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Wednesday, 28 March 2007

Sending a Chinese Back Home

In March last year, according to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor of the United States State Department, the United Nations Special Rapporteur Nowak reported that Falun Gong practitioners accounted for 66 percent of victims of alleged torture while in Chinese government custody. In its Country Report on Human Rights Practices, the US Bureau gave no judgment as to the truth or otherwise of that allegation but it did have this to say about the way adherents to this rather strange organisation are treated in China:

Falun Gong members identified by the government as "core leaders" have been singled out for particularly harsh treatment. More than a dozen Falun Gong members have been sentenced to prison for the crime of "endangering state security," but the great majority of Falun Gong members convicted by the courts since 1999 have been sentenced to prison for "organizing or using a sect to undermine the implementation of the law," a less serious offense. Most practitioners, however, were punished administratively. Some practitioners were sentenced to reeducation through labor. Among them, Yuan Yuju and Liang Jinhui, relatives of a Hong Kong journalist working for a television station supportive of Falun Gong, were sentenced to reeducation through labor for distributing Falun Gong materials. Apart from reeducation through labor, some Falun Gong members were sent to "legal education" centers specifically established to "rehabilitate" practitioners who refused to recant their belief voluntarily after release from reeducation-through-labor camps. Government officials denied the existence of such "legal education" centers. In addition, hundreds of Falun Gong practitioners have been confined to mental hospitals, according to overseas groups.

Allegations of abuse of Falun Gong practitioners by the police and other security personnel continued during the year. In addition, multiple allegations of government-sanctioned organ harvesting from Falun Gong prisoners surfaced. In April overseas Falun Gong groups claimed that a hospital in Sujiatun, Shenyang , had been the site of a "concentration camp" and of mass organ harvesting, including from live prisoners . The government opened the facility to diplomatic observers and foreign journalists, who found nothing inconsistent with the operation of a hospital.

Police continued to detain current and former Falun Gong practitioners and place them in reeducation camps. Police reportedly had quotas for Falun Gong arrests and targeted former practitioners, even if they were no longer practicing. The government continued its use of high-pressure tactics and mandatory anti-Falun Gong study sessions to force practitioners to renounce Falun Gong. Even practitioners who had not protested or made other public demonstrations of belief reportedly were forced to attend anti-Falun Gong classes or were sent directly to reeducation-through-labor camps. These tactics reportedly resulted in large numbers of practitioners signing pledges to renounce the movement.

In Australia this week, as a Falun Gong adherent in the country illegally was prepared for deportation, a spokesperson for the Department of Immigration was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald saying: "We do not return anyone where it will be a breach of our international obligations."

Finding Kevin Rudd's Patsy

Every Labor Party leader needs a patsy when it comes Federal Conference time. At some stage of the managed debates, the script will call on the top dog to assert himself. An opponent will be allowed to bark out an objection or two before being crushed by a decisive vote in the leader's favour. For next month's conference, Doug Cameron, the federal secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, is being prepared for this essential and ritualistic defeat.

As a self proclaimed spokesman for the left, Mr Cameron will be allowed, even encouraged, to argue for Labor to return to its past support of protection for manufacturing industry. Delegates will hear him urge the banning of free trade deals and public private partnerships. There will be a call for the removal of tax on superannuation payouts because it weakens the traditional pension safety net for retired workers. In the cause of old-fashioned equity the first-home owner's grant should not be available to the wealthy. Evil rich speculators should not benefit from negative gearing tax incentives.

Mr Cameron is sure to play the villain's role with panache and, as a trade union leader with ambitions to enter federal parliament himself and then advance his way to the ministry, will keep the rhetoric within the acceptable limits which Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd told his Caucus colleagues about yesterday. “Internal party democracy is important,” a caucus spokesman quoted Mr Rudd as saying. The spokesman added, according to the AAP report, that the leader was “relaxed about the debate – what was important was the tone of the debate.”

What will make it even more important for Mr Rudd is that the opposition debaters will come essentially from the ranks of trade union delegates to the Conference. The Parliamentary Party knows it is locked in to committing itself to reversing much of Prime Minister John Howard's industrial relations legislation but it wants to do all it can to pretend that a Labor Government would not be a trade union puppet. Mr Rudd crushing powerful union bosses on the conference floor will be a powerful and necessary symbol of his independence.