Friday Cleansing

Washing the dirt off a confounding week of highs and lows, with stories glimpsed between the headlines on a damp Friday night.

Apology For Slavery... From Africans: Nigerian Civil Rights groups are demanding that Nigerian tribal chiefs apologize for their role in capturing and selling fellow Africans during the trans-Atlantic slave trade:

The Civil Rights Congress (CRC), a leading coalition of human rights groups, said in a sequel to apologies by the US Senate last June and by Britain's former prime minister Tony Blair for slavery, it was time African traditional leaders take their cue.

"We cannot continue to blame the white men, as Africans, particularly the traditional rulers, are not blameless" said the grouping in a letter to Nigerian traditional chiefs.

"The rulers had participated by - helping to systematically raid and kidnap ... defenceless communities ... and then trading them off with European, American and other collaborators.

"They must apologise on behalf of their ancestors and... put a final seal to the history of slave trade.

"In view of the fact that the Americans and Europe have accepted the cruelty of their roles and have forcefully apologised, it would be logical, reasonable and humbling if African traditional rulers, [... can] accept blame and formally apologise to the descendants of the victims of their collaborative and exploitative slave trade..."

Polluted China: Haunting photographs in a gallery of horrors that catalogues rural life in today's polluted People's Republic of China. An interview with photographer Lu Guang is translated here:

Q: The places you shot at where you think the pollution was very serious, how did the villagers see the pollution in their lives? Did they feel the pollution was very serious and threatening their lives or [that the polluting industries] driving the local economic development was more important?

Lu Guang: In fact, there is no economic development for them, it only brought them destructions. Back then they had fertile fields. There were many water conservancy facilities built in the 70’s, all were every good, used to irrigate the fields. But now, pollution came and the water could not be used to irrigate the fields anymore. After a long time, now all the water conservancy facilities are wastes. The polluted water has led to contamination of the underground water. All their drinking water is underground water, water in the wells or from the water tower. Water from water tower flows straight to their homes, unlike us, the tap water we drink is already processed. Drinking this kind of water for long time, many people got very ill...

What Do Ann Landers and Daniel Defoe Have In Common? Both wrote advice columns for newspapers, reveals the new book on the history of "Agony Aunts": Never Kiss a Man in a Canoe: Words of Wisdom from the Golden Age of Agony Aunts. A review in the UK's Guardian reminds us how much those columns are a mirror of their times:

In our anti-authoritarian age, in which nobody's opinion – professional, amateur, drawn from experience or the ether – is deemed to be more or less valid than anyone else's, the hectoring tone of the Victorian agony aunts sounds utterly alien and alienating. ... Many agony aunts [now] seem to prefer a generalised I-feel-your-pain response. Cloying sympathy has replaced bracing empathy, which may make the reader feel momentarily better but doesn't really do much to resolve the problem.

Christmas Past, Present And... Future?

"What's Christmas-time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books, and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you?"
"If I could work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"
__Ebenezer Scrooge to Nephew Fred, Stave I, A Christmas Carol

I wonder what novelist Charles Dickens would say if he somehow found himself visiting Christmas 2008, a time in which Scrooge’s classic anti-Christmas rants are no longer mere idle threats from a materialist heart, but increasingly a state-supported tangible reality.

Consider first: a 41-year old mother of three is told to remove her Christmas lights by a housing association worker - in case they offended her non-Christian neighbours:

[..."]I put the lights up in the first week of November and then recently a uniformed housing worker was outside, and it looked like he was counting my decorations.
"When I went outside he said that the lights were 'offensive to the community'. If I was offending anyone I could understand why he was telling me, but nobody has complained.
"My neighbours are Bengali and Chinese and I know that they love the lights - the children will always point them out when they walk past."
...
She said: "I told him that I am far from a racist and that I wouldn't be taking the lights down. I'm shocked, annoyed and upset. At the end of the day, it's the festive season and they're staying."
Independent councillor Ahmed Khan, who represents Mrs Glenn's ward, condemned the over-zealous employee's actions.
He said: "Every year this woman puts her Christmas lights up and I know how popular they are. It's great when people make an effort to decorate their houses."
"It's this kind of nonsense that sets race relations back 20 years. That woman did nothing more than decorate her house to celebrate Christmas."

Thank goodness that, for once, the overly sensitive busybody had his scheme defeated by that rare treasure, a reasonable bureaucrat, who remembers what it means for children to see their world light up at Christmas.

