Dhondup Wangchen: 6 Years for Reporting Life

Radio Free Asia reports that Tibetan documentary film maker Dhondup Wangchen has been sentenced to six years imprisonment (not counting the one he's already spent awaiting trial) for the crime of "splitting the motherland."  That's right, folks, China is such a fragile nation that it's handlers can't cope with being exposed in a documentary.  It might make the ruling class look bad.  Really.

China Jails Tibetan Filmmaker
2010-01-06
HONG KONG—Authorities in the northwestern Chinese province of Qinghai have handed a six-year jail sentence to a Tibetan filmmaker who returned from exile to make a documentary about his homeland, Tibetan sources say.
The Xining Intermediate People's Court [my bold] handed the sentence to Dhondup Wangchen, the producer of the documentary “Leaving Fear Behind,” in a secret trial that found him guilty of “splitting the motherland,” the sources said.“Dhondup Wangchen, the producer of ‘Leaving Fear Behind,’ was sentenced six years to prison,” a Tibetan from the Amdo region identified as Thardrub said.
“We were checking around about it...later, we were able to confirm that he was sentenced secretly [my bold] by Xining Intermediate People's Court in Qinghai on Dec. 28, 2009.”
Dhondup Wangchen’s relatives were given no information about his trial or sentencing, he added.
“They were not informed about the sentencing,” Thardrub said. “The relatives argue that he is innocent and he did not commit any crime...They are planning to appeal his sentence in the higher courts.”
Jamyang Tsultrim, a relative of Dhondup Wangchen now living in Switzerland, said the sentencing of Dhondup Wangchen was a clear indication of how Tibetans were deprived of freedom of expression in China.
“His relatives made arrangements for a lawyer to represent him, but the lawyers were not allowed to represent him,” Jamyang Tsultrim said.
“He was also suffering from liver problems and was denied any kind of medical treatment,” he added.
[...]  Dhondup Wangchen’s film, “Leaving Fear Behind” (www.leavingfearbehind.com), is a 25-minute documentary including interviews with Tibetans in the Amdo region expressing their views on Tibet’s exiled leader the Dalai Lama, the Beijing Olympics, and Chinese laws.
The authorities also detained Jigme Gyatso, a monk from the Kham region, at the same time, but released him on Oct. 15. He later said he was tortured in detention.
“Leaving Fear Behind” was produced outside China after Dhondup Wangchen managed to send footage out of Tibet before the authorities caught up with him.
It was shown to foreign journalists in Beijing during the Olympic Games.[...]
Original reporting by RFA’s Tibetan service. Translated by Karma Dorjee. Written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.
http://www.rfa.org/english/news/tibet/filmmaker-01062010111100.html

Imagine living in a country where not only is it a crime to document real things happening in real places, but a so-called "people's court" can keep you imprisoned, run a secret trial with a secret decision, and disappear you for SIX YEARS!  Your family and friends can't file an appeal because they haven't been notified of anything--not the alleged "crimes" and certainly not the supposed "justice" of having to live in a Chinese prison for almost a decade.
The day will come when the Chinese people and all the minority ethnic groups within China will recognize their enslavement to this nebulous government of the people.  They  will rise up and say, "Whose justice are you talking about?"  Let's hope true justice comes about through peaceful means.  It can happen if each and every individual bureaucrat wakes up to the crimes they commit in the name of "The People."  It will grow as they decide to stand up for justice, not Just Us.

Learn more from the web site for Leaving Fear Behind:  http://www.leavingfearbehind.com/
The NY Times covered this story in October, with more personal info about Dhondup Wangchen:
China Is Trying a Tibetan Filmmaker for Subversion
By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: October 30, 2009
CHONGQING, China — A self-taught filmmaker who spent five months interviewing Tibetans about their hopes and frustrations living under Chinese rule is facing charges of state subversion after the footage was smuggled abroad and distributed on the Internet and at film festivals around the world.
The filmmaker, Dhondup Wangchen, who has been detained since March 2008, just weeks after deadly rioting broke out in Tibet, managed to sneak a letter out of jail last month saying that his trial had begun.
“There is no good news I can share with you,” he wrote in the letter, which was provided by a cousin in Switzerland. “It is unclear what the sentence will be.”
[...]  Until now, the case of Mr. Wangchen, 35, has received little attention abroad. Uneducated and plainspoken, he was an itinerant businessman until October 2007, when he bought a small video camera and began traveling the Tibetan plateau interviewing monks, yak herders and students about their lives.
Tsetring Gyaljong, a cousin who helped him make the documentary, said that Mr. Wangchen’s political awareness was sharpened nearly a decade ago, when he witnessed a demonstration in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, that was quickly broken up by public security officers.
“He saw how it was dissolved in two or three minutes and how everyone was taken away,” said Mr. Gyaljong, speaking from Switzerland, where he has lived in exile since escaping from Tibet. “There were no pictures, no testimonies, and he felt like the world should know that Tibetans, despite the Chinese portrayals, are not a happy people.”
[...]  In an interview from Dharamsala, where she works as a baker, Mr. Wangchen’s wife, Lhamo Tso, said she feared she might not see him again for many, many years.
“As a wife, I’m very sad to be without the person I love so much,” she said. “But if I can separate out that sadness, I feel proud because he made a courageous decision to give a voice to people who don’t have one.” [...]
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/world/asia/31tibet.html?_r=2

Long live the Tibetan people, wherever they are!

