Activists decry N Korean plan to legalize dog meat
　

CAMPAIGN: The move by Seoul has triggered a series of protests from animal protection groups, many of which have threatened to boycott the country’s goods if the ban is lifted
　

By Loa Iok-sin
STAFF REPORTER
Thursday, Apr 10, 2008, Page 2

Animal protection groups from Taiwan and South Korea yesterday called on South Korean President Lee Myung-bak to intervene in a plan to legalize the consumption of dog meat in South Korea and urged people in both countries to join their protests.

The Seoul City Government last month adopted a set of hygiene regulations on dog meat and classified dogs as livestock.

The city government also plans to push for central-government level legislation on the processing of dog meat and classification of dogs as livestock after the parliamentary election later this month.

The move by Seoul has triggered a series of protests from animal protection groups both inside and outside of South Korea.

“It’s understandable that in certain regions people had to eat dog meat in order to survive in the past, but we already have plenty of meat sources,” said Wu Hung (朱增宏), chairman of the Environment and Animal Society of Taiwan (EAST).

He said in a telephone interview with the Taipei Times that once dogs become farm-raised on a large scale, new diseases may break out.

“Eating exotic animals is the cause of several epidemics — such as SARS — in recent years,” Wu Hung said. “Dogs have been human companions for thousands of years. Once they become a meat source, who knows what diseases will threaten human health?”

Lee Won-bok, president of the Korean Association for Animal Protection, agreed with Wu Hung.

“Bird flu is getting out of control in [South] Korea. As people are worried about the safety of all meat products, it’s naive to believe that dog meat is safe as long as it’s processed under strict hygiene control,” Lee told a news conference in Taipei on Tuesday, urging the public to send protest letters to the South Korean president.

“Hence, for the purposes of disease prevention, health and respect to life, the [South] Korean government should prohibit eating and selling dog meat,” Lee said.

The letter campaign is part of a coordinated action by animal protection groups across Asia.

Park So-yeon, president of the group Coexistence of Animal Rights on Earth, accused the Seoul City Government of disregarding a 1984 ban on selling dog meat.

“The failure [of the city government] to penalize illegal dog meat sellers has resulted in the slaughter of 2 million dogs in the city alone,” Park said.

“Instead of taking responsibility, they’re now running away from it by trying to legalize the sale of dog meat,” he said.

If the South Korean government doesn’t heed their demands, the groups vowed further action, including boycotting products made in South Korea.
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US Congress slams China for abuses
　

TAKING THE LEAD: Fresh from her meeting with the Dalai Lama, Representative Nancy Pelosi spearheaded a rare cascade of criticism at Beijing’s behavior at home and abroad
　

By Charles Snyder
STAFF REPORTER IN WASHINGTON
Thursday, Apr 10, 2008, Page 3

US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi led a bipartisan parade of members of Congress in condemning China’s crackdown on Tibetan demonstrators on the floor of the House on Tuesday evening, in a cascade of anti-China rhetoric not seen in the capital since the 1990s.

With the Olympic torch expected to face strong opposition from human-rights activists when it is paraded through Pelosi’s San Francisco district today, the speaker — a long-time vocal critic of China’s human-rights violations — slammed Beijing for its denial of freedoms at home and support of tyrannical regimes overseas.

Fifteen House members spoke out against China for more than an hour as the chamber took up a resolution introduced by Pelosi criticizing the Tibet crackdown and calling on Beijing to enter into negotiations with the Dalai Lama.

While the resolution is expected to garner overwhelming support, a final vote was put off until next Wednesday, when a roll call vote will be taken.

Up until this week, Congress had been silent about the Tibet crackdown, but Pelosi took the unusual step of introducing the resolution herself after her recent trip to India, where she met the Dalai Lama and spoke out forcefully for China to end the killing and violence in Tibet.

The bill was put on the agenda only days after Taiwan’s representative to Washington, Joseph Wu (吳釗燮), sent a letter to Pelosi supporting her condemnation of the Tibet crackdown and contrasting China’s behavior to Taiwan’s free presidential election.

“Recent events in China stand in stark contrast with those taking place in Taiwan,” he wrote in a letter dated April 3.

“As China continues to persecute civic and religious leaders, Taiwan embraces human rights, the rule of law and freedom of religion and assembly,” he wrote.

