by
escaping from de facto house arrest in
his home village in Shandong province on April 22 and by seeking U.S.
protection in the Chinese capital four days later. American officials
said Wednesday that they accepted him at the embassy on humanitarian
grounds.
A familiar name
Chen was already well-known to U.S. officials. According to
WikiLeaks, between April 2007 and July 24, 2009, his name was included
in at least 37
State Department cables. His was one of three “key cases” mentioned during the May 2008 resumption of
the U.S.-China human rights dialogue after a six-year hiatus.
So
U.S. officials were elated when the Chinese government said it would
allow Chen and his family to move away from their village and pledged to
investigate why authorities there allowed armed thugs in plainclothes
to confine the activist and prevent others from seeing him.
But
Teng Biao, Chen’s lawyer, said in an interview late Wednesday that he
had spoken with Chen several times during the evening. “He felt his
safety is threatened. He feels pressure now,” Teng said. “In fact, from
his language, I can tell that the decision to leave the embassy was not
100 percent his idea.”
“I spent most of the time trying to
persuade him to go to the U.S.A.,” Teng said. “We discussed what to do
next, staying in China or going to the States. After some discussion
with friends, I feel his safety cannot be guaranteed if he stays in
China.”
Teng said on Twitter Thursday that Chen did not have all
the information available to him when he was inside the embassy. He said
Chen’s wife, who had been isolated for years in their Shandong village
farmhouse, also did not earlier have enough information to make
appropriate decisions about their future, while they were negotiating
for Chen to leave the embassy. Teng said he could no longer speak to the
media.
Some China experts said they saw the pledges from Beijing
not only as a human rights achievement but as an indication that — as in
the recent case of Chongqing party leader
Bo Xilai or
last year’s ouster of corrupt local leaders in a strife-torn southern
town — the central government wants to assert its authority over
renegade or corrupt provincial authorities.
In addition, the
agreement appeared to take Chen off the bilateral agenda. American
officials released a photograph showing a smiling Chen with U.S.
Ambassador Gary Locke and insisted that the activist left the embassy of
his own volition.
Looking to leave China?
But friends of Chen criticized U.S. officials for leaving him
unaccompanied at the hospital, where he was treated for a foot injury.
Adding to the confusion, Chen told several reporters by phone from his
hospital bed that he now wanted to move to the United States with his
family.
Under intense international scrutiny, U.S. diplomats scrambled to provide their version of events.
“I
was there,” Kurt Campbell, the State Department’s top diplomat for East
Asia, said in a statement. “Chen made the decision to leave the Embassy
after he knew his family was safe and at the hospital waiting for him,
and after twice being asked by Ambassador Locke if he was ready to go.
He said, ‘Zou’ — let’s go. We were all there as witnesses to his
decision, and he hugged and thanked us all.”
Locke said the U.S.
Embassy was prepared to house Chen for years, if that was what he
wished, but that Chen insisted on leaving the embassy to be reunited
with his wife. He spoke on the phone twice with his wife on Wednesday,
said Locke, and she implored him to leave and join his family at the
hospital.
Speaking at a press conference Thursday, Locke
emphasized that the goal of U.S. officials was to determine what Chen
wanted and then help him get it by acting as go-between negotiators with
the Chinese government.
“He made it very, very clear form the
very, very beginning that he wanted to stay in China, that he wanted to
be part of the struggle, to improve the human rights within China and to
gain greater liberty and democracy for the people of China,” Locke
said. “We asked him, ‘Do you want to go to the United States?’ He said
no.”
Locke said Chen wanted his wife to be brought to the
hospital, where he would talk with her on phone and decide whether to
leave the embassy or stay.
Chen spoke with his wife twice on
Wednesday after she arrived at the hospital, said Locke. Chen’s wife
spoke in the presence of a U.S. Embassy employee and away from Chinese
government officials.
“She was imploring him to come to the hospital to be reunited with the family,” Locke said. Chen then decided to leave.
“I
can tell you unequivocally that he was never pressured to leave. He was
excited and eager about leaving when he made this decision,” Locke
said.
A senior State department official said U.S. officials were
spending Thursday trying to establish what Chen in fact wants to do
before exploring any further ways to help him.
