Poppy Sebag-Montefiore
Few people will have missed the outcry over China’s decision to execute British national Akmal Shaikh, despite evidence that he had been duped into unknowingly transporting 4kg of heroin into the country. It was argued that Shaikh had bipolar disorder and a delusional personality; he thought he was going to China to record a song about a Little Rabbit which would inspire world peace. On the basis of his mental illness, Britain made 27 ministerial pleas for clemency; Gordon Brown discussed his case with China’s president Hu Jintao several months ago and then with Prime Minister Wen Jiabao when they met in Copenhagen; the British charity Reprieve compiled an Application for Special Pardon including a psychiatric assessment. Witness statements and appeals were being sent to China right up until the final hour. But the pleas were ignored and Akmal Shaikh was executed on schedule on 29th December 2009.
Why did Britain’s appeals fail? “Diminished responsibility” on the grounds of mental illness is a legal concept in China, but the authorities argued that there was no evidence of mental illness at Shaikh’s first trial in December 2007. They did not, however, respond to the documentation provided by Britain, nor would they carry out a medical assessment of Shaikh.
According to a Chinese human rights lawyer who had been eager to assist Shaikh’s defence: “The government didn’t act according to the rule of law on Akmal’s case. China wants to throw its weight around and show it’s a powerful country. They wouldn’t have dared do this before they hosted the Olympics.” Shaikh’s trial, which lasted less 30 minutes, took place in December 2007, three months after his arrest, but the judgement was not announced until October 2008, after the Beijing Games were over.
But if China’s treatment of Akmal Shaikh was a show, it seems less likely that it was put on for Britain; it was probably a performance of prowess for a domestic audience. Once his sentence became a “hot topic” on the Chinese internet, it was supported with so much enthusiasm that one Chinese journalist I spoke to felt that no amount of evidence or international pressure could change the verdict. The vast majority of public opinion in China is expressed via the internet—comments at the bottom of news stories, on blogs and in online discussion forums. And China may be a one-party state, but the party listens to public opinion—particularly the opinion that it helps to shape.
From the perspective of the Chinese media, at issue in Akram Shaikh’s case was that Britain, true to its 19th-century form, seemed to be claiming special treatment and interfering in China’s judicial sovereignty. The Chinese reporting downplayed the claims of Shaikh’s mental illness. He didn’t have one, it was decided. Britain didn’t prove it, said the China Daily; “China has its own definition of mental illness and by that he is deemed to be mentally sound,” wrote China’s Global Times. Editorials said that Britain was appealing because it no longer has the death penalty. “How could a criminal be exempted from the death penalty only because he is British?” asked Xinhua, China’s national wire service. Shaikh’s case became a story of the British trying to get away with inflicting drugs on the Chinese, a story that reminded people in China of the opium wars.
These views were echoed by the vast majority of China’s “netizens,” who commented in support of the execution, many making explicit reference to the opium wars. One blogger on the SINA web portal wrote: “China today is not the China of 1840, the British drugs smuggler should be killed.” On the Tianya forum someone wrote: “Better than shouting about it, let’s start the 3rd opium war!” Another went: “Just kill him immediately, that’s equality!!!!!!!!!” By the eve of Akmal Shaikh’s execution, the story was the most read and commented on topic on SINA.
Underlying all of this is the desire among many educated, online, middle-class Chinese professionals to a feel a sense of equality with other people globally. They are desperate for the Chinese not to be seen as the world’s coolies. Each time I meet someone with a strong and active nationalist approach to politics in China, I ask them about how they feel about their lack of rights within China. Most respond by saying that of course they would like to have more rights at home, but it is not possible for them to speak out for this now. Their only outlet as political beings is to rally for higher status internationally. In this case—as with so many others—it was nationalist voices that shouted the loudest, and in unison, on the web. Shaikh was cast as a baddie in China’s nationalist pantomime, to be hissed and booed off stage. Alternative or dissenting voices, like that of the unnamed human rights lawyer quoted above, were inaudible amid the nationalist sway.
