Gore Vidal, who died this week, was often scathing in his attacks on US foreign policy. In April 2002, Index on Censorship magazine was the first English-language publication to feature this essay, written after 9/11
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The defection of Chinese writer and dissident Yu Jie last week revealed shocking allegations of torture and beatings more usually associated with rogue American troops in Iraq.
Yu, a close friend of imprisoned Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo, is most famous for his mocking attack on the country’s premier, China’s Best Actor: Wen Jiabao, published in Hong Kong in late 2010.
Yu fled with his family to the US on 11 January. Shortly after, he held a press conference in Washington and released a written statement on why he had chosen to defect. Below we pick out the most shocking of these claims.
Though I was physically in China, I became an ‘exile at heart’ and a ‘non-existent person’ in the public space.
Illegal house arrests, torture, surveillance, tracking, and being taken on ‘trips’ became part of my everyday life.
Several of the plainclothes officials came at me again and began beating me in the head and the face without explanation. They stripped off all my clothes and pushed me, naked, to the ground, and kicked me maniacally. They also had a camera and were taking pictures as I was being beaten, saying with glee that they would post the naked photos online.
They forced me to kneel and slapped me over a hundred times in the face. They even forced me to slap myself. They would be satisfied only when they heard the slapping sound, and laughed madly. They also kicked me in the chest and then stood on me after I had fallen to the ground.
The head state security officer told him:
If the order comes from above, we can dig a pit to bury you alive in half an hour, and no one on earth would know… If the central authorities think that their rule is facing a crisis, they can capture [all China’s dissidents] in one night and bury them alive.
While the post-Tiananmen Square period was a time when Chinese dissidents defected in their droves, there is still a steady trickle of Chinese who seek refugee status overseas. Some of them leave legally, while others, who are denied passports or the right to leave smuggle themselves out, usually via Vietnam. They include fellow writer Liao Yiwu, who has been living in Germany since 2011; Chinese diplomat, Chen Yonglin, who fled to Australia in 2005; and AIDS activist Wan Yanhai, who left for the United States in 2010. The wife of Chinese dissident human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, Geng He, has also been living in the US for the past two years. Her husband is currently serving a three-year prison sentence for violating probation rules, having been missing for more than a year.
October 4, 2011
Nguyen Tan Dung
Socialist Republic of Vietnam
Office of the State
1 Bach Thao
Hanoi, Vietnam
CC:
French Foreign Ministry
Alain Juppé
Ministere des Affaires etrangeres
37, Quai d’Orsay
75351 Paris
France
Dear Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung,
We, international digital freedom and human rights organizations, call on the Government of Vietnam to release blogger, human rights defender, and lecturer Pham Minh Hoang.
Mr Hoang, a dual French-Vietnamese citizen sentenced on August 10 to three years in prison and an additional three years house arrest, is a well-known blogger whose articles on education, the environment, and Vietnamese sovereignty in respect to China have been widely read. He is also a lecturer in applied mathematics at the Ho Chi Minh City Polytechnic Institute, an activist campaigning against bauxite mining by Chinese firms, and has participated in conferences on Vietnam’s sovereignty over the Paracel and Spratly Islands. Mr Hoang has worked tirelessly to promote human rights and to empower and encourage civic participation among his pupils and peers.
At Mr Hoang’s trial, Judge Vu Phi Long ruled that his writings had “blackened the image of the country” and were “aimed at overthrowing the people’s government.” Mr. Hoang, on the contrary, has claimed that he was exercising his free speech and was unaware that he had committed any crimes.
We would like to remind the Government of Vietnam that Mr Hoang’s blogging activities, as well as his activism, are guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Vietnam is a party to, as well as by Articles 35, 50, 53, and 69 of the Vietnamese Constitution.
We call on Vietnamese authorities to recognize Mr. Hoang’s right to expression, and to lift any charges or convictions related to his protected expressive activities, and — with these charges lifted — to ensure his release.
Signed,
Action des chrétiens pour l’abolition de la torture
ARTICLE 19
Committee of Concerned Scientists
Committee to Protect Journalists
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Front Line Defenders
Index on Censorship
PEN International
Reporters Without Borders
Scholars at Risk
Dan Snyder, the owner of the Washington Redskins, dropped his libel suit against the Washington City Paper over the weekend on the eve of the team’s season opener, saying he had nothing further to gain from the seven-month legal battle that had drawn steep criticism from numerous media organisations. Snyder had originally sought 1 million US dollars, plus additional damages, in a suit against the alternative weekly paper and the author of a scathing cover story about him last November headlined “The Cranky Redskins’ Fans Guide to Dan Snyder.” (The news prompted the City Paper to prominently repost Dave McKenna’s story to the top of its homepage Sunday, giving the piece — as it has for months — more page views and a longer life than it ever would have without Snyder’s protestations.)
Both parties have agreed to pay their own legal fees. The City Paper said its share has topped the 34,000 USD raised by its followers in a legal defense fund. In a statement, the City Paper said:
“Today, we got what we wanted all along: dismissal of a case expressly designed to pressure us, and filed by a man who now apparently says he never even read the story in the first place. Now we’re eager to get back to our business of covering the city’s politics and culture—including its sports culture—without this distraction.”
In a statement issued by a spokesperson for Snyder, the owner claimed a level of dubious victory as well, saying “the principle that the truth and the facts matter in responsible journalism has been vindicated,” even as the lawsuit has been abandoned.
At the heart of the dispute was McKenna’s tongue-in-cheek tone. In the story, for example, he described Snyder as “going all Agent Orange on federally protected lands” — meaning that he had cleared trees to get a better view of the Potomac River from his property. Snyder’s lawyers insisted that this line implied Snyder literally sprayed Agent Orange (the shrub-killing toxin deployed by the US military in Vietnam). The suit took much of McKenna’s figurative language and recast it as libelous assertion, creating justification for a legal attack that many media critics interpreted as a mere bullying tactic from the beginning.
From the team’s statement:
“The lawsuit was pursued as a means to correct the public record following several critical factual misstatements in the Washington City Paper article. In the course of the defendants’ recently filed pleadings and statements in this matter, the Washington City Paper and its writer have admitted that certain assertions contained in the article that are the subject of the lawsuit were, in fact, unintended by the defendants to be read literally as true. Therefore, we see nothing further to be gained at this time through continuing the lawsuit.”