A blog for all seasons; A blog for one; A blog for all. As the 11th most informative blog on the planet, I have a seared memory of throwing my Time 2006 Man of the Year Award over the railing at Time Warner Center.
Justice. Only Justice Shall Thou Pursue
China has been getting real bad press these days from the ongoing demonstrations during the Olympic torch runs against Chinese actions against Tibetans, its policies relating to Darfur, and its general disregard for human and civil rights.
China has arrested nine Tibetan Buddhist monks who have been accused of a bomb attack, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
Chinese officials said the monks' homemade bomb exploded in a government building in eastern Tibet on 23 March.
Xinhua news agency did not explain why the alleged bomb incident was not reported at the time.
News of the arrests came as Beijing continued to attack overseas critics of its crackdown in the Himalayan region.
Xinhua said the monks confessed to planting the explosive in Gyanbe township.
Beijing's claims that the recent Tibetan protests were part of a violent campaign by the Dalai Lama, the region's exiled spiritual leader, to disrupt Chinese rule in Tibet and sabotage the Beijing Olympics in August.
There are conflicting issues at play here. On the one hand, China wants to project that they have a stable security situation at home, and that the country doesn't have a fiscal, social, or political crisis on its hands. On the other, they need to try and spin the current Tibetan crisis as one of the Tibetans own doing - to make the world believe that the real bad guys are the Tibetan monks, not the Chinese government who has been occupying the country.
UPDATE: Via Hot Air, Big Lizards notes that the guy seen accosting the Olympic torch bearer in a wheelchair may not be who the media claims he is. While the photo shows that he's wearing a Tibetan flag bandana on his head, photos taken before the dustup show him marching along in solidarity with pro-Chinese demonstrators.
In other words, are the Chinese purposefully planting demonstrators to undermine Tibetan support by attempting to show that the Chinese are the wronged parties here? The evidence certainly seems to be growing in that direction.
The Olympic torch run is scheduled to take place today, but one has to wonder whether demonstrators will manage to succeed in bringing the torch relay to a screeching halt just as they did in Paris.
Demonstrators are opposing China's ongoing oppression in Tibet, and have repeatedly extinguished the torches used in the Olympic torch relay as it made its way through London and Paris. The torch rolled into San Francisco yesterday and the relay is supposed to take place later today.
On Wednesday afternoon, the flame will be under no such bushel as it makes its only appearance in the United States on an increasingly tense international tour en route to Beijing. It will star in a two-and-a-half-hour relay along this city’s waterfront, involving six miles of pavement, 79 runners and untold scores of law enforcement officials.
The precise route remained in flux on Tuesday as the torch extravaganza threatened to become more civic migraine than celebration in the face of potential protests by those upset with China’s human rights record and recent crackdown in Tibet. Mayor Gavin Newsom met with police and relay officials amid concerns that disruptions in London and Paris this week not be repeated here.
“I can only confirm that the route is dynamic,” said Nathan Ballard, a city spokesman.
The San Francisco Police Department canceled days off for patrol officers and called in state and federal agencies and officers from nearby cities to help patrol the relay route. A no-fly zone was established overhead, the Coast Guard beefed up its fleet and Bay Area police planned on a pair of motorized water scooters patrolling the waterways.
Downtown buildings also stepped up security, and restaurants along the route pulled in — rather than pulled out — patio seating. Sources of anxiety were everywhere: protests atop tourist attractions, famous and not-so-famous Tibet supporters and, of course, the city’s lunatic fringe.
The lunatic fringe? That would be the folks in charge of the city generally, who bend to the whim of the far left who dominate the local political scene.
Beijing organizers have said the monthlong international relay will not be stopped despite the protests, but some International Olympic Committee members have suggested an early end should be considered.
The International Olympic Committee's executive board is scheduled to meet Wednesday, but a spokeswoman declined to say which members plan to discuss.
The board will take up the topic of the torch relay "in general" on Thursday or Friday, IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies said. But there is no proposal to end the global tour early, she added.
The president of the IOC, Jacques Rogge, is expected to meet with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. The meeting was pre-scheduled and will focus on the preparations for the Olympics, the IOC said.
On the torch's visit to France on Monday, protesters forced an abrupt halt to the flame's passage through Paris after just 10 miles of the 17-mile (28 km) route.
On Sunday, at least 36 people in London were arrested along the torch's route, according to London Metropolitan Police.
An Olympic committee member suggested Monday that the public relations nightmare that has followed the Olympic flame on its way to the Summer Games in Beijing may make 2008 the last time such an ambitious global torch relay is attempted.
