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Julia Scheeres, Wired Magazine: As part of an ongoing attempt to clamp down on Internet speech, the Chinese government sentences five members of the Falun Gong religious group to prison for posting an article critical of authorities.

In its ongoing repression of Internet speech, the Chinese government has sentenced five Falun Gong members to prison for posting an article to a discussion board that accused authorities of mistreating a jailed colleague.

In a terse news story, the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, stated Feb. 19 that a court in western Chongqing found the three men and two women guilty of “vilifying the government’s image through spreading fabricated stories on persecution of cult practitioners” and had given them prison terms of five to 14 years.

Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based group that monitors free speech worldwide, has called for the release of the now 22 Falun Gong members imprisoned for publishing news on the Internet about the outlawed spiritual movement…

“The crackdown on members of this spiritual movement is completely unjustified,” said Julien Pain, who researches Internet speech issues for the group. “The five Internet users were convicted for posting online what is already very well-known to human rights organizations, that members of Falun Gong are systematically tortured in prison.”

Falun Gong — a spiritual discipline that combines exercise and meditation — had an estimated 70 million adherents before President Jiang Zemin outlawed the movement in 1999, calling it a doomsday cult. Activists say more than 800 Falun Gong members have died in police custody since the ban.

The Feb. 19 sentencing is symptomatic of the communist government’s struggle to control online content in a country that is second only to the United States in number of Internet users. According to the China Internet Network Information Center, 79.5 million Chinese are connected to the World Wide Web.

As China’s Internet economy burgeons, so have the government’s attempts to battle “subversive” content on home computers and in the country’s 110,000 cybercafes. According to some estimates, China employs 30,000 technocrats to police the Internet.

Laws regulating the Internet include the expected prohibitions on software piracy and the creation of software viruses, but also nebulous phraseology, such as a ban on “harmful information” that “spreads superstition,” said Bobson Wong, a specialist in Chinese Internet culture.

“The problem with China’s Internet restrictions is that they’re so vague,” Wong said.

“Most people know that there are certain taboo topics that can’t be discussed online — Tiananmen, Falun Gong, criticism of high-level officials. Anybody who is even remotely affiliated with these topics tends to be prosecuted.”

Amnesty International recorded the arrests of 54 people between November 2002 and January 2004 for online activities ranging from calling for government reform in a chat room to signing an online petition for the release of a Falun Gong member.

In a recent report, the group said it believed this number is merely a fraction of the real number of people detained in China for expressing their views online. In May 2003 alone, for example, Xinhua reported that more than 100 people were arrested for “spreading rumors” about SARS over the Internet or through phone text messages.

In addition to forcing ISPs and Internet cafes to use filtering software, government minders hand delete individual messages from discussion boards and change the domain name server records of forbidden sites so visitors are rerouted to authorized pages.

To thwart censorship, many Internet users employ proxy networks, which act as portals to other sites and allow users to hide their computers’ IP addresses. Bill Xia, a Chinese immigrant who founded a North Carolina company that created a proxy network called DynaWeb, says “tens of thousands” of Chinese use his product every day.

“The Internet gave dissidents a useful means to avoid state censorship, in a country where there’s no independent media,” said Pain, the Reporters Without Borders researcher. “The Chinese authorities are trying to censor the Internet and to track down cyberdissidents. But given the huge amount of information that is being published, they can’t succeed totally.”

Sonam set free (Buddhist News Network)

February 2, 2004

Original article no longer available…

After hectic mobilization from Buddhist activists, mainly from California, the detained Tibetan nun Sonam who came to the United States seeking asylum has been released from a central Virginian jail.

Sonam, the Tibetan nun detained in a central Virginian jail, was released yesterday.

An anonymous source have requested well wishers cautions that while the appeal process is still moving forward, she asks that everyone to keep up the momentum during this incredible time of opening and major press coverage.

Here’s some of what [local Buddhist woman] shared this morning:

She got a call yesterday from her contact at Radio Free Asia asking to please pick up Sonam from the prison. They let Sonam out, and there was much crying and hugging.

“The sweetness in that jail is beyond belief.”

Sonam will be staying with a Tibetan women; [local Buddhist woman] plans to take her to a doctor next week.

Apparently, Senator Diane Feinstein called Tom Ridge’s office twice yesterday from California to say the situation was upsetting and that they had to do something about it. This perhaps says something about the mobilization that has been going on California!

