The state power of Beijing's communists and Thimpu's royalists is used to deny freedom to Tibetans and Nepalese under its heel, finds Meenakshi Ganguly of Human Rights Watch.

By Meenakshi Ganguly

The study of history provides rich lessons about the damaging effects of oppression and injustice, particularly egregious human-rights violations. One of the most important is that if legitimate claimants are brutally repressed into silence and desperation, their grievances can be exploited by those who instigate further violence. The result of this mistaken choice of war over peace is that almost everyone involved is drawn into a circle of fear and degradation in a way that leaves them even worse off.

Among the various battles raging around the globe - with cluster-bombs and suicide-bombs, between militants and soldiers, over religion or land - one peaceful struggle is rapidly disappearing from our newspapers, and another, possibly more violent, threatening to make news. Each is nourished by human-rights abuses and hidden by the "happy news" of the state concerned. The tiny mountain kingdom of Bhutan and the enormous state of China share the dubious distinction of representing dominant ethnic and linguistic majorities that would prefer to erase minority cultures.

In Tibet, China is building roads, rails and other infrastructure in an attempt to push people into choosing prosperity over religious and cultural identity. Tens of thousands who fled into exile can still cling to their language, culture and religion, but the millions who remain, after years of arrests and killings, have largely been forced into compromise. Many Tibetans believe they are ignored by the international community because their movement was peaceful.

Bhutan, even as it boasted of its high "gross national happiness", has violated international laws protecting political freedom and those shielding against discrimination based on religion or ethnicity, attempting to create a homogenous culture. When minority ethnic Nepalis complained, Bhutan responded by forcing into exile more than 100,000 of its citizens with impunity. Those that remained were silenced and terrified into submission. But now, Bhutan is witnessing the beginnings of a violent Maoist rebellion, one which has already led to reports of arrest and torture of suspected supporters.

Tibet's hidden fractures
If China were to write the history of Tibet, it would describe a "splittist" monk who tried to dismember the nation and harm a government determined to provide its people with care and opportunity. A few journalists, allowed recently to travel to the region by Chinese authorities, reported a 13 percent annual growth rate, widespread construction, tourism and jobs. They were not encouraged to look at the continued repression of political activists, the arbitrary detention and torture, the fact that even possessing a picture of Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, is regarded as a crime. New housing projects are on display, with claims that government subsidies are encouraging nomadic tribes to gain access to education and health.

By contrast, little has been said about how the Chinese government is forcibly relocating those herders into the housing projects, demanding an end to their traditional livelihoods. Human Rights Watch, in a report published in June 2007 - No One Has the Liberty to Refuse: Tibetan Herders Forcibly Relocated in Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan and the Tibetan Autonomous Region - found that approximately 700,000 people have been resettled in western China. The economic and social rights of Tibetan herders have been violated as they are forced to slaughter their livestock and move into newly built housing colonies without consultation or compensation.

Stories such as those recorded in the report seldom surface. One herder said: "The government says that if we sell our animals and start businesses like shops and restaurants we would have a happy life and not have to work so hard. In our village at present, about 100 households still have cattle, and 100 have none left. Of those, about fifty opened shops and restaurants, but they don't know how to do good business or how to prepare food very well, so naturally they became poor. The other fifty have no shops, no restaurants, and no cattle." Yet Tibetans, led by the Dalai Lama, have remained staunchly peaceful. The Dalai Lama insists that eventually, truth and right will persevere: what after all, is a few decades in the life of a nation? This is easy enough to say for a man who is believed to be in his fourteenth incarnation; but in Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama presides over the Tibetan government in exile, restless young men alternate between figuring out a ticket to the west and dreaming of a homeland they insist will be lost unless they fight for it - with bombs and guns. They respect their holy leader and cannot disobey him, but no one pays attention to peaceful protests, they insist.

Bhutan's inner strains
In Bhutan, some young people have probably reached the same unfortunate conclusion. In the early 1990s tens of thousands of Bhutanese citizens were expelled from their home. They were ethnic Nepalis, Hindus unlike the Buddhist Drukpas and culturally distinct; the Bhutanese government believed them to be intruders, and potential troublemakers. The community had grown in numbers and influence, and the Drukpa elite believed that its own privileged position and cultural identity was at risk. Citizenship laws were tightened and in 1989, the king ordered all citizens to observe the traditional Drukpa values, dress and etiquette, even removing the Nepali language from the school curriculum.

This led to growing turbulence, culminating in mass protest demonstrations in late 1990. Instead of addressing the reasons for discontent, the government arrested and exiled a large number of ethnic Nepalis. For almost two decades, the refugees have remained in camps in Nepal. Their demand for repatriation was peaceful, but despite endless rounds of talks with Kathmandu, Bhutan has shown little inclination to let them come home.

Meanwhile, ethnic Nepalis who were allowed to remain in Bhutan face constant discrimination, unable to get government jobs, buy or sell land, find admission in colleges or open a business unless they are cleared by government, a certificate nearly impossible to secure. They have to wear the national dress and speak the Dzongkha language. In a report published in May 2007 on this long-term refugee crisis - Last Hope: The Need for Durable Solutions for Bhutanese Refugees in Nepal and India - Human Rights Watch quoted a man who said, "They don't ask me to leave, but they make me so miserable, I will be forced to leave. I have no identification, so I cannot do anything, go anywhere, get any job." The state will no doubt try to write this ugly chapter out of the history of Bhutan. But that won't make the situation any less volatile. In the refugee camps, an offer of resettlement by the United States and other countries has sparked unrest because to some it means an end to their quest for justice and the eventual goal of return to Bhutan. Refugees who speak in favor of resettlement are being threatened and intimidated; in late May 2007, they were attacked by a mob, one of their leaders beaten, and huts burnt. In the ensuing violence, Nepali police forces shot and killed two of the rioters.

