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World Cup fever is in full swing – the event shines a geopolitical spotlight on every nation showcased on a daily basis. This time around, the public relations initiatives behind each team seem to be near-tangible. For some of the more oppressive regimes, they may even be downright embarrassing.

Since leaving the country is an impossibility for prison- er, citizens of North Korea, the marketing gurus from the Jong-Il administration have decided to recruit their Chinese friends to make the trip for them and support the Chollima, the nickname of North Korea’s embattled but unbowed soccer team.

And so the Beijing office of the North Korean Sports Committee is dolling out tickets to the tournament, China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency reported. The Chinese fans, hired to be dressed head to toe with North Korean fan attire, will attend North Korea’s games against Brazil and Portugal.

North Korea is looking to distribute at least 1,000 tickets to these Chinese rent-a-fans.

North Korean President Kim Jong Il, the ‘all-powerful, everlasting son of the Eternal Leader’, is reputed not merely to meddle in the team, but actually to pick it. This will be yet another example of the politics behind the players, and symbolize the erratic authoritarianism behind the world’s most secretive regime.

I for one, will be watching their upcoming match with Brazil with pen and pad in hand.

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Premier Wen will start a two-day visit to Myanmar on Wednesday, on the ‘occasion‘ of the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations between China and Myanmar.

During his visit, Wen will meet Myanmar’s top leader Senior-General Than Shwe, Prime Minister U Thein Sein and other government officials. The two sides will sign a package of documents aimed at strengthening economic and trade cooperation, Ye told Xinhua.

What is truly astonishing is not simply that the meeting is being hailed as near-joyous by both the Chinese and Myanmar diplomatic communities, but that is critically coincides with the Chinese government being pressured to take a firm international stance on the growing North and South Korean dispute. Watching China’s instant condemnation of the Israeli assault on an aid flotilla bound for Gaza, South Koreans must be wondering more than ever if rather than when China will muster a clear response to their own nautical tragedy.

“We believe that Premier Wen’s visit is bound to create positive and far-reaching influence on Sino-Myanmar relations and could open up a new page of Sino-Myanmar good-neighborly and friendly cooperation,” he said.

China values its traditional friendship with Myanmar, wishes to further boost cooperation in all areas and hopes that the two countries will always be good neighbors, good friends and good partners, Ye said. However when human rights are fundamentally pushed to the wayside at every turn, questions begin to really build when referencing the growing superpower, its controversial ties and its prospective geopolitical strategy.

The Myanmar government has always stuck to the “one China” principle, and stood by the Chinese government in dealing with major issues pertaining to China’s core interests. China has always supported the Myanmar government in its efforts to safeguard the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and unfortunately so for the millions calling for independence in Tibet and the thousands cut off from communicative access from right within the heart of China.

China sincerely hopes Myanmar to be politically stable, democratically progressive, nationally reconciled, economically developed and socially harmonious, he said. To say the future of democracy in Myanmar is clouded by the ruling junta’s dire clutch to authority and rampant use of political persecutions as weapons in their defense.

Ye said the two sides have closely coordinated in international and regional affairs and cooperation has been strengthened in economics and trade, culture, education, religion, military affairs as well as combating transnational crimes.

China now stands as Myanmar’s third largest trading partner and investor. In 2009, bilateral trade totaled 2.907 billion U.S. dollars. Up to January 2010, China’s investment in Myanmar amounted to 1.848 billion dollars, accounting for 11.5 percent of Myanmar’s total foreign investment, he said.

In recent years, the two sides have expanded cooperation in the sectors of hydropower, energy, mining, communications, fishery, manufacturing and infrastructure, and have made frequent exchanges in culture, news and sports, Ye said.

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Thirteen years ago, in March 1997, China threatened trade sanctions against countries that continued to cosponsor the annual U.N. Human Rights Commission resolution on China—a public, periodic reminder of the human rights problems extant in the People’s Republic.

This was part of a shift in the Chinese Communist Party’s response to those who criticized its human rights practices after the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989. Previously, governments had addressed rights violations in China with a combined approach of diplomacy and public censure, bilaterally, and multilaterally.

What changed was a cessation of public censure and multilateral action as a quid pro quo for bilateral dialogue. Engagement became the buzzword. The driver of these changes was, of course, Beijing, “with the objective of eliminating multilateral pressure,” observes NGO, Human Rights in China (HRIC).
Making dialogues bilateral rather than multilateral has numerous implications, the Epoch Times’ Matthew Robertson explains. “As early as 1998 HRIC, in its ‘From Principle to Pragmatism’ report, noted these deleterious effects. They include that action or inaction on human rights will be more closely linked to trade relationships, as countries sitting across the table from China will be unwilling to jeopardize trade to pursue human rights outcomes; a lack of progress benchmarks; the human rights of Chinese citizens becoming a bargaining chip; the shutting out of NGOs and activist groups, who are most familiar with experiences of human rights abuse; and as Dr. Ann Kent of the Australian National University put it, the whole process becomes ’secretive, nontransparent, unaccountable, and totally ineffective.’”