"Under the impression that [the Treadmill and the Poor Law] scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude," returned the gentleman, "a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?"
"Nothing!" Scrooge replied.
"You wish to be anonymous?"
"I wish to be left alone," said Scrooge.

Elsewhere in the UK, the tilting balance of power sees the Salvation Army that operates out of Uxbridge, West London, no longer allowed to continue their tradition of rattling their tins to attract donations from passersby, in case it harasses or offends people of other religions:

Councils and police can enforce the no-rattle rule and have powers to prosecute or ban offenders.
The restriction was branded "bonkers" yesterday both by donors and long-serving Salvation Army volunteers.
[..."]I've been doing this for more than 40 years and I fail to see how rattling a tin could cause offence. If I was shaking a tambourine I could do it all day - if I shake my tin, I could end up in court."
...
Tony Keywood, shopping with his wife Sheila, was among a crowd enjoying the carols and stepped forward to make a donation.
"I jokingly told them off for not shaking their tins," said Mr Keywood, 78, a retired telecoms executive.
"They said they weren't allowed to do that in case it caused offence to other religions. They said they'd been told rattling a tin was considered to be intimidating.
"I don't know who makes up these rules but I suspect it will have something to do with human rights. I do feel Britain has lost its way on things like this."
...

One doesn't have to be too historically-minded to recognize that this would not be the first time that Britain lost its way, and needed to be guided back to the path well traveled, finding a way to reconcile present circumstances with past traditions. The people greeting Dickens' A Christmas Carol when it was first published in 1843 were struggling to remember Christmas as a day other than for drinking oneself to numbness in order to deal with missing the closeness of family. Today the struggle takes many forms, multiplying in complexity to the point that it seems hard, once more, to see with any clarity what future vision of Christmas lies in our destiny.

The Spirit stood among the graves, and pointed down to One. He advanced towards it trembling. The Phantom was exactly as it had been, but [Scrooge] dreaded that he saw new meaning in its solemn shape.
“Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,” said Scrooge, “answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?”
Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood.
“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” said Scrooge. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!”
The Spirit was immovable as ever.
__Stave IV, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol

Maybe the grim news from China can serve as a timely wake-up call and alert us to the risks we run in pursuing a modern-age Saturnalia through a self-willed amnesia, snapping our bond to our past:

With Christmas approaching, the authorities are intensifying their crackdown against underground Christians, storming their prayer halls, beating and threatening them.

On Wednesday in Yancheng City’s Pinghu district some 200 thugs broke into a church during a meeting of underground Christians. Before they threw worshippers out, they beat at least ten of them and stole their money and other valuables.
The church was then closed down and a demolition order placed on the building.
“They are developing this plot of land, and they [developers] wanted the land on which our church is built," said Father Ding, who is in charge of the Chengnan Church, which was built thanks to donations of more than a million yuan.
The authorities had offered money but when their offer was refused, attacks against parishioners began.
"No agreement had been reached, and they hadn't even carried out an evaluation of the property” when a “deputy secretary from the municipal government led the gang," Father Ding said.
The police was called but they did not bother to show up to let the faithful have their church back.
On Tuesday in the village of Taoling in Pushan (Nanyang in Henan) 40 Christians were arrested; 16 were sentenced to administrative detention for 10 to 15 days and fined for taking part in unlawful religious meetings.
In Dazhu County (Sichuan), around 30 people were detained and then released, after authorities raided a wedding party at an unofficial Christian church. Their crime was “illegally spreading the gospel,” a participant told Radio Free Asia.
“They took away our banner with the words 'God loves humanity.' They checked our identification cards and threatened that we would be forced to attend only those churches with registration documents recognised by the government,” he said.
...

Paris Honors Dalai Lama And Jailed Chinese Human Rights Activist

France's President Nicolas Sarkozy probably won't be awarding Parisian socialists with a Gold Medal for timing this week, as the mayor of Paris takes a surprising stand for human rights by naming the Dalai Lama, and jailed Chinese activist Hu Jia, both Honorary Citizens of the City of Lights:

Yahoo France provides the details (my translation):

On Monday, Paris officials made the Dalai Lama and the Chinese dissident Hu Jia "honorary citizens" of the City of Paris, at the risk of inflaming relations between France and China, which have been strained by the fiasco of the passing of the Olympic torch through the French capital.
The vow of the mayoralty concerning the Dalai Lama was adopted “unanimously but with many abstentions from the vote”, said socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoe.
...
The 72 socialists voted in favor… The 54 UMP officials did not take part in the vote…

[Note: the UMP is President Sarkozy’s party]

Bertrand Delanoe confirmed during the debates that "helping the dialog is one of the duties of the City of Paris" and made known that the "spiritual commitment" of the Dalai Lama was "to [the mayor's] point of view, secondary in relation to the future of the Tibetan people."

