Asia Cast

Asia Cast for Sunday 22nd February

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been criticised for not pressing China on issues of human rights. (By SEIU International/Flickr)

In this Bulletin…

- Hillary won’t bring up human rights with China;
- Pol Pot torturer begs forgiveness ; and
- Obama slips just a bit.

But first, here’s our SOH focus on China
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With severe droughts racking the landscape of China, citizens are looking at why such a thing can be happening and many individuals are coming forth to give their understandings of the causes of these events.

Wang Weiluo, a renowned hydraulic engineer who was involved in the Three Gorges Dam feasibility study, believes Beijing exaggerates the influence of nature in order to shirk its responsibility. According to Wang, the main cause for the drought is Beijing’s overbuilding of reservoirs.

Wang explained why such a devastating drought happens. According to him, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) built 87,000 water reservoirs since it came into power and this broke all world records. The enormous number of reservoirs is a waste of water resource and provides a small population of people in power opportunities to monopolize this resource.

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As US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton started the China leg of her inaugural trip on February 20, petitioners from all over China gathered in Beijing to use the event as another opportunity to make themselves heard.

Because of the coming Chinese National Congress, many petitioners have recently returned to Beijing. But many of them have changed their strategy this year; instead of going through the normal channels such as visiting the appeals office or delivering their letters to Supreme Courts, which have netted no results, they now have taken to organized actions.

On February 20, a “Rights Protection Walk” was organized by Beijing right activists Cao Shunli and several others. Throughout China millions upon millions of citizens are pleading to the west to help free them from the regime that has ruled them for over sixty years.

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And now for the rest of today’s Asia Cast
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On the eve of a UN Human Rights envoy’s visit to Burma, a Burmese court has handed a fifteen year jail sentence to two senior opposition politicians, in a hearing that had no lawyers or family present and was held in a high security prison in Yangon.

Both politicians won seats in parliament when the NLD scored a landslide win in a 1990 general election. The ruling military junta ignored the results. The two men were arrested in August after they wrote an open letter to the United Nations criticizing the ruling military regime’s seven-step road map toward democratic political reforms.

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With the trials of senior Pol Pot cadres about to begin, Khmer Rouge torturer chief Duch, asked for forgiveness three decades since the end of it’s rule which is blamed for 1.7 million deaths.

The former teacher is charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity by the joint Cambodian-UN court set up to prosecute “those most responsible” for the 1975-79 Khmer reign of terror, one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century.

Also known as Kaing Guek Eav, 66-year-old Duch was in charge at the S-21 prison where at least 14,000 enemies of the ultra-Maoist 1975 revolution were jailed and killed.

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China’s recent response to its first review by the United Nations Human Rights Council was to deny Chinese citizens were ever abused and to declare people there were free to voice their opinions in the media. The regime also says it opposes torture.

Canada was noteworthy among the countries that spoke out against the regime’s rights infractions.
The Canadian representative said the regime should speed up judicial reforms relating to the death penalty and administrative detention whereby Chinese citizens are detained without trial.

This latest review before the UN follows on the heels of a review by the organization’s Committee on Torture last December.

In what observers described as a rare move, the torture committee told the regime to arrange for an investigation into the organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners and for the prosecution of those responsible for deaths associated with the gruesome business of illicit organ transplants.

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A CNN poll has shown that President Obama’s approval rating is diminishing slightly but that most of it is coming from the republican sections.

Sixty per cent of those questioned in the poll favoured the economic stimulus plan, with 39 per cent opposing the package.

The $787 billion law is designed to pump up the economy by increasing federal government spending, sending aid to states in fiscal trouble and by cutting taxes.

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“Asia Cast… keeping you across the top headlines from Asia and the World.”

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