FREE TIBET

Stop China, Stop Beijing Olympic 2008

There are moments in life, where silence is a sin and talk becomes an obligation. A civic duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative to which we can not steal.
Vi sono momenti, nella Vita, in cui tacere diventa una colpa e parlare diventa un obbligo. Un dovere civile, una sfida morale, un imperativo categorico al quale non ci si può sottrarre.
Oriana Fallaci
www.MySpace.com/Fallaci
Repression continues in China, six months before Olympic Games
When the International Olympic Committee assigned the 2008 summer Olympic Games to Beijing on 13 July 2001, the Chinese police were intensifying a crackdown on subversive elements, including Internet users and journalists. Six years later, nothing has changed. But despite the absence of any significant progress in free speech and human rights in China, the IOC’s members continue to turn a deaf ear to repeated appeals from international organisations that condemn the scale of the repression.
From the outset, Reporters Without Borders has been opposed to holding the Olympic Games to Beijing. Now, a year before the opening ceremony, it is clear the Chinese government still sees the media and Internet as strategic sectors that cannot be left to the “hostile forces” denounced by President Hu Jintao. The departments of propaganda and public security and the cyber-police, all conservative bastions, implement censorship with scrupulous care.
Around 30 journalists and 50 Internet users are currently detained in China. Some of them since the 1980s. The government blocks access to thousands for news websites. It jams the Chinese, Tibetan and Uyghur-language programmes of 10 international radio stations. After focusing on websites and chat forums, the authorities are now concentrating on blogs and video-sharing sites. China’s blog services incorporate all the filters that block keywords considered “subversive” by the censors. The law severely punishes “divulging state secrets,” “subversion” and “defamation” - charges that are regularly used to silence the most outspoken critics. Although the rules for foreign journalists have been relaxed, it is still impossible for the international media to employ Chinese journalists or to move about freely in Tibet and Xinjiang.
The Reporters Without Borders list of nine things the Chinese authorities must do before the Beijing Olympic Games:
1. Release all journalists and Internet users detained in China for exercising their right to information.2. Abolish for ever the restrictive articles in the Foreign Correspondents Guide that limit the media’s freedom of movement and work.3. Disband the Publicity Department (the former Propaganda Department), which exercises daily control over content in the Chinese press.4. End the jamming of foreign radio stations.5. End the blocking of thousands of news and information websites based abroad.6. Suspend the “11 Commandments of the Internet,” which lead to content censorship and self-censorship on websites.7. End the blacklisting of journalists and human rights activists, which prevents them from visiting China.8. Lift the ban on Chinese media using foreign news agency video footage and news reports without permission.9. Legalize independent organisations of journalists and human rights activists.
www.rsf.org