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.