UPDATE: Crowds are already forming along the route. There are multiple layers of security surrounding the torch bearers. We'll see how well that works out for the San Francisco leg as Parisian authorities had said that they had extremely heavy security and yet their leg of the torch relay became an unmitigated disaster.
Police plan to shield the runners with no fewer than three layers of protection - cops on foot jogging at their side, cops on bicycles and cops on motorcycles - all to prevent an embarrassing replay of the attempted torch grabs in Paris and London earlier this week.
Department insiders also say the cops will even have boats stationed along the waterfront route in case things get really out of hand.
"The idea is if there is some kind of mass sit-in that blocks the road, then they can just put the torch on a boat and move around it," said one City Hall source, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to discuss security plans.
The torch relay is supposed to head from McCovey Cove to Aquatic Park and then back to Justin Herman Plaza. But there is a contingency plan to turn the torch around short of Fisherman's Wharf if it appears that protesters might disrupt the run in the tourist enclave's narrow streets.
UPDATE: The route has been shortened as pro-Tibet protesters clashed with pro-Chinese protesters outside AT&T Park.
So, what can we expect after the past two stops on the Olympic torch tour? Demonstrators managed to force organizers to extinguish the Olympic torch in London and three separate times in Paris. In Paris, demonstrators forced the cancellation of the remaining torch relay through that city.
At the same time, protesters scaled the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco to protest the Chinese occupation of Tibet.
Now, the torch is supposed to wind its way through the city of San Francisco in its only visit to the United States. Mayor Gavin Newsom notes that the relay route might be changed at the last minute to deal with any potential disruptions and security is going to be as tight as would be expected during a visit from a head of state.
UPDATE: Will any of the protesters note the environmental toll of running the torch around the world - 80,000+ miles and all the fuel it takes to keep the torch going all that time, to say nothing of the airlines, personnel, and vehicles that spew forth emissions? Where's Al Gore to issue a pronouncement over the tremendous waste of energy and carbon emissions due to the torch relay? Anyone? Bueller?
The torch was being carried by a wheelchair athlete when it was halted and extinguished for a second time due to demonstrators shouting, according to AP. Backup flames, also lit from the birthplace of the ancient games in Olympia, Greece, are on call with the relay at all times to relight the torch.
Agencies report that the relay has now resumed.
The incidents came one day after human-rights activist demonstrators made the torch's journey through London more like running the gauntlet than a journey of celebration, with UK police making more than two dozen arrests. What do you think of protests at the Olympic torch relay?
The torch departed the Eiffel Tower, carried by 400-meter athlete Stephane Diagana, at around 1030 GMT (0630 ET) to crisscross a city thronged with thousands of police and demonstrators, shouting and waving flags. It was then due to be carried through the boulevards of the French capital, passing landmarks including l'Arc d'Triomphe, the Place de la Concord, The Louvre and Notre Dame.
Jim Bittermann, CNN's senior European correspondent based in Paris, said that while it was hard to gauge numbers, it looked like thousands of demonstrators had taken to the streets -- although some were Chinese backing the Olympics.
37 arrests were made in Paris as the torch wound its way around major landmarks in the city. This all occurred despite extremely heavy security and police presence designed to prevent a repeat of the events in London the day before when protesters managed to extinguish the Olympic torch as it wound its way through London. According to the Times, the French prevented a repeat of the torch going out, but other outlets say that it was, indeed, extinguished.
The Chinese Communists deserve this kind of embarrassment because of their heinous record of oppression and repression of the rights of the Tibetan people. The Chinese government had hoped to make a huge splash with the Beijing Olympics, and instead, the world is getting treated to a very public display of just how the Chinese operate.
Riots and demonstrations continue in Tibet against the brutal Chinese government. For their part, Tibetan exiles are engaging in nonviolent demonstrations by tonsuring their heads (ritual shaving their heads).
The refugees say they are resorting to peaceful means and are abiding by the Dalai Lama's call for non-violence.
The Dalai Lama had pointed out to the Tibetan exiles that their activities could be interpreted as 'violent' and can aggravate the current situation. He urged them to be 'extra vigilant'.
China has accused the Dalai Lama, of orchestrating a rash of monk-led protests and rioting - the most serious in the Himalayan region for nearly two decades - in a bid to wreck the August 8-24 Beijing Olympic Games.
UPDATE: Make it three times that the torch was extinguished as it made its way through Paris.
Despite massive security, at least two activists got within almost an arm's length of the flame before they were grabbed by police. Officers tackled many protesters and carried off some of them. A protester threw water at the torch but failed to extinguish it and was also taken away.
At the start of the relay, a man identified as a Green Party activist was grabbed by security officers as he headed for 1997 400-meter world champion Stephane Diagana, the president of France's national athletics league, who was carrying the torch from the first floor of the Eiffel Tower. The man was tackled before he got close to Diagana.