Bhutan's Maoist leader Vikalpa, complaining about the "denationalization" of Bhutanese citizens, told a journalist that there was no option other than to launch a "people's war." "Where there is suppression, there is revolt. Where there is revolt, it explodes the empire of suppression into pieces", he said. Meanwhile, there are reports that a number of people allegedly involved with the Maoists have been arrested and tortured by the Bhutanese government.

China and Bhutan still have a chance to avoid the brutal confrontation their policies of ethnic suppression nurture. But to do so, they must stop propounding the cheerful narrative that writes their troublesome minorities out of the picture of national identity, and instead grant them the respect and rights to which they are entitled.


This article originally appeared on openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons license. To view the original article, please click here.


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By Sudeshna Sarkar

On 11 January 2004, Om Prakash Timilsina was arrested by the then-Royal Nepalese Army on suspicion of having links to Maoist rebels and held in an army barracks for five months.

During this time, the Maoist insurgency against Nepal's government was growing stronger, with the army being called in to fight the guerrillas. The midnight knock at Timilsina's door was indicative of what had been the way of life in the Himalayan nation since 2001.

What followed that midnight knock was a session of torture that Timilsina, and others like him, will never forget.

"A major put me down on the floor and wrapped wires round my wrists," Timilsina told Advocacy Forum Nepal (AFN), a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that monitors detention centers and provides legal aid to victims of human rights abuse. "Then in an interval of three minutes, he gave me three shocks. [Then] he beat me with a wooden stick. After that, he sat on my back, sipping tea."

Timilsina's ordeal occurred at a time Nepal was being indirectly ruled by King Gyanendra. The monarch had ascended the throne in 2001 after a midnight massacre in the palace in the capital city Kathmandu wiped out his elder brother, King Birendra, and the entire royal family. In a move that signaled that he did not want to remain a mere figurehead, Gyanendra sacked the prime minister in October 2002 and began appointing a succession of premiers to consolidate his power.

In February 2005, having decided to rule directly, the king seized power with the help of the army and ran the government for 15 months before an uprising forced him to step down in April 2006.

The 19-day revolt is regarded as a landmark in Nepal's history, ending the king's authoritarian rule and restoring democracy. The new multi-party government signed a peace agreement with the Maoist guerrillas, who ended their 10-year "People's War" and finally joined the ruling alliance this year.

Though the civil war has ended, the practice of torture by security forces and the Maoists continues in Nepal.

Last week, AFN released a report based on its findings in the 35 detention centers it monitored from April 2006, when the royal government fell, to April of this year. "Torture Continues: A Brief Report on the Practice of Torture in Nepal," documents over 1,300 new cases of torture since the restoration of democracy.

"[...]One year after the historic Jana Andolan [people's movement], Nepal still suffers from an enormous deficit in human rights protection," the report said. "Torture still continues, the culture of impunity reigns and victims continue to suffer from the mental and physical wounds of egregious human rights violations and abuses."

Common methods of torture include administering electric shocks, sexual abuse and savage beatings with iron rods and bamboo sticks.

The report noted the June 2006 case of Sikha Ram Chaudhary, who was detained by Chitwan National Park officials in southern Nepal. Chaudhary was suspected of stealing rhino horns.

According to the report, Chaudhary was subjected to severe beatings and burns with cigarette butts for a week before falling unconscious. He was taken to a nearby hospital where he was declared dead. The autopsy report showed that he had seven broken ribs, which had caused his respiratory system to collapse.

Of the close to 4,000 detainees interviewed by the NGO, nearly 28 percent said they had been subjected to torture. The worst perpetrators were the police, who were responsible for over 1,200 out of just over 1,300 cases of torture. Though the sweeping power enjoyed by the army to execute arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial executions officially ended in April 2006, the report documented 17 cases of torture, four rapes and six cases of illegal detention by the troops.

Even the Maoist guerrillas who pledged to give up violence were responsible for 67 cases of torture, one case of rape and 96 cases of abduction. Minors received the worst treatment, with close to 37 percent saying they had been tortured and around 43 percent reporting that they had been detained illegally.

The tip of the torture iceberg

The findings could be just the tip of the iceberg. Given that AFN monitors detention centers in only 13 out of 75 districts and these include only police cells and not army detention centers, the actual figure could be substantially higher.

"In the remote areas especially, detention centers are often out of bounds for human rights monitors," said Dr Bhogendra Sharma, president of Kathmandu-based NGO Center for Victims of Torture, which provides medical and psychological treatment to torture victims.

"For instance, we were not allowed access to detainees in Nawalparasi [the site of ethnic violence in the southern plains since January]," Sharma told ISN Security Watch. "Old habits die hard. For torture to end, the culture of impunity has to end first.

Activists point to two prominent torture cases for which national and international organizations are campaigning for justice: the Maina Sunuwar case and the Bhairavnath battalion case.

In February 2004, 15-year-old Maina Sunuwar was taken from her home by a group of plain-clothed soldiers who originally wanted to intimidate Maina's mother who had witnessed the gang rape and murder of her niece by security forces. As neither of Maina's parents were home at the time, the soldiers took the girl to an army training center where she was given electric shocks until she died.

According to AFN, after her death, the three perpetrators shot her in the back of the head to make it look like she was killed while trying to escape and buried her body.

The NGO helped Maina's mother file a case against the soldiers, which was also taken up by Amnesty International and several foreign diplomats, including the US ambassador to Nepal, James Francis Moriarty.