The “debate” on the bill went beyond Tibet, as 15 representatives spoke out against a wide range of Chinese human-rights violations and support for repressive regimes in Sudan and elsewhere.

Pelosi recalled the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, when between 2,000 and 3,000 people were killed by Chinese police and troops. She said that demonstrators arrested during the incident remained in prison to this day.

She also urged US President George W. Bush to “hold back” in deciding whether to attend the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing in August until China decides to hold negotiations with the Dalai Lama.

Her call came as the White House indicated for the first time that Bush, who has planned to attend the ceremony, could be amenable to skipping the event.

“The president can always make a change” in his plans, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

Representative Christopher Smith, another long-time China critic, gave graphic examples of Chinese torture of Tibetans arrested in the ongoing crackdown as well as during previous incidents, and stated that the International Olympics Committee had made a “great mistake” in awarding the Games to China.

Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, described the Olympics as the “genocide Olympics,” in view of the Tibet crackdown and Beijing’s support for the Sudanese regime, which has used massive violence in the Darfur region.

Pelosi praised human-rights activists in San Francisco, who on Monday raised “free Tibet” banners on the Golden Gate Bridge, which is on the scheduled route of the Olympics torch. She said their action made her proud.

She also leveled indirect criticism at former US president Bill Clinton for his ardent advocacy during his presidency of favorable trade treatment for China.

Through his presidency, Congress had to annually renew China’s “most-favored nation” status, a ritual that gave the lawmakers a chance to lambaste China’s human rights and trade policies, usually for several hours each year.

When Clinton successfully obtained congressional approval for “permanent normal trade relations” with China — a designation that cleared the way for China’s (along with Taiwan’s) entry into the WTO in 2001 — the debates stopped.

Pelosi said on Tuesday that as a result of advocating favorable trade for China, “we have lost our way.”

She also criticized China for scheduling the Olympic torch to pass through Tibet.

“The world should not allow that to happen,” she said.

KMT requests that military drill be postponed for Ma
　

By Jimmy Chuang
STAFF REPORTER
Thursday, Apr 10, 2008, Page 3

Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators yesterday tried to convince the Ministry of National Defense (MND) to postpone its annual Yushan military drill so that president-elect Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) could attend.

“The drill is always held in April. The new president has the authority to reschedule it once he assumes office, Minister of National Defense Michael Tsai (蔡明憲) said during a Diplomacy and National Defense Committee meeting yesterday morning in response to a question by KMT Legislator Lin Yu-fang (林郁方).

Ma has rejected the Presidential Office’s invitation to attend the drill next Tuesday, saying he already had other obligations.

Tsai said that the warfare simulation is organized by the National Security Bureau (NSB).

While I have no problem with rescheduling the simulation, only the president has the authority to make such a decision, Tsai said.

Tsai and NSB Deputy Director Tsai Teh-sheng (蔡得勝) said they were ready to assist the new president in any way possible.

The committee also criticized the ministry after it was discovered that military prosecutors had begun to summon reporters during their investigations into the establishment of the private arms trading firm Taiwan Goal.

Three reporters who cover military affairs received telephone calls from military prosecutors while Tsai and ministry officials were at the committee meeting yesterday morning.

The prosecutors said the reporters were being summoned to help with the investigation.

The calls immediately became the focus of the discussion. KMT Legislator Justin Chou (周守訓) criticized the ministry for misleading the prosecutors, adding that the priority should not be finding the reporters who broke the story.

KMT Legislator Alex Fai (費鴻泰) asked General Political Warfare Bureau Director-General Yang Tien-hsiao (楊天嘯) to reveal who had given the order to call on the reporters. Tsai, speaking on Yang’s behalf, said that he, not Yang, had given the order.

He said he would respect freedom of speech but that reporters should obey the law.
　

Will we see 'last of the Tibetans'?
　

By Ian Buruma
Thursday, Apr 10, 2008, Page 8

Are the Tibetans doomed to go the way of the American Indians? Will they be reduced to nothing more than a tourist attraction, peddling cheap mementos of what was once a great culture? That sad fate is looking more and more likely and the Olympic year has already been soured by the Chinese government’s efforts to suppress resistance.