NY Times Acknowledges Freedom is Squelched in China

Now you might think a blog called DisabilityNation would be biased toward two old ladies who are blind and need a cane. So ok, for a less, er, subjective report, the New York Times makes this story sound almost cute and normal. Note the lack of the words "freedom, liberty, dissent." Note the presence of the words "demonstrate, protest, disturbing public order". Maybe the NY Times doesn't see things so differently?
Too Old and Frail to Re-educate? Not in China
By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: August 20, 2008
BEIJING — In the annals of people who have struggled against Communist Party rule, Wu Dianyuan and Wang Xiuying are unlikely to merit even a footnote.
The two women, both in their late 70s, have never spoken out against China’s authoritarian government. Both walk with the help of a cane, and Ms. Wang is blind in one eye. Their grievance, receiving insufficient compensation when their homes were seized for redevelopment, [are you listening, Lower East Side?] is perhaps the most common complaint among Chinese displaced during the country’s long streak of fast economic growth.
But the Beijing police still sentenced the two women to an extrajudicial term of “re-education through labor” this week for applying [my bold] to hold a legal protest in a designated area in Beijing, where officials promised that Chinese could hold demonstrations during the Olympic Games.
They became the most recent examples of people punished for submitting applications to protest. A few would-be demonstrators have simply disappeared, [my bold] [yikes!] at least for the duration of the Games, squelching already diminished hopes that the influx of foreigners and the prestige of holding the Games would push China’s leaders to relax their tight grip on political expression.
“Can you imagine two old ladies in their 70s being re-educated through labor?” asked Li Xuehui, Ms. Wu’s son, who said the police told the two women that their sentence might remain in suspension if they stayed at home and stopped asking for permission to protest.
“I feel very sad and angry because we’re only asking for the basic right of living and it’s been six years, but nobody will do anything to help,” Mr. Li said.
[...] When the International Olympic Committee awarded the Games to Beijing in 2001, ignoring critics who said China should not be rewarded for repression, its president, Jacques Rogge, offered assurances that the Games would invariably spur China toward greater openness.
But prospects dimmed even before the opening ceremony, when overseas journalists arrived to discover that China’s promise to provide uncensored Internet access [my bold] was riddled with caveats. The ensuing uproar did persuade the government to unblock some politically sensitive Web sites, but many others, including those that discuss Tibet and the banned spiritual group Falun Gong, remain inaccessible at the Olympic press center.
[...] “In order to ensure smooth traffic flow, a nice environment and good social order, we will invite these participants to hold their demonstrations in designated places,” Liu Shaowu, the security director for Beijing’s Olympic organizing committee, said at a news conference. He described the creation of three so-called protest zones and suggested that a simple application process would provide Chinese citizens an avenue for free expression, a right that has long been enshrined in China’s Constitution but in reality is rarely granted.
But with four days left before the closing ceremony, the authorities acknowledge that they have yet to allow a single protest. They claim that most of the people who filed applications had their grievances addressed, obviating the need for a public expression of discontent.
Chinese activists say they are not surprised that the promise proved illusory. Li Fangping, a lawyer who has been arrested and beaten for his dogged representation of rights advocates, said there was no way the government would allow protesters to expose some of China’s most vexing problems, among them systemic corruption, environmental degradation and the forced relocation of hundreds of thousands of residents for projects related to the Olympics.
“For Chinese petitioners, if their protest applications were approved, it would lead to a chain reaction of others seeking to voice their problems as well,” Mr. Li said.
During the past two decades, China has embraced a market economy [my bold] and shed some of the more onerous restrictions that dictated where people could live, whom they could marry and whether they could leave the country. But with political dissent and religious freedom, the government has been unrelenting.
[...] In recent months, the pressure has only intensified: scores of rights lawyers and political dissenters have been detained, and even the armies of migrant workers who built the Olympic stadiums have been encouraged to leave town, lest their disheveled appearances detract from the image of a clean, modern nation. [my bold] [oh, please, I can’t S T A N D it!]
“When you have guests coming over for dinner, you clean up the house and tell the children not to argue,” Mr. Bell said.
While the demands of Ms. Wu, 79, and Ms. Wang, 77, the protest applicants, might be seen as harmless, they threatened to expose the systemic problems that bedevil the lives of millions of Chinese. Like many disenchanted citizens, the two women, former neighbors, were seeking to draw attention to a government-backed real estate deal that promised to give them apartments in the new development that replaced their homes not far from Tiananmen Square. Six years later, [9/11 First Responder Alert!] they are living in ramshackle apartments on the outskirts of the city, and their demands for compensation have gone unanswered.
On Monday, when they returned to the police station to follow up on their protest applications, the women were told they had been sentenced to one year at a labor camp for “disturbing public order.” For the moment, the women have been allowed to return to their homes, but they have been warned that they could be sent to a detention center at any moment, relatives said.
[...] At a news conference on Wednesday, Wang Wei, the vice president of Beijing’s Olympic organizing committee, was asked about the lack of protests. He said it showed the system was working. “I’m glad to hear that over 70 protest issues have been solved through consultation, dialogue,” he said. “This is a part of Chinese culture.”
But human rights advocates say that instead of pointing the way toward a more open society, the Olympics have put China’s political controls on display.
“Given this moment when the international spotlight is shining on China, when so much of the international media are in Beijing, it’s unfathomable why the authorities are intensifying social control,” said Sharon Hom, the executive director of Human Rights in China. “The truth is they’re sending a clear and disturbing message, one they’re not even trying to hide, which is we’re not even interested in hearing dissenting voices.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/21/sports/olympics/21protest.html?ex=1219896000&en=bbbd73a1742fcf00&ei=5070&emc=eta1