The ensuing publicity forced the army to conduct a court martial. However, the three men were found guilty only of "not following procedures," Two captains were ordered to pay NRS 25,000 each (approximately US$395) as compensation and were declared ineligible for promotion for one year. The colonel involved was fined NRS 50,000 and made ineligible for promotion for two years.

Authorities exhumed Maina's body in March, but there has been no investigation. Though the Supreme Court ordered the army and police in May to explain the delay and produce the original case files, no documents have been submitted.

In the second case, the Bhairavnath battalion of the army ran a secret torture camp in its barracks in the heart of Kathmandu. Maoist suspects were held for long periods while blindfolded and their hands tied behind their backs. At least 49 of the prisoners are missing. The Maoists say they were gunned down on the outskirts of the city and then buried secretly.

Redefining torture

Though the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights last year compiled a report with graphic description of the torture methods and names of prisoners and asked the government to punish the men running the camp, no action has been taken.

"The criminal justice system has to be overhauled," Chandra Kanta Poudel, IT and administrative manager at AFN told ISN Security Watch. "Though there is a Torture Compensation Act, it is not enough. Torture has to be made a criminal offense."

The Torture Compensation Act provides for a maximum compensation payment of NRS 100,000. To make a claim, a victim has to file within 35 days of being tortured or released from detention, often a near impossible task given the geographical barriers and lack of legal remedies. Most importantly, it regards only an act of violence occurring during official detention as torture.

"We are lobbying for a new torture law," says Sharma. "Also, we are asking the government to sign and ratify the Optional Protocol of the Convention Against Torture, that would allow national as well as international organizations to monitor torture in Nepal."

Nepal's Law and Justice Ministry says a new torture law is in the offing.

"The government has abolished torture," Kedar Poudel, a ministry spokesperson, told ISN Security Watch. "The state doesn't condone torture. The acts reported are committed by individuals and the government asks victims to use the legal remedy available. Security officials found guilty of torture will be punished."

According to Poudel, the Law and Justice Ministry and the Home Ministry are drafting a new bill to be tabled in parliament. "It will re-define torture," he says, "and make it a criminal offense. We have been told to give it high priority."

Another top priority for the government is holding elections in November, but it first has to quell the growing violence in the southern plains, where nearly 90 people have died since January. The elections have already been postponed once; it remains to be seen if they will now be held on 22 November as scheduled.

Until this exercise is conducted with some semblance of credibility, a new government installed and a new constitution written and promulgated, the new torture law is unlikely to see the light of day.


Sudeshna Sarkar is a correspondent for ISN Security Watch in Kathmandu.


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By Carlos Eire

As Elie Wiesel reminds us, there is no more eloquent witness against injustice and evil than eyewitness memory. A colleague of mine at Yale, the theologian Miroslav Volf, who spent time in prison in Croatia simply because his father was a Protestant minister, has argued that evil can triumph multiple times: first when an injustice is committed, and over and over if the record of that injustice is wiped out and the memory of it denied.[1]

In 1959, when Fidel Castro took power, the population of Cuba was only 6 million. But except for the scale, life there was much like it was in the Soviet Union. Imagine having lived in a repressive state, and then from the moment you reach the United States constantly being told what a wonderful place you came from and how wonderful the Castro revolution has been to your people. Imagine being told constantly—sometimes directly, sometimes insinuated—that you are simply selfish, you didn’t want to share your property with other people, and that’s why you are here. That’s my story and why I wrote my memoir. I face this every day still, even recently at the UN, because I come not from Europe but from the “third world.”

Cuban History

Cuba was a Spanish colony until 1898, when the Spanish-American war freed Cuba from Spain. In 1898, the population of Cuba was 2 million; slavery had existed until 1888. Cubans had been fighting against Spain unsuccessfully for forty years, but in 1898 the U.S. marched in and took over. In 1902, the U.S. granted independence to Cuba (which it did not do for the Philippines and Puerto Rico, the other two colonies it won from Spain). Cuba got its own constitution, but under the Platt amendment, the U.S. had the right to intervene in Cuban affairs any time it felt its interests were threatened.

Cuba’s first president, Tomas Estrada Palma, had spent most of his adult life in the U.S., teaching at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York state. Between 1902-52, the U.S. intervened directly and indirectly numerous times, removing presidents and ensuring that other presidents were installed.

Between 1900-30, one million European immigrants arrived in Cuba, completely changing the island. Contrary to prevailing myths, the country was not quite a third world country in 1959. In fact, at that time, it had more college-educated women than the U.S. per capita. It had more TV sets than all of Italy. It had a very prosperous economy and a huge middle class. Yes, there was poverty, but the country also had a high literacy rate and a liberal 1940 constitution. But unfortunately, the country was politically immature, subjected to one dictatorship after another and a great deal of corruption.

In 1952, an army coup brought to power Fulgencio Batista, who ruled with an iron fist. He made sure that the opposition met its end very quickly. But there was a degree of press freedom. Cuba had several TV stations, more than 80 radio stations, and more than 60 newspapers. There was censorship, but it was not extreme. You simply could not say anything contrary to Batista’s regime. Castro took on Batista, beat him, and succeeded him, but his was only one of 17 different revolutionary groups fighting against Batista. The first thing Castro did when he marched into Havana was to ensure that these other revolutionaries quickly disappeared. By 1960, he was expropriating American property and foreign investments and also beginning to abolish private property. Before long he had declared Cuba a Marxist-Leninist state.