The procession continued but, soon after, a crowd of activists waving Tibetan flags interrupted it for the first time by confronting the torchbearer on a road along the Seine River. The demonstrators did not appear to get close to the torch, but its flame was put out by security officers and brought on board a bus to continue along the route.
Less than an hour later, the flame was being carried out of a Paris traffic tunnel by an athlete in a wheelchair when the procession was halted by activists who booed and chanted "Tibet." Once again, the torch was temporarily extinguished and put on a bus despite protesters' apparent failure to get close.
Some 3,000 officers were deployed on motorcycles, in jogging gear and using inline roller skates. Still, police barely stopped the second rush at the torch, and the attempt to extinguish it with water. Other demonstrators scaled the Eiffel Tower and hung a banner depicting the Olympic rings as handcuffs.
The torch was extinguished for the third time when police interrupted the procession as a precaution because they spotted a crowd of demonstrators on a bridge they were approaching.
Police said they did not immediately have a count of the number of arrests. Mireille Ferri, a Green Party official, said she was held by police for two hours because she approached the Eiffel Tower area with a fire extinguisher. In various locations throughout the city, activists angry about China's human rights record and repression Tibet carried Tibetan flags and waved signs reading "the flame of shame."
Riot police squirted tear gas to break up a sit-in protest by about 300 pro-Tibet demonstrators who blocked the torch route.
France's former sports minister, Jean-Francois Lamour, said that though the torch had been put out, the Olympic flame itself still burned in the lantern where it is kept overnight and on airplane flights.
"The torch has been extinguished but the flame is still there," he told France Info radio.
UPDATE: CNN reports that the torch relay through Paris has been canceled for the rest of the day due to the ongoing disturbances and demonstrations. Ouch.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, protesters have managed to scale the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco to display a Tibetan flag. No doubt that they'll be charged with trespassing and other related charges, but it likely also affected traffic in the area.
The Chinese continue their brutalization of the Tibetan people, and eight people were killed by police in what the authorities are calling riots:
Police fired on hundreds of protesters in a Tibetan area of western China, killing eight people, overseas activist groups said. State media reported one government official was seriously injured in what it called a riot.
Another Tibetan activist group said Saturday that two monks committed suicide late last month because of government oppression.
The reports indicate that unrest is continuing in China's Tibetan areas despite a massive security presence in place since anti-government demonstrations in Tibet's capital, Lhasa, and neighboring provinces broke out in mid-March.
The protests are the longest and most sustained challenge to China's 57-year rule in the Himalayan region. China's subsequent crackdown has drawn international scrutiny and criticism in the run-up to this summer's Olympic Games.
Police fired on Buddhist monks and ordinary citizens who had marched on local government offices in Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan province near Tibet on Thursday, according to the London-based Free Tibet Campaign and the International Campaign for Tibet.
The Chinese are using deadly force to try and stamp out the demonstrations by Tibetans against ongoing Chinese occupation of their country. Where is the UN statement to rush to condemn China for these ongoing acts of violence? You know that the usual suspects in the UN always do so when Israel defends itself against Palestinian terrorists, and yet here we have unprovoked violence by China against a nation it has occupied for decades and not so much a hint of a resolution or a weakly worded statement from UN officials, let alone a General Assembly statement. The last time that Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said anything about Tibet, it was March 17, and he was "increasingly concerned" about the situation and urged restraint. I guess killing eight protesters is showing restraint.
If these reports are accurate, the Chinese government has been staging riots in an attempt to discredit the Tibetan monks who are protesting the Chinese government. The report includes a photograph of Chinese soldiers being provided with robes worn by monks.
Britain's GCHQ, the government communications agency that electronically monitors half the world from space, has confirmed the claim by the Dalai Lama that agents of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, the PLA, posing as monks, triggered the riots that have left hundreds of Tibetans dead or injured.
GCHQ analysts believe the decision was deliberately calculated by the Beijing leadership to provide an excuse to stamp out the simmering unrest in the region, which is already attracting unwelcome world attention in the run-up to the Olympic Games this summer.
For weeks there has been growing resentment in Lhasa, Tibet's capital, against minor actions taken by the Chinese authorities.
Increasingly, monks have led acts of civil disobedience, demanding the right to perform traditional incense burning rituals. With their demands go cries for the return of the Dalai Lama, the 14th to hold the high spiritual office.
Committed to teaching the tenets of his moral authority---peace and compassion---the Dalai Lama was 14 when the PLA invaded Tibet in 1950 and he was forced to flee to India from where he has run a relentless campaign against the harshness of Chinese rule.
