China and its friends come off as bullies on world stage

 Source: Montreal gazzette

By JANET BAGNALL, The Gazette December 10, 2010

 

 

This morning, in Oslo city hall's marble auditorium, an empty chair will stand in for a man who could not get there: Chinese dissident Liu Xiabo, this year's Nobel Peace Prize laureate. A glittering ceremony will acknowledge Liu's fight for human rights and democracy in his homeland, but he will learn nothing of it. He will remain locked up in a Chinese prison for another 10 years for "subversion against the state." Even his relatives were prevented from leaving China to attend the ceremony in Oslo. Liu's wife is under house arrest; other family members are under police surveillance.
China has managed to distinguish itself even against the standards of Nazi Germany, a feat unmatched since 1936, when Germany prevented journalist Carl von Ossietzky from leaving the country to accept the Peace Prize.
The Nazi regime made do with keeping Ossietzky (or anyone representing him) away from the award ceremony, but China has gone further. It has demanded that other countries boycott the Oslo ceremony and then for good measure it hastily minted its own peace prize.
Acting out of pure self-interest, more than a dozen countries agreed to China's request. To their great shame, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Tunisia, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Vietnam, Egypt, Sudan, Venezuela, the Philippines and Russia have agreed to go along with the boycott.
A common thread among the majority of these countries is their fear and loathing of dissidence in any form. Liu is a dissident and a human-rights activist, reason enough for them to boycott the ceremony. Other countries seem to have caved primarily over business interests: China buys Sudan's oil; it has become a trading partner of Saudi Arabia; and it's spending generously to develop Iran's oil and gas reserves. China might have to pay for the favour, but these countries are willing to do its bidding. (Norway is not one of them: China froze its free-trade negotiations with Norway when the Nobel Peace Prize was announced, an obvious and unsuccessful effort at intimidation.)
What this tawdry boycott tells us about China and its friends is that they think there's nothing they can't buy and bully their way out of: morality; international laws and treaties; universal acceptance (in theory, anyway) of the importance of human rights; the need in the age of global warming to work together with the rest of the world.
Denying the Nobel Peace Prize to a human-rights activist is just one more thing they calculate they can tough out. By Monday, they think, it'll be forgotten.
Or not. Maybe the damaging information WikiLeaks has pumped out about these same countries will stick to them. It's one thing for despotic regimes to gang up on one man rotting in a Chinese prison, it should be a different matter when things they would rather keep hidden are stripped of diplomacy's protective covering. What WikiLeaks has put into the public domain is the polar opposite of the half-truths and outright lies governments use to subvert democratic principles or international obligations.

Let's take the example of Saudi Arabia: The United States is not the only oil-consuming nation to refuse to condemn Saudi Arabia, but it's the most significant. Human-rights violations, suppression of women, nothing gets in the way of the "friendship" between the world's second-biggest oil producer and the world's biggest oil consumer.
But we now know, thanks to WikiLeaks, that the U.S. considers Saudi Arabia the "world's most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide." The U.S. has been leading the war on terror since 9/11, knowing all the while that its friend and ally, Saudi Arabia, has been supplying the money that is terrorism's life blood.
The U.S. has also been fully aware of the reach of Saudi money. It knew that it was Saudi Arabia that supplied virtually all the funding for the Pakistan-based Sunni group behind the 2008 Mumbai terror attack.
Air travellers harassed by security guards, Canadians lined up for hours at the U.S. border, Americans who bought all that duct tape during the Bush years might like to keep in mind that the war against terrorism seems to have been more mirage than reality.
More than we would care to admit, we have been imprisoned in a false reality, denied the right to know the truth. At least Liu Xiabo knows the truth of what he is up against.
jbagnall@montrealgazette.com