From the beginning there were opponents of the regime, even among men close to Castro who had fought with him. But promised elections were never held, and people kept disappearing. There were already exiles in 1960, and the CIA decided to help them invade Cuba. While the vast majority of the men who landed in the Bay of Pigs invasion had fought against Batista, they were not there to reinstate Batista, but to fight what they had been fighting against since the mid 1950s. Castro had coopted the revolution, and from day one spoke for the entire Cuban people. Anyone who did not agree with him was no longer part of the Cuban people. They were worms, gusanos. Many of the Cubans who were concerned with the way the revolution was going assumed that it wouldn’t last long, given the long history of U.S. involvement in Cuba.

By 1961, there was a Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) on every city block—citizens who would spy on their neighbors, distribute ration cards, and handle petitions for promotion or for higher education. CDR members got the most rations. All school-aged children were “requested” to perform “volunteer labor” for six weeks each summer, laboring in the countryside for no pay, in living conditions worse than those of any sweat shop in the Western world, with terrible food and no contact with their parents. (This continues today.) Beginning around 1960, many parents became concerned about their children’s future. Men and women who opposed the Castro regime wanted desperately to get their children out of Cuba. So the State Department and the CIA devised a plan to grant the children visa waivers, since children did not need security clearances. The State Department gave carte blanche to three Cubans in Havana to print up visa waivers on a mimeograph machine in a house that was directly across the street from the G2, Castro’s secret police.

But Cubans are very neighborly. Mothers began to share this information, and before you knew it, purely by word of mouth, news of the program had spread like wildfire. Women — it was only the mothers — were flocking to this house. The G2 inquired why so many people were visiting the house and was told it was a canasta tournament. Between 1960-62, 14,600 children were airlifted to the U.S. I was one of them. My parents put me on a plane with my brother and sent us to the U.S. We had no family here, and my parents didn’t know where we’d end up or if we would ever see each other again. But they were willing to do that. As it turned out, I never saw my father again after April 6, 1962. The regime would not allow him to leave. Families were separated continually. If the family applied for an exit permit, the father would be fired from his job and sent to perform slave labor in the countryside for an indefinite period of time, “until you’ve paid off your debt to the revolution.”

When the missile crisis almost brought the world to an end in October 1962, Cuba sealed its borders. This meant that the parents of over 10,000 of us children were stranded in Cuba. And yet years later, in November 1999, when five-year-old Elian Gonzales was rescued from the waters off of Florida, the Cuban government insisted that he be returned to Cuba because “every boy deserves to be with his father.” Between 1962 and 1976, when my father died, the longest conversation I ever had with him was three minutes, the limit on the length of calls, with someone else listening in on the Cuban end, laughing, making snide remarks, and calling us worms.

My brother and I were separated once we got to the U.S. Eventually we found our way back together in a home for juvenile delinquents and spent nine months there, not because we had done anything wrong but because that was the only place for us. Three and a half years later our mother was able to leave through Mexico. She knew someone who knew someone who knew someone at the embassy there. But twice before that, she had her exit permit, made it to the airport, and was sent back home, told to reapply, because her seat was needed for someone more important.

The Gonzales case moved me to write my memoir. Over decades I had written on my Yale University stationery to practically every major publication in the U.S. asking them to do a story on the airlift and the way the Cuban government had split families up, and got not one acknowledgment. So for four months in the summer of 2000 every night I wrote at my life story. Simon & Schuster agreed to publish it, but not as a novel, as I had submitted it. They found it out as true and insisted that it be published as a memoir.

Man does not live by bread alone; truth is more important than bread. I wrote the book because of the countless times even highly educated people tell me that in the third world “human rights” means something completely different, that there it is a full plate of food. One college honor student who had been to Bangladesh and Cuba found the two places the same, telling me with welled-up eyes that “You don’t understand. In the third world what really matters is getting food. It doesn’t matter what kind of restrictions they live under.”

Cuba remains like the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union. My memoir has been banned there, and I’ve been declared an enemy of the revolution. Government permission is required to travel abroad, change jobs or residence, own a computer, access the Internet, sell products or services, gain access to a boat, retain a lawyer, organize activities or performances, or form a business. One cannot receive religious instruction, watch independent TV stations, read anything not approved or published by the government, earn more than the government-controlled rate ($17 per month for most jobs, $34 per month for professionals), refuse to participate in mass rallies organized by the Party, or criticize the laws, the regime, or the Party.

Sugar is no longer the chief source of income; last year, the regime closed down half the sugar mills. Much of the countryside now is fallow. An invasive plant has taken over much of these formerly rich producing sugar fields. Tourism, mostly European and Canadian, is now the main source of income. Since the 1950s, the only construction that has taken place in Cuba is that which the Soviets did, which is very little. The population is nearly double what it was in 1959, but there is no new housing. There are cases where a couple divorces, each remarries, and all four live together. European firms, mostly Spanish, Italian, and French, invest in hotels in Cuba because they make good money. They put up all the capital, Cuba provides only the land, which it leases. The laborers are paid European union wages. But the workers don’t receive this; the government skims it.

It requires special government approval to work in one of these highly coveted hotel jobs. The only Cubans allowed to set foot in these hotels and restaurants or use their beaches are those who work there. So the best beaches, hotels, and stores are off-limits to Cubans. If I weren’t an enemy of the people and was allowed to visit, my 81-year-old uncle wouldn’t be allowed to meet me in the hotel or join me for a swim. Last year, a thick book of laws came out regulating contacts between Cubans and foreigners. It is now illegal for any Cuban to accept a tip or gift from a foreigner.

My uncle has revealed to me two very sad things about Cuba today. First, the verb “to steal,” robar, no longer exists in Cuba. No one steals; they just solve their problems. And if there is no private property, can you have any theft? Second, there is no trust. Everyone knows that everyone else is looking to get something from them.

