What we too often forget about Tiananmen Square is the joy. It seems almost unseemly to mention it, in light of how many people died and how many lives were ruined by the crackdown that came later. But in those heady, early days when Mikhail Gorbachev’s historic visit made the students bolder than ever, this was the fizziest, most exuberant story I’d ever covered in China.
I had been a correspondent in Beijing for two years in the mid-80’s and landed in Moscow just as Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost were getting really interesting. My Newsweek editors, in their infinite wisdom, were evidently reckoning that I’d covered one big, nasty, Communist country and could be trusted to cover another. In fact, the two were mirror images of each other: China’s economic reforms were vibrant and its politics dull, while Russia’s economy was gasping for breath and its political class couldn’t stop babbling.
Now Chinese politics had come alive. The weather was great and the square was thronged. The students sang The Internationale and really meant it (“Masses, slaves, arise, arise”); they erected a replica of the Statue of Liberty without a trace of irony. We cynical old hacks scratched our heads and pinched ourselves. Or as the correspondent for the London Observer put it on a brilliantly sunny day in May, turning his beaming face to me as we strolled through the square, “We’re getting paid to do this!”
The demonstrations felt especially meaningful to those of us who had listened, over the years, to countless endless lectures about how happy and satisfied the Chinese people really were. They didn’t want political freedom. They were satisfied with economic progress. Chinese officials were intent on purveying this explanation for their country’s political quiescence compared to, say, the Soviet Union at the time. And, absent any real manifestation of political engagement from the Chinese people, some of us had begun to believe it.
The size of the demonstrations grew and grew. The elite students were joined by office workers, factory workers, and even government bureaucrats. Together they put the lie to the Chinese government’s Big Lie. Chinese people had quite a few grievances, as it turned out, both economic and political, and they wasted no time in seizing this unprecedented moment to express them. This was a story that we correspondents always knew was percolating quietly below the surface. To put it on the cover of Newsweek magazine, week after week, was to vindicate not only the hopes and desires of the Chinese people, but also our own convictions about the truth about their country.
You have to remember how closed China was then, and how scared most people were. Foreigners were still a jaw-dropping rarity. We correspondents had no freedom of movement around the country – every trip outside of Beijing required special dispensation from the Foreign Ministry. Ordinary Chinese could get in huge trouble just for having unauthorized contact with foreigners. Our ability to know what was really happening in China was pathetically limited.
Tiananmen burst all those strictures. Suddenly, Chinese people were babbling about politics (just like Russians! it seemed to me). Their feelings and opinions were emblazoned on placards for all the world to see. Those few weeks of freedom were heaven for frustrated correspondents who felt they’d never really gotten the full story.
That the story ended in violence surprised no one, even while it shocked us all. And perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, either, that twenty years later, the Big Lie has taken hold again. Chinese people just aren’t interested in politics. Economic progress has left them satisfied.
Don’t believe it for a minute. Yes, personal freedoms are much more extensive and yes, people are pleased with the country’s economic success. They are also prouder of their country now than they were then, I think. But still, not far below the surface, China simmers with political discontent. The issues that sparked Tiananmen -- corruption, labor exploitation, the lack of free speech – still plague China today. It wouldn’t take much to bring about some kind of mass protest again. I’ve seen it happen before, and seeing it once made me surer than ever that it could happen again.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Torture and the world out there
What motivated many Americans to turn against George Bush’s counter-terrorism policies was, in part, a realization that the rest of the world had turned against them already. President Barack Obama’s decision to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and renounce the use of torture have proved enormously popular with America’s closest allies, and even some not-so-close. By the same token, his unwillingness to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators of torture has important international implications that have not so far been part of the debate.
US policy on torture directly affects criminal culpability in other countries. Take the case of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who was arrested by Pakistani authorities in Karachi in 2002 and spent seven years in detention in Morocco, Afghanistan, and ultimately Guantanamo Bay. He claims to have been beaten, repeatedly cut on his genitals and threatened with rape, electrocution and death by Moroccan interrogators who were acting at the behest of the CIA, and being fed questions by British intelligence.