"I am secular. I have not become Buddhist", the mayor explained. ...

[Photo from the Dalai Lama's 2003 visit to Paris, seen here accompanied by mayor Delanoe]

I wasn't familiar with Hu Jia, the particular activist that Paris' Green Party nominated to share the honorary status granted to the Dalai Lama.


According to Amnesty International, Hu's case makes "a mockery of promises made by Chinese officials that human rights would improve in the run-up to the Olympics.”

Hu started his activism as an AIDS activist in 2001. He is the co-founder of the Beijing Aizhixing Institute of Health Education and of Loving Source, a grassroots organization dedicated to helping children from AIDS families.

...

Prior to his formal detention, Hu Jia had publicly expressed concerns over human rights abuses by police in Beijing, including the arrest of activists without the necessary legal procedures. This included the case of land rights activist Yang Chunlin and human rights defender Lu Gengsong, both also detained on subversion charges.

While detained, Hu has been subjected to 47 lengthy and repeated interrogations. He was denied access to his lawyer, members of his family and medical treatment, including necessary daily medication for liver disease resulting from a Hepatitis B infection. His wife, Zeng Jinyan, is still under house arrest with their newborn baby....

Amnesty International chronicles many more stories like Hu's, in their comprehensive report What human rights legacy for the Beijing Olympics?

China is a little upset by the Paris councillors' decision. Their reaction, according to the report from Le Figaro (my translation):

"This decision is a coarse interference in Chinese interior affairs, seriously damaging to French-Chinese relations", declared Jiang Yu, spokesperson for Foreign Affairs, reminding France also to "take concrete measures to safeguard these bilateral relations". For Chinese authorities, the Council of Paris' decision "will now encourage the arrogance of the Dalai Lama and his pro-independance Tibetan partisans."

Monday, before the vote, the Paris councillors had received a message on letterhead from the Chinese Ambassador in France, to dissuade them from making the Dalai Lama an "honorary citizen" of the French capital...

Pierre Schapira, one of the mayor's deputies who had knowledge of the Chinese message, explained that the letter's author warned the Paris councillors in "extremely violent" terms, explaining that in distinguishing the Dalai Lama, they were "worsening the situation in Tibet".

"I was scandalized by this ultimatum. I had never seen an ambassador who put pressure on elected officials in this manner", Pierre Schapira declared.

The communique, however, did not mention Chinese human rights activist Hu Jia. ...

Did the Chinese Ambassadorial mission to France influence recalcitrant Parisian city councillors with their bull-in-a-China-shop approach to diplomacy?

UPDATE: I see that vigilant France-watcher Tiberge at GalliaWatch also a post on this story, with a more detailed account of the breakdown of votes, including the curious fact that Paris' eight Communist officials abstained from voting...

Chinese Anti-French Protest In Paris

5,000 Chinese assembled outside the Place de la Republique in Paris to do something they would find much more challenging to do at home: to engage in full-throated protest against the ruling government of the nation they are living within.

The account carried by the website of Paris city paper LeParisien reports that the protestors were especially negative towards the organization "Reporters Without Borders" and its president, Robert Ménard, accusing French journalists of "racism without borders" and "mental terrorism".

Thierry Liu, spokesman for the protestors, explains its objectives in this video interview recorded by the city newspaper Le Parisien [my translation]:

The origin of this protest is very complicated. A group of students, and former students in Paris, who had the initiative to write to the President of the Republic, so far there have been several thousand people who have signed this letter. An open letter. It is not a petition, because the idea is not to say that we are right, but rather to promote understanding between the two peoples.
A boycott is a wall that they are in the process of building. Meanwhile the media, they have played a very negative role in this affair. You speak in France with grand words, like "democracy", "human rights", without understanding what is happening in China, in terms of rights, without knowing that in China we are in the process of trying to build a state of rights. Democracy, human rights... it's true, these are values dear to all, the chinese are not dumb, they also want rights, they also want liberty. The objective is to invite the peoples of the world, including the French, to the Olympic games in Beijing, because the Olympic Games are not only chinese games, they are the games of the world. The Chinese have worked for years, to prepare for these games...