And so it is very difficult for me to read things like the following, from an August 2003 article in The Guardian by then Labour MP Brian Wilson entitled “Revolution revisited: Cuba isn’t perfect, but it is living proof that it is possible for a third world country to combat poverty, disease, and illiteracy”: “Cuba’s primary service to the world has been to provide living proof that it is possible to conquer poverty, disease and illiteracy in a country that was grossly over-familiar with all three…. The fact that it has been delivered in the face of sustained hostility from an obsessive neighbor [the U.S.] makes it all the more stunning.” Here’s a response to a 2004 PBS documentary on Fidel Castro from a man in Texas, posted at the PBS website: “Everyone below the age of 50 don’t know about the conditions of Cuba before Fidel. When a revolution is successful there is a reason and the reason in Cuba was poverty…. Without the strength of Castro, Cuba will fall into decline searching for a direction and will come under the fold of the United States just as it was in the 40s and 50s.”

What’s behind this? Bigotry of the worst sort. It is pure ignorance based on the assumption that unless they have a strong leader like Fidel Castro, Cubans can’t take care of themselves. I call it the Mussolini principle. In the 1930s many Americans and British praised Mussolini because he made the trains run on time, he made those unruly Italians mindful of time and efficient.

Travel writers do Cuba great disservice. As an exception, Thomas Swick of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel wrote a beautiful piece, recording the inane comments his fellow travel writers made on their trip (“Our Gang in Havana,” Mar. 24, 2002). The comments sound like they are discussing Rousseau’s noble savage or Kipling’s White Man’s Burden. Sarah Shuckburg, a travel writer for the UK’s Telegraph, writes as follows:

“I sit on a bench in a tiny park, and the colour, music and exuberance of old Havana engulf me…. An intoxicating blend of Spanish guitars and African drumbeats drifts from a nearby bar, where an elderly couple is performing an afternoon salsa…. Three barefoot boys in tattered shorts kick a dented can over the cobbles. Bare-chested men exchange jokes as they push barrows of rubble. A grizzled, toothless man approaches me and holds out his hand. I give him a few tiny coins.” (“A little local colour,” Mar. 5, 2006)

She thinks of this as praise for the revolution. But where are the sports programs? And the old man is grizzled and toothless because Cubans don’t have any razors or toothpaste. They have awful dental and medical care. Even Castro had to call for a Spanish surgeon to come and save his life.

I’ll conclude by letting you think about how Shuckburg summarized her experience in Cuba, based on what we’ve discussed:

“Cubans are lucky, with several giants to worship—principled, visionary reformers. Fidel Castro is one of them. There are few photographs of him, and no statues, but for most Cubans, Castro is a living legend who has maintained his communist ideals despite the collapse of communism elsewhere, and despite sanctions and embargoes from the `enemy’ to the north. The Cubans I speak to all share Castro’s patriotism and his distrust of democracy, and are intensely proud of Cuba’s egalitarianism, education, health care and sporting achievements. None of them mention human rights or freedom of expression.”

Notes
Volf, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (2006)

Carlos Eire is the Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University and author of Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003), the One Book/One Philadelphia selection for 2007. This essay is based on his presentation at Living Without Freedom: A History Institute for Teachers sponsored by FPRI’s Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education, May 5–6, 2007, held at and co-sponsored by the National Constitution Center and the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia. FPRI’s History Institute program is chaired by David Eisenhower and Walter A. McDougall and receives core support from the Annenberg Foundation. The program on Living without Freedom was supported by a grant from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. This article was published by FPRI.

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By Wei Jingsheng

Losing freedom is a painful thing. But exactly how painful it is can vary. For the average child, not being allowed to go outside and play, or for an employee, being forced to work, are losses of freedom. These losses can be painful, and the child or employee might resolve to make trouble for his parents or boss. But by no means does suffering such a loss mean that you can understand what a much more extreme loss of freedom is like. So, reporters and goodhearted people always ask me questions like, “In prison, how were the meals?” or “Were you beaten?” Actually, those problems are much less important. The greatest and most serious problem is losing your freedom. That is the severe pain.

During my 18 years in prison, I was kept in strictly solitary confinement for three years. The rest of the time, although I was held alone in a cell, it was not as strict; I could chat with guards and fellow prisoners. During the three years of solitary confinement, there was a period of more than a year when I was not let out of my tiny cell even once. No one was allowed to speak with me; the door was always closed. Food was delivered through a small opening in the lower part of the iron cell door. Outside my window there was a small yard, but even that no one was allowed to enter. In this environment of complete isolation from the outside world, a person begins to slowly lose his endurance. An indescribable feeling of torment comes forth from within. Many people in this sort of situation lose their sense of reason; more serious cases go insane, becoming mentally ill. Many political prisoners are driven mad this way, including those imprisoned as a result of political fights within the Chinese Communist Party.

During that time of confinement, many would pay no attention to the quality of the food or to being beaten. Many prisoners would even welcome a beating, the pain of which would be cathartic, because the suffering in one’s heart would vent forth, giving one a feeling of being liberated. During that time, I would intentionally kick the door with my foot, yell and shout to draw the person guarding me to come quarrel and fight. I would seize the chance to vent the rising gloom trapped in my heart. Unfortunately this method only worked once. At the time the feeling of release exceeded my expectations. I felt relaxed and carefree for several days. But the second time it didn’t work, they discovered my plot. No matter how hard I kicked the door or how much I yelled, they paid no attention to me. Later a kindly guard told me there were orders from above that no matter what commotion I made they were to pay it no heed, so I need not bother.

