Holocaust Remembrance – Then and Now
Tuesday, April 21st is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and although it is painful, uncomfortable, and even shameful for some, it is important for us to solemnly remember this terrible act of genocide—and the complicity of the international community that allowed it to go on for as long as it did. Harry Wu, a Chinese dissident who spent almost 20 years in Chinese labor camps, also paid tribute to the more than 6 million victims of the Holocaust in a lecture last week at ICT. His chilling point was to remind us that over 20 million Chinese and Tibetans have died in Chinese labor camps. And that these camps continue to exist today.
Mr. Wu and Tubten Khetsun, who also spoke at ICT last week, were both prisoners of Chinese prisons during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s. They told us of conditions frighteningly similar to those of Nazi concentration camps: starvation, exposure, long hours of forced labor, no sanitation, no connection to the outside world, and most importantly, imprisonment based solely on belonging to a certain group of people. These prisons, then and now, rely on secrecy and the ignorance of the outside world to continue to operate. Tubten Khetsun-la said although his situation was terrible, he heard that prisoners in camps farther outside the city fared even worse.
When we think of prisoners in the US, we mostly think of the time they spend behind bars, their loss of freedom, as a fair punishment for the harm they have done in society. In this country, criminals do not forfeit their basic human rights. Protection from particularly cruel or unusual punishment is guaranteed by the founding document of our nation, the Constitution. This is not the case in the People’s Republic of China. In the PRC, the corruption of the judicial system, the frequent arbitrary arrests, and the classification of basic human acts as political crimes, mean that many people in prison are not what we consider criminals. In the PRC , murderers and peaceful protestors alike are subjected to forced labor and denial of their basic human rights in prisons.
At the end of the talk, a reporter from Radio Free Asia told a compelling story of nuns in detention in Tibet today. A Tibetan prison guard was so appalled by the treatment of these nuns that when she left the detention center she searched until she could find their families to tell them what was going on. The nuns work from 5am until 11pm making plastic toys and carving gemstones for international export. This is not a problem that remains isolated in China.
In the 1930s, the confusion and naivety of the international community lead to the rise of Nazi Germany. Remembrance of the Holocaust since has always accompanied a commitment toward ending torture and genocide when history starts repeating itself anywhere in the world. Given this pledge, countries around the world, including the US , should not be timid in examining closely what the PRC is doing behind its veil of secrecy and public relations. Let us learn from our mistakes but also from our success, and unite the international community again on the side of human rights and justice, to finally bring an end to torture in China and Tibet forever.
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While Chinese atrocities must be expose and opposed, let’s not be complacent about human rights abuses closer to home. “Protection from particularly cruel or unusual punishment is guaranteed by the founding document of our nation, the Constitution” In many cases this written guarantee is simply not observed. It is also worth noting that the US is still holding many people without trial (recently including some children in Guantanamo), has been using torture, and has kidnapped and ‘disappeared’ many people through ‘extraordinary rendition’. The prison population of the US (some two million people) is disproportionately black and works for private companies who profit from this trapped source of labour.