Later in the video a second interview is offered, this time with a French sympathizer to the Chinese students' position [my translation]:

For myself, I feel that politics have nothing to do with the Olympic Games, that is, with sports in general. Each country has its Achilles Heel, France, Belgium, everyone... even the United States...


Strictly speaking, sports have nothing to do with anything except athletic competition. But the Olympic Games.... well, they were supposed to be different.

From the official site of the Olympic Movement, we can read the Olympic Charter, and the first two of the six Fundamental principles of Olympism:

Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind. Blending sport with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.

The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.

In what way does China respect universal fundamental ethical values, when children under the age of 18 may not legally attend any church? How concerned is China with the preservation of human dignity, when they arrest Christians like 42-year old Li Mei, for such "crimes" as singing hymns and praying for the disabled? Li Mei and 9 other church leaders were sentenced to re-education through labor for 12 to 18 months... repeated beatings and torture caused her to require a hysterectomy.

Instead of helping the cause of human rights in China, the imminent Beijing Olympics seem to be causing the exact opposite result, as the communist party cracks down on potential visible contradictions to the state-defined image of "brotherhood" the government wishes to present to the eyes of the world.

The spokesman at the anti-French rally in Paris lectures us on how "China is building a state of rights", and that we don't know what we're talking about when we speak of human rights abuses in China.

I think he's living in a state of denial... of Olympian proportions.

Anti-French Protests In China

Two views on Chinese youths' protesting recent French youth protests against China.

From Reuters:

Dozens of young Chinese, angry at disruption of the Olympic torch relay in Paris, protested outside a Carrefour branch in east China on Friday, setting fire to a French flag, waving banners and shouting slogans, local media said.
...
Local media photos showed the protesters holding up banners that read "Boycott France, Support the Olympics" and "Oppose Tibet independence, Love the motherland."

My translation of the account carried by the French online version of the Belgian newspaper 7Sur7:

Anti-French protests erupted Saturday in four Chinese cities, targeting the Carrefour franchise, to protest against France's attitude on Tibet and the Olympic games. ...

The largest gathering took place in Wuhan, an industrial city in central China, of eight million people, according to police and witnesses. Hundreds of Chinese, up to thousands, marched in front of Carrefour stores. The protestors began by assembling before a first store before heading to other neighborhoods, added the same source. "There were several hundred protestors, calm, a majority of them youths, they didn't hang around for long, they carried Chinese flags", said another witness over the phone. According to police, there were 300 people at first, then the procession quickly fleshed itself out. An informed source, quoting police, said that the protest had attracted 10,000 people by noon, a number that AFP could not independantly confirm. According to this source, the protestors were "very well organized"....

["Joan of Arc = Prostitute" "Napoleon = Pervert" "France = Nazi" "Free Corsica" ]

Protestors carried a French flag defiled with swastikas and calling Joan of Arc a "prostitute". Police in Wuhan did not wish to comment.
...

The online account carried by France's main newspaper, Le Figaro, has gathered over 190 comments as I write this. Scanning through the comments, there seem to be a significant number expressing sympathy... with the Chinese protestors!

A translated sampling of remaks:

realityman, 19/04/2008 12:32

in china, we are more free than is thought except when it's against the power in charge or against the interest of the country.... Generally, educated people are very well informed by chinese media and foreign media (the Le Monde, Figaro, cnn etc websites are all accessible and are not censored. For that matter all sites are accessible with a proxy) the people read a lot of different sources of information. On the other hand in france, ideas against chinese and calling them all kinds of names are permitted. Which goes to show, democracy is a good thing only if the public is well informed. This is far from being the case in france... disturbing.

taoguy, 19/04/2008 12:04

I'm ashamed of being french. i saw our athletes insulted by the french. On the olympic flame's journey through France, it was the chinese in France that applauded the french athletes. We have no lesson to give to the chinese. Our values are not universal. France is a racist and selfish nation. I invite all those who speak without knowledge to study the history of China and Tibet. Insulting China serves no purpose, what is needed is to work with China, welcome chinese to France, send students to study in China...

sam, 19/04/2008 15:35

it builds, it builds and then it bursts... I only hope that it won't be us, we french in china, who'll suffer the consequences from the irresponsabily of some long distance defenders of certain values that they themselves refuse to apply... for the moment, working only with chinese, I feel no antipathy... the next time, before acting, think about the consequences and put your misplaced pride elsewhere, especially when you haven't mastered the subject... and that the subject barely concerns you.