See also: Tibetan nun’s path to asylum hindered

Tibetan nun’s path to asylum hindered (Washington Post)

January 26, 2004

Original article no longer available

Test of faith continues in a Virginia jail

David Cho, Washington Post: Sonam always feared her devotion to Buddhism would land her behind bars in her native China. As it turns out, she is serving a long term in jail — not in East Asia but in central Virginia. The 30-year-old Buddhist nun, who grew up in a Tibetan village near the foot of Mount Everest, fled to the United States last August after family members had been tortured and friends jailed for their faith, she said. But when she arrived at Dulles International Airport and requested asylum, federal immigration officials detained her and placed her in the local jail in this small city outside Richmond.

Sonam, who is known by that one name, has been here ever since except for a brief visit last November to a court room in Arlington where a federal immigration judge granted her asylum. But even as she was hugging her attorney in celebration, the lawyer from the Department of Homeland Security announced that she was appealing the case.

Sonam was then shackled and returned to her cell, where she waits for her next court date, which is likely to be in the fall at the earliest, her attorney said.

Sonam is among thousands of asylum seekers who have fled persecution in their homelands only to be jailed in the United States, a new report by the New York-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights shows.

Mandatory arrest
By law, the Department of Homeland Security detains all asylum seekers who arrive without proper documents. But since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, federal immigration officials have also been denying parole to these immigrants and appealing rulings in their favor, a practice that can keep them locked up for years, according to the report, which monitored the department’s activities for a year and details scores of cases, including Sonam’s.

Homeland Security officials deny they are trying to keep asylum seekers behind bars, although they acknowledge that long incarcerations occur. They say they are reviewing their practices in response to the report and are tallying statistics on how many asylum seekers have been detained, refused parole or seen their cases appealed.

“Even a well-balanced policy can get out of kilter on an individual case because someone has exercised poor judgment,” said Asa Hutchinson, the Homeland Security Department’s undersecretary for border and transportation security.

At the same time, he and others say there is concern that a terrorist could slip into the country under the guise of an asylum request.

“People who come here may have no legitimate [reason]. They are here for economic reasons or for criminal reasons and have been trained to assert asylum,” Hutchinson said.

“That requires us to be careful and . . . sometimes it makes people more skeptical of asylum cases than they should be.”

Flight and fear
Last week, during an interview at the Riverside Regional Jail, Sonam spoke of her journey to the United States that began with a desperate, eight-day walk to Nepal across snow-capped mountains and ended with her first ride on an airplane, which frightened her so much she couldn’t look out the window.

Sonam Singeri, a Tibetan working for Radio Free Asia who has befriended Sonam, was at the interview to translate. As soon as Sonam walked into the visitors’ room and saw Singeri, she collapsed into her arms and sobbed uncontrollably.

“It’s so lonely. It’s so hard. Why is this happening?” she cried out, Singeri said.

Sonam told a story of flight and fear. She said her father had been jailed in Tibet and tortured with electric shock. She described hiding from police patrols as she made her way across the Himalaya Mountains to Nepal, where she lived for three years.

But even there, she said, she worried about her safety. In May, the Nepalese government began to round up Tibetan refugees and send them back to China, where they were sure to face prison and torture, she said.

Even after asylum seekers such as Sonam have convinced immigration judges that they are bona fide and pose no threat, Homeland Security lawyers continue to press appeals in many cases, the Lawyers Committee report says.

‘Sending a message’
“They are indefinitely detaining asylum seekers who have already been granted relief, who present no risk, who have often been tortured in their home countries,” said Archi Pyati, who works in the Lawyers Committee’s asylum program.

“We are sending a message that in the United States . . . we don’t hope that asylum seekers find their way here because if they do they will find themselves in a very difficult situation and in prolonged detention.”

Immigrants seeking asylum in this country must prove not only their identities but also that they are in danger in their native countries.

Sonam’s case was appealed because she did not have enough documentation to back up her story, according to a brief filed by Homeland Security attorney Deborah Todd. The fact that Sonam lived in Nepal for three years indicated that she could have safely stayed there and did not need to come to the United States, Todd argued in her appeal.

Asked to comment, a spokesman for Homeland Security said the department does not talk about ongoing cases.

Sonam said she had no way to get identity documents in Nepal because the government does not recognize refugees from China. She feared that she would be deported to China along with other Tibetans who were being sent back at the time. So she sought a way to get to the United States.

Using the money she had made as a seamstress before she joined her monastery in Nepal, Sonam booked a flight through Calcutta to Dulles.