I then thought of a new plan. I had with me a few Russian middle-school textbooks. Every day I would read them out in a very loud voice. The entire prison could hear me. Actually I was only venting, I was not reading Russian at all. Many years later I encountered a convict who was in the same prison at the time, who told me: “It would be useful if your English were as good as your Russian.” I asked, “How do you know my Russian is good?” He responded, “Back then I heard you read Russian in a loud voice. I never understood why you didn’t study English, but were studying Russian.” I did not know how I should respond, because, actually, I was not even studying Russian. The other convict had lived in a larger cell and had just a little bit more freedom than we did, and so he could not understand the suffering of those with less freedom.

A long time passed. One day a guard suddenly called me to go out and play badminton. At first, I didn’t know what was up. After playing for a while, I didn’t feel anything unusual, we just played very happily all afternoon. That was much better than fighting with the guard. After a few days I asked a guard when I could play badminton. The guard said, “Play badminton, what, are you dreaming?” For more than ten years, I never understood why they only let me play badminton once. After being released there was a reporter who asked me: “The treatment in prison was not too bad, was it? We all saw the tape of you playing badminton.” Only then did I realize why I had played badminton only once. It was to make a videotape to deceive the international community. Once it was recorded, it was over; wanting to play badminton again was of course like the guard said, dreaming.

After this sort of experience, I feel even more keenly that freedom is the most important condition for a person’s existence. Indeed, I think that for the last few thousand years human society has been searching for a better social system. What is a better social system? A system that can more effectively guarantees everyone’s freedom. With the prerequisite of upholding social order, a social system that can provide a greater guarantee of freedom is a better system.

Autocratic systems probably have greater social order than some democratic societies, but the prerequisite for that social order is a large sacrifice in personal freedom. People in that sort of system lose too much freedom and severely lack the necessary conditions for living. When enough people’s lives become too hard to bear, they will eventually resist and revolt.

Social order seemed very good in China during Mao Zedong’s time; the average people seemed to behave themselves, and prostitution and drugs were nearly eliminated. Some confused Western scholars thought Mao Zedong had created a society that conformed most closely to their standards of an ideal social system. But they were mistaken. Just as they were coming to believe that Mao had created an ideal society, the Cultural Revolution started in 1966. After more than a decade, the Communist Party’s autocratic rule had finally deprived the Chinese people of too much freedom. The spirit in society to resist and revolt had grown.

When people live in a free society, they can undervalue the importance of freedom. They mistakenly believe that even without freedom, the Chinese people can live very well. When the Chinese people rise up to oppose the CCP, those who themselves are free cannot understand why people have to destroy a good social order. Foreigners could not comprehend why we had to have the Cultural Revolution.

According to normal understanding, cultural change is a slow process. What effect can that sort of violent storm of a revolution have on cultural change? Mao called for revolt, and many ordinary people took the opportunity to oppose the Communist Party officials. In this sense it was not really a “cultural” revolution. One aspect was Mao using the “Cultural Revolution” that all in the Communist Party could agree with as a pretext for inciting a movement to strike down his political opponents. Another aspect was ordinary people seizing the opportunity to vent the dissatisfaction and unhappiness that had built up in their hearts for many years. However, at the end, the Cultural Revolution took the “dictatorship of the proletariat” to the extreme and suppressed the movement that Mao had launched.

On these two points, Deng Xiaoping and later Chinese Communist leaders have something in common. They have feared that the people will revolt and also that the people will say they are the dictatorship of the proletariat. So they have not allowed people to talk about the problem of the Cultural Revolution. One of the greatest lessons from the revolts during the Cultural Revolution was that everyone believed that he would gain legitimacy by rebelling under the banner of Mao. In the end, rebelling under the banner of Mao was like rebelling while kneeling before the emperor. When the emperor wants to put you back in your place, you have no way out.

The CCP especially feared that after the people absorbed this experience, the next time their rebellion would not be under the Party’s banner. So they did not permit the people to study the lessons from this experience and discuss the Cultural Revolution.

Under the CCP’s autocratic rule, the people cannot participate in forming public opinion. With no freedom of speech, the so-called “four great freedoms”—to “speak freely,” to “air your views freely,” to write “big character posters,” and to engage in “big debates”—were just to leave ordinary people with just a last little bit of the people’s freedom.[1] Of course, they could speak nonsense, just as America’s freedom also allows people to speak nonsense.

The main reason Deng eliminated the “four great freedoms” after the Cultural Revolution was that Democracy Wall[2] evidenced that people were using those freedoms to criticize the government, which caused fear among the leadership. So Deng used the Cultural Revolution as an argument to intimidate and persuade those within the party to support him in eliminating Democracy Wall. “The four great freedoms” of the Cultural Revolution and Democracy Wall period vividly showed Deng the power of freedom of speech. Deng Xiaoping used Democracy Wall’s momentum to defeat Hua Guofeng’s “Whatever” Faction.[3] The power of the people had shown that it could interfere with power struggles in the central authorities, and that it was quite formidable in its own right. So, the first thing Deng did after he took power was to shut down Democracy Wall. Such was the lesson the new leaders had learned from the experience of the Cultural Revolution and Democracy Wall: be very afraid of ordinary people seizing the opportunity to rebel. So after they assimilated their experiences from the Cultural Revolution and Democracy Wall, the CCP leaders became very afraid of the people taking opportunities to rebel.