The unelected Communist party feels it has to constantly prove its legitimacy, and in these economically precarious times, showing that the party can now stand up to its old oppressors demonstrates to the nation that they are being led in the right direction. It is a bizarre cycle. The government is responsible for stoking up nationalist sentiment, then must respond to it, even when it puts them in embarrassing diplomatic situations, as the Shaikh case surely has. Gordon Brown stated that he was “appalled and disappointed” and the Chinese ambassador was called into the British foreign office.
But the blip in relations will be temporary. Beijing’s hosting of the 2008 Olympics legitimised China as a country. Soon the execution of Akmal Shaikh will be forgotten—perhaps listed on reports of China’s bad behaviour, its imperviousness to western practice, along with its actions in Copenhagen and its imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo. Ivan Lewis, minister for foreign and commonwealth affairs, has argued that engagement with China is “non-negotiable and any alternative strategy is simply not credible.” But, he has added: “By being so clear in our public criticism of China’s handling of this case we are demonstrating that it is not business as usual.” Yet business continues, quite as usual.
After what we have seen with Shaikh’s case, will we be able to see through our own mythologies about the story of modern China? Will we continue to imagine that political reform and an independent judiciary will emerge as, if by nature, in the wake of China’s economic development? It’s an idea that we cling to; capitalism rests upon it. In life, as in economic development, we are convinced that once wealth arrives, all else good will fall into place—despite the fact that history tells us no such thing.
Perhaps we need this myth when we want to buy something cheap that has been made in China, or to make an incentivised trade deal there. If images of sweatshops and detention centres shuffle through our minds as we consider what a great deal we are getting, the myth kicks in and we are comforted by our delusions that we are helping make things better, because once people in China are rich, all will be resolved.
But the fact remains that China has given a lethal injection to a vulnerable man. This is what happens in a place where political instability undermines the rule of law. China’s courts are routinely used as a political tool; at times it wears down the innocent or incarcerates the brave; each year for millions of China’s “petitioners,” justice is a mirage; it disappears as soon as they approach it. While Chinese people continue to be let down daily by their judiciary, Akmal Shaikh’s will not be the last prick of injustice in China that is felt by the outside world.
China has indeed performed an economic miracle, but we cannot ignore the fact that it is also a place with a judiciary that is subservient to its problem-laden political system. These two phenomena co-exist in China, and contrary to what we might expect, the success of the former is doing nothing to fix the latter. Rather, China’s “economic miracle” makes a gloss over its political stagnation, and enables its fallout to remain unaddressed.
Archie Brown
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect ’s blog
Twenty years ago today in China the prolonged pro-democracy demonstration in Tiananmen Square was brought to a brutal end, when troops and tanks moved in and hundreds of people were killed on the streets of Beijing. While the western world remembers this event, it’s worth bearing in mind that June marks another, very different anniversary. Just 20 years ago democratic reforms in the Soviet Union also astonished the world. Contested elections brought into being the First Congress of People’s Deputies, held between 25 May and 9 June. From the outset, this was a legislature in which the executive was criticised and real debate took place. Its proceedings were televised live and watched by more than half the adult population.
In 1989 it looked as if Russia and China were travelling in opposite directions. What was then still the Soviet Union was moving towards democratic and accountable government. In China, radical economic reform had already made great progress, but the response to the Tiananmen Square demonstrators of Deng Xiaoping (the father of the Chinese economic reform) was to impose martial law.
Read more »
Christopher de Bellaigue
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
On 20th June the popular agitation to overturn the results of Iran’s presidential election of eight days before, which millions of Iranians believe to have been rigged in favour of the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, entered a new phase. The accommodation between non-violent protestors and the authorities, who had tacitly permitted a week of huge, and generally good-natured, demonstrations, has now ended. The protest of 20th June was violently broken up by the security forces, leading to fighting in the streets and at least ten deaths.