The Dali Lama has been claiming that the Chinese government has been stoking the rioting and violent demonstrations, and I wouldn't put it past the Chinese government to stage riots even on the eve of the Beijing Olympics to discredit the Dali Lama. (HT: kiwiviv at LGF)
China accused the Dalai Lama on Sunday of using unrest in Tibet to back demands for Tibetan independence ahead of the August Olympic Games in Beijing.
The verbal attack on the exiled Tibetan leader, accused on Saturday of colluding with Muslim Uighur separatists in China's western Xinjiang region, was part of an intense propaganda and security drive to stifle anti-Chinese unrest before the Games.
Unrest in Tibet began when Buddhist monks demonstrated in the capital, Lhasa, on March 10, the 49th anniversary of a failed uprising against Chinese rule, and on subsequent days.
Five days later anti-Chinese rioting shook the city. Chinese authorities said one policeman and 18 civilians were killed.
Anti-government protests then flared in nearby provinces with large ethnic Tibetan populations, leading to violence in which several people were killed and many injured.
In Sichuan, Gansu and other troubled provinces troops continued conspicuously patrolling the streets of Tibetan towns, and kept schools and Buddhist monasteries under tight guard.
Pro Tibetan groups claim that at least 100 people have been killed by the Chinese security forces that have attempted to quash the demonstrations and rioting.
However, for the Chinese to say that the Dali Lama was taking the Olympics hostage is nonsensical. The Chinese anti-Democratic and anti-human rights policies are holding the Chinese people hostage, along with the Tibetans. They're the ones who are not permitting self-determination. The Dali Lama has been calling for peace and nonviolent demonstrations with a move towards autonomous governance, not independence.
The Chinese need a scapegoat for the situation in Tibet, and they are foolish to think that the world is going to somehow blame the Dali Lama for the problems.
The Chinese Communists (hey, that's what they call themselves, and who am I to argue, but they're more appropriately called totalitarian thugs) have a full plate to deal with right now.
Tibetans are rioting against the jack booted dominion the Chinese government in Beijing has imposed on them for decades. More than 100 people have been killed in the rioting, and it's showing signs of spreading.
The government has released photos of those wanted in connection with the rioting, and human rights groups are right to warn of mass arrests and still more human rights abuses. The government claims that only a handful of people have been killed, but the Tibetans say at least 99 have been killed by the Chinese forces.
After days of official statements that no lethal force had been used to quash the unrest, which has left an unknown number dead, state news agency Xinhua reported yesterday that four people had been shot and wounded.
It said police shot the four in southwestern Sichuan province in "self-defence". Pro-Tibet groups poured scorn on the report.
"At this point any statement the Chinese government puts out has virtually no credibility," said Lhadon Tethong from Students for a Free Tibet, based in Dharamshala, India.
"We are seeing photographs, we have friends who have lost relatives. We categorically reject any of the (official Chinese) information."
China said early today that 18 "innocent" civilians and one police officer were killed in the rioting in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, raising its official death toll from 13. The victims, it said previously, were killed by Tibetan "mobs".
But the Tibetan exile government of the Dalai Lama based in Dharamshala said it had confirmed 99 people were killed in the Chinese crackdown.
Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), stopped short of calling for a boycott of China over the ongoing rioting in Tibet and the ongoing suppression of human rights.
She did not call for an Olympic boycott, which the Dalai Lama has also opposed, but appeared to open the door to one if China maintained its crackdown in Tibet. She said the "world is watching" events there, and called for an international investigation into the violence, and access to the region for journalists and international human rights monitors.
Pelosi said it was incumbent on "freedom-loving people throughout the world" to speak out against China's "oppression". If they did not, "we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world".
There is no appetite among governments for an Olympic boycott. All have too much to lose by alienating the burgeoning superpower. But the news and images filtering through the razor wire around Tibet are making many western capitals uneasy, particularly those that promised to build foreign policies on human rights.
It's interesting that everyone is willing to look the other way when you've got a big bully who's doing all manner of unspeakable acts depriving everyone under their control of human rights. At what point does such actions become intolerable and demand action, even the limited act of boycotting a sporting event? How many people have to die?
Still, for Pelosi to come out and say what she did is a black eye that the Chinese can ill afford. They're already dealing with the very strong possibility that the air quality in Beijing during the Olympics will be so bad that some top athletes might stay away because of health concerns.
And now comes word that the government might prevent anyone from broadcasting from Tienanmen Square, site of the bloody crackdown by the government against pro Democracy students in 1989, which saw incredible bravery in the face of insurmountable force. The Chinese government doesn't like that footage shown, but to remind you of what I'm talking about, here's the photo:
And here's the video showing this same man holding up an entire column of tanks with his simple act of refusing to back down.