Washington’s much more direct responsibility for the unlawful rendering and torturing of Mohamed has hardly created a ripple in the United States. But Britain’s more tangential complicity has generated a fierce outcry in the UK and resulted in an official criminal investigation. How strange that the mere fallout from US torture policy has done more abroad than the actual genesis and execution of the policy has done here in Washington. That fact will not be lost on Obama’s international constituency.
The unwillingness to prosecute Americans for torture will have a deleterious effect on efforts to prosecute dictators around the world for their crimes. Along with European governments, Washington is currently engaged in a fierce battle for international public opinion over the indictment of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir for crimes against humanity and other grave offenses against the people of Darfur. Governments in Africa and the Middle East are trying to portray the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court as a tool of imperialist powers who are targeting Third World countries in a phony campaign for “justice.”
Unfortunately, this specious argument is gaining adherents. It will gain even more if the United States refuses to bring its own perpetrators of major crimes to account; the alleged double standard will be proven. At risk is a steadily developing system of international justice that has ended impunity for tyrants from Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia to Charles Taylor of Liberia.
And international justice will, in the end, catch up with America’s own alleged criminals. Efforts to indict Bush administration officials such as Donald Rumsfeld and George Tenet have gotten underway in German and Spanish courts only because they haven’t gotten any traction in American courts. Foreign prosecutors are much more likely to claim universal jurisdiction if American prosecutors are believed not to have done their job.
Unless European authorities obtain custody of the accused, torture prosecutions in Europe will not deliver real justice (though it might affect some of their travel plans). They could also deepen an isolationist strain in the United States that fails to understand international justice as founded on respect for the same human rights principles that Americans themselves profess.
In the debate over torture, Human Rights Watch’s position in favor of prosecution, and of the release of an additional tranche of photos, has been described as criticism from “the left.” That’s true only if being “left” in the United States today means having a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, which possibly it does. President Obama came to power promising to close the gap between America and its international partners on the neuralgic issues of fighting terrorism. His latest decisions will widen them.
US policy on torture directly affects criminal culpability in other countries. Take the case of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who was arrested by Pakistani authorities in Karachi in 2002 and spent seven years in detention in Morocco, Afghanistan, and ultimately Guantanamo Bay. He claims to have been beaten, repeatedly cut on his genitals and threatened with rape, electrocution and death by Moroccan interrogators who were acting at the behest of the CIA, and being fed questions by British intelligence.
Washington’s much more direct responsibility for the unlawful rendering and torturing of Mohamed has hardly created a ripple in the United States. But Britain’s more tangential complicity has generated a fierce outcry in the UK and resulted in an official criminal investigation. How strange that the mere fallout from US torture policy has done more abroad than the actual genesis and execution of the policy has done here in Washington. That fact will not be lost on Obama’s international constituency.
The unwillingness to prosecute Americans for torture will have a deleterious effect on efforts to prosecute dictators around the world for their crimes. Along with European governments, Washington is currently engaged in a fierce battle for international public opinion over the indictment of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir for crimes against humanity and other grave offenses against the people of Darfur. Governments in Africa and the Middle East are trying to portray the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court as a tool of imperialist powers who are targeting Third World countries in a phony campaign for “justice.”
Unfortunately, this specious argument is gaining adherents. It will gain even more if the United States refuses to bring its own perpetrators of major crimes to account; the alleged double standard will be proven. At risk is a steadily developing system of international justice that has ended impunity for tyrants from Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia to Charles Taylor of Liberia.
And international justice will, in the end, catch up with America’s own alleged criminals. Efforts to indict Bush administration officials such as Donald Rumsfeld and George Tenet have gotten underway in German and Spanish courts only because they haven’t gotten any traction in American courts. Foreign prosecutors are much more likely to claim universal jurisdiction if American prosecutors are believed not to have done their job.
Unless European authorities obtain custody of the accused, torture prosecutions in Europe will not deliver real justice (though it might affect some of their travel plans). They could also deepen an isolationist strain in the United States that fails to understand international justice as founded on respect for the same human rights principles that Americans themselves profess.
In the debate over torture, Human Rights Watch’s position in favor of prosecution, and of the release of an additional tranche of photos, has been described as criticism from “the left.” That’s true only if being “left” in the United States today means having a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, which possibly it does. President Obama came to power promising to close the gap between America and its international partners on the neuralgic issues of fighting terrorism. His latest decisions will widen them.
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