Forewarned of the demonstration and its route, the authorities deployed many thousands of Basijis, members of a ramshackle but highly ideological militia, armed riot police, and soldiers from the Revolutionary Guard, preventing most of the marchers from reaching Enghelab Square, the demonstration’s starting point. Those who did make it to Enghelab Square were forced by truncheon-charge and teargas into nearby sidestreets. Azadi Street, the proposed route for the march, witnessed a massive mobilisation of Basijis, riot police and busloads of Revolutionary Guard members, many of them holding up their truncheons and yelling encomiums to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The authorities achieved their aim of preventing a recurrence of the marches that had blocked off Tehran for much of the previous week. Some supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the reformist politician who claims to have won the election, and demands its annulment, seem to have been dissuaded from participating by the warning delivered on Friday in a sermon by Ayatollah Khamenei, in which he sided unambiguously with Ahmadinejad against his domestic opponents and told Mousavi’s supporters to end the protests or face “blood, violence and chaos.”
By 7pm on 20th June, municipal buses were once more running down Azadi Street, and most of the city’s other arteries were clear. The side alleys running off Azadi Street, however, told a different story. In modest neighbourhoods, youths staged pitched battles with the security forces, hurling rocks and wielding knives and screwdrivers, while the Basijis and their Revolutionary Guard comrades fired teargas canisters and, according to eyewitnesses, live rounds. (Western reporters have been banned from attending any of the protests).
Tehran has not seen such conflict since the early years of the revolution. Plumes of smoke rose from burning tyres and rubbish bins. At least one underground station was turned into a battleground. In places that had effectively become no-go areas for the security forces, Mousavi supporters assumed the role of traffic cops,?people gathered on the roofs of their houses to observe events, and residents, young and old, male and female, thronged the pavements to watch and shout encouragement. According to a second eyewitness, protesters stripped to the waist applied wet towels to parts of their torsos that had been inflamed by teargas.
Today’s Tehrani youth, often derided as softies by an earlier, revolutionary generation are, in the words of one admiring middle-aged Iranian, “putting their lives on the line.” Reports of Basiji deaths were confirmed by no less a source than Ayatollah Khamenei himself. In Mir Hossein Mousavi, the agitation has a figurehead who has shown unexpected mettle. Also on 20th June, Mousavi released a statement in which he challenged the main contentions made by the supreme leader in his sermon on Friday, notably that the opposition was being stoked by Iran’s foreign enemies. Responsibility for all violence, Mousavi said, lay with “those who cannot tolerate non-violent actions.” While calling on his supporters to continue their protests without violence, he said: “Rest assured that I will always be at your side.”
The authorities may now be hoping that, by using the state media and friendly newspapers–most domestic outlets, for which Mousavi’s views have been stifled by censorship and arrests–they can depict the agitation as a shot bolt, and reintroduce a sense of normalcy into people’s lives. But the ability of the opposition to control, if only for a few hours, neighbourhoods in central Tehran, and to chase away groups of Basijis, hints at the development of a patchier, less predictable agitation. The ability of the protesters to organise themselves without mobile phone contact, text messaging and the internet, all of which have been severely disrupted by the authorities, has been proven.
Thirty years after a revolution that promised freedom for all, only to end in dull authoritarianism and factionalism, many Iranians remain profoundly suspicious of promises of change, and sceptical about their own ability to stay the course. Such doubts were not in evidence on the night of 20th June, however, when choruses of “Allahu Akbar,” (”God is Great”), a revolutionary cry that has now been appropriated by the Mousavi camp, rang out, louder than ever, from the rooftops of many of Tehran’s residential neighbourhoods.
The authorities now face a dilemma. They can continue to allow Mousavi his freedom, and the limited freedom he enjoys to be in contact with his supporters, or they can arrest him, which might give new focus to the crisis, and make irreparable the rift that now seems to have opened up between Khamenei and Ahmadinejad on one side, and Mousavi and his main backer, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, on the other. In effect, there are two interlocking rifts, one within the elite, and one between the demonstrators and defenders of Iran’s current system of government. In his statement Mousavi was at pains to emphasise that his is not a counter-revolutionary movement, and that the Basij and Revolutionary Guard are not “our enemies.” On the contrary, he said, “we are confronting those liars” with a view to “reform by returning to the pure essence of the Islamic Revolution.” Not everyone demonstrating in his name would agree.