Deng Xiaoping sensed that for him to continue to rule, although he could wave the banner of democracy, by no means did he need democracy. He saw very clearly that he still needed to use the method of the dictatorship of the proletariat to handle the Chinese people. He did not want people to criticize the dictatorship of the proletariat. The major portion of the brutality of the Cultural Revolution was caused by the dictatorship of the proletariat; rather than by struggles among the people. Struggles between two factions were in fact caused by Mao Zedong and his gang sowing discord. This was precisely one of Mao’s methods of playing with the dictatorship of the proletariat.

CCP intra-party struggles, as a rule, are ruthless. The Communist Party’s type of despotic, autocratic politics, which also has certain characteristics of a religion, is fanatical and impervious to reason. So it manifests itself as even more cruel than autocratic rule of ancient times. Under such ruthless conditions, leaders become especially unable to acknowledge their mistakes, and the mindset of revenge becomes especially strong. I have heard that now it is also like this; there has been little change since the Cultural Revolution: “No matter what tactic I use, I have to cut you down, otherwise you will probably cut me down, and it would probably be a pretty nasty end.” This type of situation brings about ruthless politics.

Here, I wish to speak about religion, but not the modern West’s religion, which is separated from politics; rather, I refer to the religion of the Middle Ages with its unification of church and state. Much of the activity during the Cultural Revolution was similar to religious rituals. Every day one had to listen, read, ask for instructions in the morning, report back in the evening—in ritual forms resembling prayer. Bare your heart to the party, bare your heart to the leaders—this imitates confession.

This way of doing things was in part an idea of Mao’s, in part it probably also is related to the May Fourth era[4] idea of complete Westernization. At the time people summed up what they learned from the Westernization movement and from the failure of the Hundred Days Reform.[5] They believed China’s culture was inadequate and prevented China from adopting advanced Western things. So the first step was to destroy Chinese culture. Then it would be easier to paint a good picture on a blank piece of paper. This was the ideology of the far left during the May Fourth movement. It later became the ideology of the CCP.

In truth, many of the methods of the Cultural Revolution were anticipated in the May Fourth period. They developed to reach extremes during the Cultural Revolution. Wanting to destroy all traditional Chinese culture, and wanting to destroy all Western culture that was not beneficial to the construction of communist autocracy—this makes China a cultural desert.

Having been through the Cultural Revolution and Democracy Wall, Deng saw that using communism’s ideals to rule people’s minds had failed. Then, what thing is most easy to do to soften people’s thinking, cause them not to rebel? That is what Marx had talked about as the opium of the spirit. So he used other extreme means—“looking toward money” and the desire for material things; prostitution, drugs, and other such things—to numb people’s will to resist and eliminate their power to rebel. In order to maintain the one-party dictatorship, the rulers don’t really give the people freedom and democracy.

Some Western entrepreneurs and scholars are now making the mistake of believing that the same freedom exists in America and in China. Their perception is correct, because in China they are treated as privileged friends of the Communist Party, and naturally they enjoy the same freedom as the Party.

But they have not noticed, or they have intentionally overlooked, that the freedom—greater than the freedom in America—enjoyed by them and the special privileged class of the CCP has been based upon sacrificing the freedom of the vast majority of Chinese. The majority that has been sacrificed of course is sure to resist this sort of oppression, create instability, and revolt. Yet the Communist Party wants to maintain its autocratic institutions, and of course it must be hostile toward democratic countries that are more in line with human existence. This [the hostile relationship and struggle between autocracy and autocrats, on one hand, and realization of freedom and the needs of human existence, on the other] is the basic structure of modern international relations. This also has been the basic structure of all the basic changes that have occurred in social institutions over the last several thousand years.

There are some American politicians who say, “We can set aside ideological differences to develop amicable international relations.” I believe that their intentions are good, but the Communist Party does not believe so. The CCP believes that America’s existence is a threat. Because the freedom that democracy guarantees is too appealing, every day that democratic institutions exist testifies to the failure of despotism. Every day those institutions provide an example for overturning autocracies. How, then, can the CCP trust that what America says is the truth? Why does America regularly make mistakes when dealing with China? It is because many Americans do not understand that lack of freedom is the fundamental reason that will compel Chinese people to revolt.

Enjoying freedom is the natural desire of human beings, thus the fundamental differences between democratic systems that guarantee freedom and autocratic systems that strangle freedom. This is the root cause of the ideological conflict, an issue that cannot be avoided or ignored.

Notes
A legacy of the Cultural Revolution, the “four great freedoms” were included in the Chinese Constitution adopted in 1978 as officially valued and validated methods of popular political participation. “Big character posters”—literally meaning (though not always in practice) posters that used large writing in Chinese characters to set forth political attacks and manifestos—were a favored tool of Cultural Revolutionaries, including Mao himself in the movement’s initial phase. (Ed.) [back]
Democracy Wall (1978-79) refers to the group of Beijing-based writers—among whom Wei became the most prominent—and their writings, which were critical of the regime and advocated democratic reform. The name derives from a brick wall at Xidan in central Beijing where many of these writings were posted and near which impromptu journals from the movement distributed. (Ed.)

Hua Guofeng was Mao’s designated, short-lived successor. Hua’s opponents (who included Deng) branded Hua and his allies as the “Whatever Faction,” claiming that they believed in following “whatever” Mao had said or done (rather than the reformist policies that Deng and his “practice” faction allies favored, which they claimed to be based on the principle of “practice is the sole criterion of truth.”).

The May Fourth era refers to the period early in the twentieth century when Chinese intellectuals, including those who would be among the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, articulated the principles of modern Chinese nationalism and called for major political and cultural changes. The name comes from the events of May 4, 1919, the date of student protests (followed by additional demonstrations, strikes and a boycott of Japanese goods) in response to provisions in the Versailles peace accords that accorded Japan former German concessions in China and thereby inflamed Chinese nationalist sentiments.