“Our understanding
now from the contacts that we have had with his wife is that his view
of what the best thing for him and his family may be changing,” the
official said. “But we do not yet have a full view of what he wants to
do at this stage so we are spending today endeavoring to clarify whether
his position has changed and what he now wants.”
Soon after Locke
and State Department legal adviser Harold Koh dropped Chen off at the
hospital on Wednesday, the diplomatic frictions grew.
A combative
statement from the Chinese Foreign Ministry heightened fears among
Chen’s supporters that the deal could be unraveling. Fuming over the
United States’ acknowledgment that it had sheltered Chen, Foreign
Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said, “The U.S. method was interference in
Chinese domestic affairs, and this is totally unacceptable to China.”
According
to the state-run news agency Xinhua, Liu added: “China demands that the
United States apologize over this, thoroughly investigate this
incident, punish those who are responsible and give assurances that such
incidents will not happen again.”
Campbell said that the United
States would not apologize but that Washington did not expect a similar
incident to occur, a formulation U.S. officials hoped would be
sufficient to mollify Chinese officials.
Meanwhile, Zeng Jinyan,
the activist whose Twitter messages provided the most detailed
information about Chen once he reached the hospital, put out another
message Thursday saying she was now under house arrest in Beijing.
Zeng’s
Twitter message said police agents in a black car followed her Thursday
morning as she drove her daughter to kindergarten. She said the police
then followed her back home and said she was officially under house
arrest.
Zeng later answered the telephone briefly at her home
after noon Thursday and said quietly, “Right now my situation is not
good. My situation is complicated ... I cannot accept interviews.” Since
then, her communications have been apparently cut off.
Zeng’s
husband, AIDS activist Hu Jia, is away from Beijing at a conference in
another part of China, and said he had been unable to contact his wife.
As
the high-level diplomatic and trade talks began Thursday morning, there
was no public mention of Chen, but there were allusions to the case.
Opening the sessions, Councilor Dai Bingguo asserted China’s right to determine how best to run its society.
“I
wish to point out in particular that a fundamental way to manage
state-to-state relations is . . . to respect each other’s sovereignty
. . . and choice of social system,” Dai said. “No one should expect the
Chinese to leave their own path.”
Clinton broached the topic of
human rights toward the end of her remarks after listing other issues on
the agenda, including North Korea’s nuclear program.
“The United
States raises the importance of human rights and fundamental freedoms
because we believe that all governments have to answer to their
citizens’ aspirations for dignity and the rule of law,” she said, “and
that no nation can or should deny those rights.”
A diplomatic dilemma
Chen’s case had presented the United States with
a thorny diplomatic dilemma. He
wanted to remain in China to fight for citizens’ rights, friends
said. But with security officials rounding up the activists who helped
him escape and who sheltered him, U.S. diplomats risked seeing Chen
arrested if he left the embassy without some formal guarantees for his
safety.
U.S. officials said the Chinese agreed to investigate the
“extralegal” activities of local authorities in Chen’s home town who
have allowed armed men to effectively confine the activist to his
farmhouse for 19 months, preventing celebrities, journalists and others
from visiting him.
Senior U.S. officials said they became
extremely close with Chen during the negotiations, often holding his
hand as they spoke. One official described the talks with Chinese
officials as “intense but collaborative.”
The officials said
American diplomats “will take a continuing interest in the case of Mr.
Chen and his family” and will check on him in “regular intervals” to
confirm that the Chinese government’s commitments are carried out.
But
activists’ fears over Chen’s fate mounted, and they expressed
increasing alarm — fueled by a series of Twitter updates — that what
seemed like a human rights victory was spiraling quickly into a
worst-case scenario.
Chen was no longer under U.S. protection,
they noted. While U.S. officials said they had been promised access to
Chen in the hospital, Britain’s Channel 4 news quoted a conversation
with him in which he seemed confused and upset that no American
diplomats were around.
“Nobody from the [U.S.] embassy is here. I don’t understand why. They promised to be here,” Channel 4
quoted Chen as saying.
Bob
Fu, president of the advocacy group ChinaAid, said he was concerned
that “the U.S. government has abandoned Chen” and that the Chinese
government is “using his family as a hostage.”
Mufson reported from Washington. Washington Post researcher Zhang Jie in Beijing contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/chinese-dissident-in-us-custody-headed-to-hospital/2012/05/02/gIQAh9WrvT_print.html