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
Kevin Watkins
Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
Dead Aid: Why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa
by Dambisa Moyo (Allen Lane, £14.99)
In March, thousands of campaigners from development charities took to the streets of London. Their target was the G20 summit. With the global economic downturn pushing Africa into recession, the marchers had a simple message for the governments of rich countries. As one banner put it: “Remember Africa—increase aid to fight poverty.”
Read more »
Steven Fielding
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
David Hare describes his latest play Gethsemane, which opened on 11th November at the National Theatre, as “pure fiction.” Nonetheless, it features Alec Beasley, a Labour prime minister responsible for the absence of social progress at home and the prosecution of a disastrous war abroad; Otto Fallon, a party fundraiser with a background in pop music; and Meredith Guest, a cabinet minister whose husband has been accused of shady financial transactions. Yet, if the purity of Hare’s fiction is open to doubt, Gethsemane aspires to be more than glib Blair bashing; at the play’s conclusion, he outlines some ways that Westminster in particular, and politics in general, might become less detached from the people.
“Politics in a work of literature,” wrote the 19th-century French thinker Stendhal, “is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar, and yet a thing too which it is not possible to refuse one’s attention.” Yes, all literature is “political” insofar as it discusses power. But fiction about how actual politicians use power is surprisingly rare; artists tend to focus on the elevated private sphere of relationships, identity and the oh-so-troubled self. As a result, contemporary Westminster fiction is usually second rank work produced by third rank politicians: a battle to the bottom between Jeffrey Archer and Edwina Currie, with the saving grace of Michael Dobbs thrown in. New Labour’s place in this pantheon, meanwhile, bounces between low comedy and high conspiracy. ITV’s Confessions of a Diary Secretary (2007) provided the unedifying spectacle of a felating, Sid James-like John Prescott, while Robert Harris’s novel The Ghost had the Blairesque lead character supporting the Iraq war largely because his wife was a CIA agent. Serious art, this is not.
Read more »
Christian Tyler
Also in Prospect’s Olympics coverage: read David Goldblatt’s guide to the political and cultural landscape of the Games; and his special online accounts of the Olympics from Athens 1896 to Athens 2004, as well as of the best Olympic books, films and websites.
You can discuss all these pieces at First Drafts , Prospect’s blog.
Christian Tyler interviews Wei Jingsheng
The man sitting opposite me in a Turkish restaurant in London is well qualified to talk about China’s Communist leaders. He has been a keen student of them for more than 30 years, 18 of which have been spent in Chinese jails.
Read more »
Salil Tripathi
Sixty years ago, on 30th January, Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated in New Delhi. In May, Israel will celebrate the 60th anniversary of its controversial creation. These two narratives got unintentionally intertwined last month, raising questions about the universality of Gandhi’s message as well as his views about Jews, the nature of the state and the limits of freedom of expression.
The vehicle for this reflection was Gandhi’s grandson, Arun, a mild-mannered 73-year-old writer and peace activist, who until recently ran the MK Gandhi Institute of Peace and Non-Violence at the University of Rochester, New York state. Early in January he wrote on On Faith, a Washington Post/Newsweek blog: “[The Holocaust] is a very good example of how a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends… It seems to me the Jews today not only want the Germans to feel guilty, but the whole world must regret what happened… When an individual or a nation refuses to forgive and move on, the regret turns into anger.” Gandhi blamed “Israel and the Jews” for being the biggest players in creating “a culture of violence.”
Predictably—given the disproportionate space the Palestine issue commands—all hell broke loose. Gandhi apologised, and later resigned from his post at the institute. Israel’s critics were quick to blame the so-called “Israel lobby,” which is supposed to control public opinion in America. Gandhi instantly became a martyr for Palestine activists—even though Palestinians have, on the whole, steadfastly refused to adopt Gandhian non-violence against their Israeli occupiers. Moreover, Gandhi’s carelessly written blog post would probably have made his grandfather blush.