To the careful observer, the CCP’s move to have Western governments abandon a multilateral approach for a bilateral one, with all its attendant problems of opacity and ineffectualness, bears an uncanny resemblance to the same divide-and-conquer tactics practiced against domestic enemies. The Party has always made deft use of the weaknesses of its enemies, and as such few groups in China have managed to mount any meaningful, sustained resistance to it. Their constituents are isolated and destroyed one after the other.

To cite one example, in dealing with labor unions the Party implants spies, breeds an atmosphere of mistrust, differentiates levels of punishment per quota of cooperation, effectively cutting deals so individuals sell each other out, and it punishes mercilessly those identified as “ringleaders,” while others receive minimal sanctions. The group crumbles. Similar dynamics of isolation and pressure were used against intellectuals, “rightists,” and “counterrevolutionaries” in the 1950s and 1960s, and are used against Tibetans and Falun Gong practitioners today.

As individuals facing off against the Party, none stand a chance. As a group, there is some hope to gain concessions and compel change—because compulsion is the only thing the CCP knows. “The pusillanimous acquiescence of Western governments to the Party’s strong-arm tactics, then, is a clear backward slide“, Robertson explains.

It is now much as professor of East Asian studies at Princeton, Perry Link, wrote in “The Anaconda in the Chandelier”: “In sum, the Chinese government’s censorial authority in recent times has resembled not so much a man-eating tiger or fire-snorting dragon as a giant anaconda coiled in an overhead chandelier. Normally the great snake doesn’t move. It doesn’t have to. It feels no need to be clear about its prohibitions. Its constant silent message is ‘You yourself decide,’ after which, more often than not, everyone in its shadow makes his or her large and small adjustments—all quite ‘naturally.’”

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In his April 15, 2010 article in Foreign Policy Magazine, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili wrote about the significant progress his country has made in nation-building and consolidation of a liberal democracy.

In the piece entitled “Failed No Longer,” Saakashvili touched upon almost all aspects of Georgia’s internal development, foreign policy priorities, security issues, international engagement and, of course, the hurdles erected by Russia’s current leadership to obstruct Georgia’s freedom of choice.

The article appeared at a time when a high-profile Nuclear Security Summit, hosted by U.S. President Barack Obama, was taking place in Washington, DC in which the Georgian president was a participant. That was the reason why analysts working on Georgia-related issues paid particular attention to the part of the article that mentioned Georgia’s efforts to “break up numerous uranium smuggling attempts.”

But there was at least one revelation in President Saakashvili’s publication that also deserves due consideration and analysis. “Very early in my presidency,” Saakashvili wrote “then Russian President Vladimir Putin called me to say that he would be ready to accept our new Georgian regime, as long as … he could name our ministers of interior and foreign affairs.” Apparently, this conversation took place sometime in early 2004, shortly after the Rose Revolution – a peaceful popular protest in which the corrupt regime of Eduard Shevardnadze was ousted and liberal reformers led by U.S.-educated Saakashvili came to power.

It is not the first time that President Saakashvili openly talked about his phone conversation with Putin. Speaking to the Georgian public and media he had mentioned the Russian leader’s ‘offer’ before but, arguably, he never spoke of this in the international press.

Georgia’s de-Sovietization has been manifested in several directions but a comprehensive police reform has been by far the most illustrative example. Although the reforms carried out in the education, justice, economic and the public service systems are no less significant, the transformation that the Georgian police have undergone under Minister of Internal Affairs Vano Merabishvili truly leaves nothing to remind of the Soviet past or Russia’s present. Instead of a Soviet-styled force having almost no public support and deeply marred in corruption some six years ago, now Georgia has a police trusted by 81% of the public, according to the opinion poll conducted by the International Republican Institute (IRI) nearly one month ago. For comparison, the same survey gives 57% to the Georgian president’s administration and 56% to the government.

Any westerner traveling across the countries that once belonged to the Soviet Union would say that police both in form and function are almost identical in all of them – except for the Baltic nations and Georgia – and have little semblance of what police really represent in the West. Russia and most of the post-Soviet states still even officially call their police force a militia (militsia) as in the old-Soviet times and their uniforms have only slightly changed if at all.

In Russia’s public discourse, interest toward Georgia’s police reform has been coupled with even bigger fascination with Georgian Minister Merabishvili’s persona and “sovereign rights.” He has been interviewed by Russian journalists more often than ever before and his laconic expressions have been broadly debated in the Russian press. One might even argue that a Merabishvili myth is being created in Russia, drawing on enigma and suspicion similar to those attached to Pyotr Stolypin, Russia’s reformist minister of the interior and then-prime minister under Tsar Nicolas II at the beginning of the 20th century.