The Hundred Days Reform refers to a short-lived and unsuccessful effort in 1898 to salvage the Qing dynasty’s crumbling rule by undertaking political, social and educational reforms, including principally those advocated by Kang Youwei.

Wei Jingsheng is a leading activist and advocate for human rights and democracy in China and critic of the Chinese Communist Party’s rule. He was imprisoned twice for a total of more than 18 years for his activities, including his 1978 essay, “The Fifth Modernization.” He is the author of Courage to Stand Alone: Letters from Prison and Other Writings, which compiles essays written initially on toilet paper in jail. He is the founder of the Overseas Chinese Democracy Coalition and co-founder of Asia Democracy Alliance. This essay (with editorial notes by Jacques deLisle chair of FPRI’s Asia Program) is based on his presentation at Living Without Freedom, a History Institute for Teachers sponsored by FPRI’s Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education, May 5-6, 2007, held at and co-sponsored by the National Constitution Center and the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia. FPRI’s History Institute program is chaired by David Eisenhower and Walter A. McDougall and receives core support from the Annenberg Foundation. The program on Living without Freedom was supported by a grant from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. For video, a conference report, and the other speakers’ essays, see www.fpri.org/education/livingwithoutfreedom.

Originally published at FPRI
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A special Church commission disclosed on Wednesday that about a dozen bishops, who are still living, had ties to Poland’s communist-era secret police.

The commission said that among Poland's 132 bishops, “about a dozen were registered by the security services of communist Poland as ‘secret collaborators’ or ‘operational contacts’ and one was registered as an “agent” of the intelligence service,” reported The Associated Press.

The secret police labeled other bishops as “candidates.” In such cases, security agents gathered material on a person in the hope of recruiting him as an informant.

This news comes at a time when Polish Catholics are still reeling from the shock of discovering that some of its clergy, previously known for their resistance to communism, had ties to the repressive government.

In order to uncover the extent of the connections between the clergy and the security services, the country’s bishops created a commission to investigate. The bishops asked the special commission to review the communist-era files in January, after Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus of Warsaw resigned before his installation over disclosures he had cooperated with the former secret police.

Other prominent clergy have also resigned over similar allegations. This issue is believed to have compromised a minority of clergy, about 10 percent, reported the AP.

But Archbishop Slawoj Leszek Glodz warned at a press conference that the documents do not provide an accurate picture of the extent of cooperation between the bishops and the secret police.

Reading from a statement, he told reporters the documents in the secret police archives “are incomplete and chaotic” and “do not allow to reliably determine the scope, intensity or harm” of any cooperation by the bishops with the security services, reported the AP.

He said there was no evidence that the 12 bishops had signed agreements to collaborate with the secret police. He said, unlike other informants, clergy were not required to provide such signatures. Historians, however, discovered such documents signed by Wielgus.

The archbishop said the report would be forwarded to the Vatican for evaluation.


Source: CNA
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(CNA).- Following a special meeting of the Polish Bishops’ Conference to discuss “the state of the Church in Poland” the bishops released a statement and called for a special day of prayer and repentance on Ash Wednesday, this coming February 21st. The meeting and statement comes in response to recent concern over the collaboration of some Polish clergy with the Communist regime of the late 20th century.

In a communication, which was to be read at every Polish Parish on Sunday, the bishops said they have “painfully followed” the accusations brought against Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus, who resigned as Archbishop of Warsaw after he admitted to collaboration with the Communist secret service (SB) and the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL) intelligence.

The bishops emphasized that despite the archbishop’s admittance of guilt, “It is not up to us to judge a man, a brother, who has served the Church in a faithful and zealous way.”

The prelates noted the tremendous persecution that was felt by the Church and by so many Poles during the era of totalitarian Communist rule and called for a greater investigation of the facts surrounding individual cases. “Only a critical and solid analysis of all the available sources can allow us to approach the truth,” they noted. “One-sided reading of documents created by officers of the repression apparatus of a communist state, hostile towards the Church, can seriously harm people, destroy the links of social trust and as a consequence prove to be a posthumous victory of an inhuman system, in which we were fated to live”

“All too easily it is being forgotten that in the times of communist totalitarianism the whole Church in Poland constantly stood against the enslavement of the society and was an oasis of freedom and truth,” the bishop’s statement said.

“We repeat once more: the Church is not afraid of the truth, even if this is a hard, shameful, truth and approaching this truth is sometimes very painful.”

“We are not afraid to confess that the Church is a community of sinners,” the bishops said, “but at the same time she is holy and called to holiness, since Jesus Christ is her Head, living and working in her – a Saint above all saints. It is before Him that we stand, asking the Holy Ghost to deliver us from evil, fear and our small-mindedness.”

With such a background, the bishops called for this coming Ash Wednesday, “to be a day of prayer and repentance of the whole Polish clergy.” The prelates declared that, “in all the churches in our dioceses, services to the Merciful God should be celebrated for a forgiveness of mistakes and weaknesses in proclaiming the whole Gospel.”

“As clergy,” the bishops continued, we are ‘taken from the people,’ we are a part of Polish society, which as a whole needs to turn away from evil and make a full conversion.”

“There is a great task of reconciliation for the Church in Poland, apart from standing in truth before the face of God. We will not change the past, both the glorious, and the one that we are ashamed of,” the statement adds.

The bishops concluded their communiqué by laying out a plan for investigating other potential collaborators while appealing, “to all the people of the Church, the clergy and the laity, to carry on the examination of their consciences concerning their conduct in the time of totalitarianism.”