Read more »
Daria Vaisman
A few Fridays ago, some of us were at a Tbilisi restaurant on the fourth anniversary of Georgia’s “rose revolution.” When the fireworks started, we crowded into the restaurant’s small back room to watch. Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, the man who had ushered in the revolution, would be stepping down that Monday, after brutally dispersing a peaceful demonstration and closing down the main independent news station in town. One of the women looked at her friend with a smirk. “So this is where our money went,” she said.
We smirked along, then wondered: how did it go so wrong? When Saakashvili was elected president in 2004, he had established himself as the darling of the west and transformed a corrupt and dilapidated country. He’d quintupled the budget; paved the roads; reformed the police service; and attracted unprecedented levels of foreign investment. Yet social policy had lagged behind, and the independence of the press and judiciary had been threatened. Georgians from all socioeconomic sectors had accumulated a personal litany of complaints.
The protests began this November. November 7th began much like the five days that preceded it, when tens of thousands of demonstrators massed in front of parliament in Tbilisi. Though the ostensible catalyst for the protest was the arrest of a former defence minister-turned-opposition leader, the deeper explanation was that people felt Saakashvili held them in contempt. Even so, they seemed unsure exactly why they were there and surprised when I asked. Their responses were filtered though a general and inchoate sense of gloom: the jails were filled with teenagers; prices had doubled but pensions had not; the government had sold off their best assets in sloppy privatisation campaigns.
Read more »
Shami Chakrabarti
Liberty recently published a study that demonstrated that Britain’s current 28-day limit on pre-charge detention is much longer than in 15 comparable democracies around the world, based on advice from leading lawyers and academics. Alex Carlile, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, dismisses this research as “mere campaigning zeal.”
Yet Carlile’s article actually demonstrates just how far the few remaining supporters of longer pre-charge detention have to go to justify any extension beyond 28 days. Faced with the fact that the US constitution limits pre-charge detention to just two days, Carlile’s response is that the British government’s proposal is not as bad as Guantánamo bay or extraordinary rendition. Surely Britain, which many used to see as a beacon of liberty, can aspire to more than that.
In a similar vein, Carlile argues that Liberty’s study is too kind to the French because, he implies, suspects are often ill-treated by French police during the six days they are allowed to be held before charge. I certainly condemn any such violation of French domestic and international law, but I struggle to see how this justifies Britain holding people without charge for over a month.
Read more »
Nic Dunlop
Last March, I travelled to Burma’s new capital, Nay Pyi Daw. I was among a handful of journalists to be invited to the junta’s annual military parade. It was the first time that the outside world had been granted a glimpse of the city the generals have built. Dumped in the middle of malarial scrubland, some 300 miles north of Rangoon, it is a strange, gleaming confection of official hotels, ministries and government housing set in the baking plains of central Burma (now called Myanmar). The junta has spent billions building this largely empty metropolis—whose name means “Seat of Kings.”
Here, the generals sit in perfect isolation while the rest of the country suffers. Spending on healthcare is, according to the UN, the lowest in the world. Poverty is widespread and a third of children under five are malnourished. Military spending, though, has rocketed. Despite chronic power shortages, leaving much of the country in almost permanent blackout, the junta’s new capital gleams with 24-hour electricity.
When I first arrived in the old capital, Rangoon, on a photographic assignment in 1995, I expected steel helmets and fixed bayonets at every street corner and endless checkpoints—all the sights one associates with military dictatorships. Instead I found a bustling metropolis of colourful markets, packed restaurants and gleaming pagodas. Street hawkers were selling old copies of Life magazine and monks browsed the book stalls next to tea shops. The Burmese army was conspicuous by its absence. I had to “steal” images of soldiers I did see, and often they would hold their hands in front of my lens to stop me. Now, here in Nay Pyi Daw, I was surrounded by thousands of them. And I was permitted to photograph at will.
Read more »
Read 3 comments »