On March 29, one of Russia’s widely-read newspapers, Kommersant, broadly covered Georgia’s police reform conveying to Russian readers the success story of Georgia’s Western-style, “top-notch” and “high-tech” law enforcement agency. The online edition of the newspaper even put out the musical advertisement that Georgian police use to recruit young officers.

Russians have reason to look to the Georgian police for inspiration and as a blueprint for comprehensive reform. According to Kommersant, only 22% of Russians trust their police, a force which is considered by the public as corrupt and inefficient. In his recent article published on April 4, Stephen Sestanovich, an influential Russia expert at the Council on Foreign Relations wrote on the merits of Georgia’s police transformation and advised Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to follow suit. “Only one political leader in any post-Soviet state has ever attempted this kind of institutional upheaval, and the comparison is an ironic one for Medvedev. For that leader is … Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia, who soon after becoming president in 2004 fired more than 80% of the country’s police officers…But however awkward the parallel may be, there are lessons in it for Medvedev. Saakashvili’s reform succeeded precisely because it was so radical.”

Let’s imagine that Georgia had had a Putin-appointed minister of internal affairs. Not only would that have meant the lack of even basic internal sovereignty, but would also have ruled out the possibility of any reform. That is how sovereignty and modernization are intertwined in Georgian reality and that is why Putin so vigorously opposes both.

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Gao disappeared in January 2009, when he was taken into police custody. For more than a year, his family and associates had no idea of where he was. This week, he unexpectedly returned to his home in Beijing, where he spoke with journalists. Though most of the mystery surrounding human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng’s disappearance has now been solved with his return to Beijing, doubts about his well-being persist.

It is dishearteningly controversial to hear Gao state he will give up political activism and championing the rights of China’s disadvantaged groups. However, many feel for his plight and understand that he is lucky to be alive; the clear message Chinese authorities sent to him over a year ago may have deterred his adamancy for political reform.

Continued, as excerpted from Voice of America:

Joshua Rosenzweig is from the Dui Hua Foundation rights group – which campaigned for Gao’s release. He says he is concerned Gao has been forced by Chinese security authorities to choose between his career and his family.

And he says it is still unclear if Gao has been freed or if he is still under police surveillance or even detention.

“It would be easier to accept Gao’s choice and his statement if there wasn’t still the strong suspicion that those choices are not being made wholly voluntarily and he’s been subjected to a great deal of pressure and even coercion,” he said.

Looking thinner than before he was charged with subversion and taken away, the often tearful Gao said that he had been through what he described as cruel experiences. He said he now wants to put the past behind him.

Gao says the main basis for given up activism is for the sake of his family. He adds that being reunited with his loved ones is his instinctive goal.

He says his children need him as they grow up.

Gao says he knows his decision to retire will disappoint many – but he wants what he describes as relative control over his life.

Rosenzweig says international pressure from governments and the foreign media had forced Beijing to let the world know where and how Gao was.

And he says the loss of the lawyer – who spoke up for the poor and oppressed groups such as the Falun Gong spiritual movement – would leave a gaping hole in Chinese activism.

Gao’s wife and two children live in the United States. They escaped from China following his arrest.

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Japanese Migrants in Japan face discrimination, exploitation and a wide variety of other forms of mistreatment, an independent United Nations human rights expert recently stated, as he urged the Japanese Government to strengthen their protection. He also alluded to the atrociously high incidence of domestic violence against migrant women and their children

“They [migrants] still face a range of challenges, including racism and discrimination, exploitation, a tendency by the judiciary and police to ignore their rights, and the overall lack of a comprehensive immigration policy that incorporates human rights protection,” said Jorge A. Bustamante, UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, at the end of a nine-day visit to Japan on Wednesday.

“Japan should establish institutionalized programmes designed to create the necessary conditions for the integration of migrants into Japanese society and the respect of their rights, including to work, health, housing and education, without discrimination,” Mr. Bustamante said.

“Racism and discrimination based on nationality are still too common in Japan, including in the workplace, in schools, in healthcare establishments and housing,” he added. Existing general provisions are not effective in protecting foreign residents from discrimination based on race and nationality, he said.

Mr. Bustamante expressed concern about the policy of detaining irregular migrants, including asylum-seekers, parents and children, for prolonged periods, in some cases for as long as three years, saying that practice amounted to a “de facto indefinite detention.”

Noting that a considerable number of migrant children in Japan do not attend school, Mr. Bustamante said that “governmental efforts should be increased to facilitate that foreign children study either in Japanese or foreign schools, and learn Japanese.”

The Special Rapporteur will later this year present to the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council a complete report on his visit, with his observations and recommendations.