The Chinese have much to answer for, but the fate of Tibet is not just a matter of semi-colonial oppression. It is often forgotten that many Tibetans, especially educated people in the larger towns, were so keen to modernize their society in the mid-20th century that they saw the Chinese Communists as allies against rule by holy monks and serf-owning landlords. In the early 1950s, the young Dalai Lama himself was impressed by Chinese reforms and wrote poems praising Chairman Mao Zedong (毛澤東).

Alas, instead of reforming Tibetan society and culture, the Chinese Communists ended up wrecking it. Religion was crushed in the name of official Marxist atheism. Monasteries and temples were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution (often with the help of Tibetan Red Guards). Nomads were forced to live in ugly concrete settlements. Tibetan arts were frozen into folkloric emblems of an officially promoted “minority culture.” And the Dalai Lama and his entourage were forced to flee to India.

None of this was peculiar to Tibet. The wrecking of tradition and forced cultural regimentation took place everywhere in China. In some respects, the Tibetans were treated less ruthlessly than the majority of Chinese. Nor was the challenge to Tibetan culture unique to the Communists. General Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) declared in 1946 that the Tibetans were Chinese and he certainly would not have granted them independence if his Chinese Nationalists had won the civil war.

If Tibetan Buddhism was severely damaged, Chinese Communism has barely survived the ravages of the 20th century, too. But capitalist development has been even more devastating to Tibetan tradition. Like many modern imperialist powers, China claims legitimacy for its policies by pointing to their material benefits. After decades of destruction and neglect, Tibet has benefited from enormous amounts of Chinese money and energy to modernize the country. The Tibetans cannot complain that they have been left behind in China’s transformation from a Third World wreck to a marvel of supercharged urban development.

But the price in Tibet has been higher than elsewhere. Regional identity, cultural diversity and traditional arts and customs have been buried under concrete, steel and glass all over China. And all Chinese are gasping in the same polluted air. But at least the Han Chinese can feel pride in the revival of their national fortunes. They can bask in the resurgence of Chinese power and material wealth. The Tibetans, by contrast, can share this feeling only to the extent that they become fully Chinese. If not, they can only lament the loss of their own identity.

The Chinese have exported their version of modern development to Tibet not only in terms of architecture and infrastructure, but also people — wave after wave of them: businessmen from Sichuan, prostitutes from Hunan, technocrats from Beijing, party officials from Shanghai and shopkeepers from Yunnan. The majority of Lhasa’s population today is no longer Tibetan. Most people in rural areas are Tibetan, but their way of life is not likely to survive Chinese modernization any more than the Apaches’ way of life survived in the US.

Since Chinese is the language of instruction at Tibetan schools and universities, anyone who wishes to be more than a poor peasant, beggar or seller of trinkets must conform to Chinese norms. That is, become Chinese. Even Tibetan intellectuals who want to study their own classical literature must do so in Chinese translation. Meanwhile, Chinese and foreign tourists dress up in traditional Tibetan dress to have their souvenir pictures taken in front of the Dalai Lama’s old palace.

Religion is now tolerated in Tibet, as it is in the rest of China, but under strictly controlled conditions. Monasteries and temples are exploited as tourist attractions, while government agents try to ensure that the monks stay in line. As we know from the recent events, they have not yet been entirely successful; the resentment among Tibetans runs too deep. In the last few weeks, that resentment boiled over — first in the monasteries and then in the streets — against the Han Chinese migrants, who are both the agents and main beneficiaries of rapid modernization.

The Dalai Lama has repeatedly said that he does not seek independence. And the Chinese government is certainly wrong to blame him for the violence. However, as long as Tibet remains part of China, it is hard to see how its distinct cultural identity can survive. The human and material forces arrayed against Tibet are overwhelming. There are too few Tibetans and too many Chinese.

Outside Tibet, however, it is a different story. If the Chinese are responsible for extinguishing the old way of life inside Tibet, they may be unintentionally responsible for keeping it alive outside. By forcing the Dalai Lama into exile, they have ensured the establishment of a Tibetan diaspora society, which might well survive in a more traditional form than would have been likely even in an independent Tibet. Diaspora cultures thrive on nostalgic dreams of return. Traditions are jealously guarded, like precious heirlooms, to be passed on as long as those dreams persist.

And who is to say that such dreams will never come true? The Jews managed to hang onto theirs for almost 2,000 years.