After she was jailed in Virginia, her attorney, who has taken the case pro bono, twice asked the Department of Homeland Security to release her from detention, arguing that Sonam poses no danger. But immigration officials denied both requests without much explanation, according to Sonam’s attorney.

Tears without speaking
The hardest part of her life these days is that she cannot speak or understand the language of the inmates or guards. (She is also illiterate in her native Tibetan tongue). She has not been able to have a conversation with anyone since her hearing last November and wept as she recounted her seemingly endless days of silence and isolation in jail.

“I live in a prison but always in my mind, I hold onto a picture of his Holiness [the Dalai Lama] in my heart,” she said. “This prison has become my monastery.”

An hour into the interview, a guard tapped the window of the visitors’ room. It was time to go.

Sonam shed a few more tears. It might be months before her next conversation. She hugged Singeri again and then followed the guard back to her part of the jail where she does not speak, cannot understand anyone and where she waits in her prison within a prison.

See also: Sonam set free

Resolve that 2003 will be a year of peace

December 31, 2002

By SEAN GONSALVES
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST
Seattle PI

Well, it’s New Year’s Eve and like millions of other Americans I’ve come up with a resolution. I hear that self-prescribed goals have a better chance of being met if the promise-maker shares it with someone else, based on the theory that most people want to live according to what they say they are going to do.

So I resolve to meditate more. Call it the Year of Meditation, which, according to many experienced contemplatives, is not a mere mental exercise but a prelude to right action.

Let the meditation begin. Right here. Right now.

I am led (compelled?) to meditate on peace, it being the holiday season.

But meditating on peace at a time when war is being advertised, or rather sold, as the way to peace gets confusing.

Considering my status as a spiritual weakling, I brought along some help via “The Little Book of Peace,” given to me as a Christmas present, hoping to stand on the shoulders of giants that I may catch a glimpse of a better world.

The great English novelist Joseph Conrad asserts that “what all men (and women) are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.”

Everyone — and I mean everyone — is for peace. Even Hitler wanted peace — not a just peace but a peace that excluded non-Aryans.

Of course, before Conrad there was the German monk Thomas à Kempis who expressed a similar sentiment: “All men desire peace but few indeed desire those things which make for peace.”

Or to put it another way: “Being a pacifist between wars is as easy as being a vegetarian between meals,” in the words of the Christian anarchist Ammon Hennacy. That’s why it’s not enough to call for peace. The important question is always: peace under what terms?

I’m amazed at some of the arguments hawks use to defend war policies, which usually go beyond polemics for a “just war” and descend into ridicule of pacifism and non-violence as being dangerously naive in the face of “reality” and human nature.

But there is truth about human nature contained in the Buddhist insight: “Hate is not conquered by hate. Hate is conquered by love. This is a law eternal.” Who can refute it?

Or how about the less esoteric observation made by Anna Julia Cooper, former slave turned feminist? “Peace produced by suppression is neither natural nor desirable.”

Why? Woodrow Wilson answers: “Victory would mean peace forced upon the losers, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which the terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only upon quicksand.” How’s that for keeping it real?

Yes, the world has changed since the days of so-called Wilsonian idealism — one notable change being that to express such a truism in public discourse is to run the risk of being blacklisted as a terrorist sympathizer.

But to sidestep the predictable consequences of war by pretending that the elimination of a particular enemy will bring peace is just as foolishly naive as peace activists’ vague calls for disarmament.

The world is not yet ready for disarmament. Doves would do well to consider what philosopher William James wrote in his famous study on religious experience. “What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proven itself to be incompatible.” Pro sports may be our best hope in this regard.

Until we find a “moral equivalent of war,” we will continue to have wars. Of course, that doesn’t mean we should lie to ourselves. Our military tradition, at its finest, is a legacy of brave men and women risking their lives to fight for our rights.

But let’s not deny that many, if not most, young people who join the services these days do so because they are looking for educational or job opportunities, not because they want to defend “freedom.”

And with our heavy reliance on superior air power and high-tech weaponry to fight our enemies, not only has the battlefield changed with modern war but the spiritual dynamics have changed also. And that comes with a high moral price.

“Technology has allowed the world of men in our society to separate itself from the sight and the sounds of killing; from the horror of it, but not from the killing. It must be easy to kill from a roomful of fluorescent lights and wash-and-wear shirts,” says Caryl Rivers, a Boston University professor.

And finally, there is A.J. Muste’s famous quip, which must irritate the sensibilities of those who ask: What is the way to peace? “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”

See archived article: Read more

Peace meditation in Sri Lanka’s Parliament

December 22, 2002