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The 10 member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will convene in Hanoi from April 8 to April 9 with an agenda many officials claim will range from economic integration to the much-needed political reforms in Myanmar.  The goal of course is to push the junta to allow opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi to take part in the country’s elections.

The Jakarta Post reports that pressure has mounted over the last few years specifically  for the military junta in Yangon to repeal electoral regulations prohibiting convicts to join political parties and run for office, and in turn allow Suu Kyi to take part in the polls. Many believe these regulations continue to be in place specifically because of the political threat the regime feels Suu Kyi poses.

The poll date has not been announced, but it will be held before Suu Kyi’s house arrest is over.

The Nobel laureate is currently serving 18 months on charges of violating the terms of her previous stint under house arrest.

Continued, as excerpted from the Jakarta Post:

Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa said the country would push the demand that Suu Kyi be made part of the solution in Myanmar’s democratization.

“It is very important for all the parties concerned to be part of the solution; in other words, not to have a mindset that one party is being sidelined or pushed into a corner or pressed,” he said at a press conference last week.

“Everyone must see that they have a stake in an orderly democratization process. Suu Kyi’s role [in a future government] could be a positive one, and we hope very much that the authorities in Myanmar also see this.”

Jakarta has not announced its agenda in the ASEAN Summit, but officials say leaders will take stock of the development of the bloc’s economic, security and sociocultural integration under one ASEAN community by 2015, as well as the thorny issue of Myanmar.

In previous ASEAN Summits, Myanmar has always been one of the key issues in the agenda.

Observers say the Myanmar polls will be a turning point for which ASEAN will be judged by its success in engaging the junta in democratization.

They add the Myanmar junta has for years been an embarrassment to ASEAN leaders, who are criticized by accommodating the interests of a rogue state.

Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) researcher Yasmin Sungkar said the exclusivity of Myanmar’s polls would not only hurt the democratization process of the country, but also impact on ASEAN integration.

“The success of Myanmar’s election depends much on its inclusiveness, but how the current leaders are allowing that to happen isn’t satisfactory,” she said.

“Democratization in Myanmar might have to wait.”

ASEAN leaders, particularly from democracies such as Indonesia and the Philippines, have issued several statements appealing for their Myanmar counterparts to quash Suu Kyi’s conviction and allow her to join the elections.

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Beginning this year, however, the New York Times has reported that first-time offenders may no longer have to live in fear. In the first major effort to upgrade a prison system that has changed little since Stalin established it more than 70 years ago, career criminals will be separated from the general prison population and housed in new prisons with cellblocks, rather than barracks.

President Dmitri Medvedev is pushing the measure to first break up the culture of barracks life and then to do away with common inmate housing almost entirely.

Continued, as excerpted from the New York Times:

Common barracks are unusual outside the former Soviet Union and parts of Africa, according to a London-based advocacy group, Penal Reform International. Western European and American correctional institutions typically rely on large cellblocks, with a few inmates to a cell.

Yet the vast majority of Russian prisoners — 724,000 out of a total prison population of 862,000 — still live in freestanding barracks, rough-hewn, low-slung buildings of wood or brick encircled by barbed wire, usually in a remote place. Low-cost and high-volume, they are modest upgrades of the camps of the 1930s to 1950s and hold the second largest per capita inmate population in the world, trailing only the United States.

The overhaul calls for a three-stage unwinding of the barracks housing system and the abolition of all 755 penal colonies, what remains of Stalin’s gulag, by 2020.

Under the plan, some sites will be renamed “settlement colonies,” a sort of minimum security prison. Hardened prisoners will be moved to cellblocks, though only just over 2,700 inmates live in cells in Russia today.

In the first stage, recidivists will be put in separate colonies apart from the general prison population. So far, officials have relocated 64,000 of 149,000 prisoners scheduled for transfer.

By 2016, prison officials say, they intend to separate the most violent first-time offenders from petty criminals, and by 2020 move them and the recidivists into new prisons with cellblocks. After that, the category of “correctional colony” would cease to exist in the Russian penal system.

Human rights groups praised the new approach, but given Russia’s recent track record on rights, they said they doubted whether it would be fully carried out. “Russian prisons are widely acknowledged to be troubled institutions with poor conditions, torture and ill treatment,” said Allison Gill, director of Human Rights Watch in Russia.

The effort represents a departure from a long tradition of Russian corrections philosophy. Correctional officers had openly — and legally until this January — used the coarse social groupings that arose in the barracks to help run the colonies.

Until the changes, all groups lived packed in the same barracks. And though rights groups say murders are common, the Russian prison service provides no data on violent death.

The overall mortality rate of 464 deaths from all causes per 100,000 inmates in Russian prison colonies, though, is well above the 251 deaths per 100,000 inmates in state prisons in the United States, the institutions where the vast majority of American convicts do time.

Aleksandr N. Khramov, a lanky 22-year-old convicted murderer, wore the red armband of an activist as he kept watch in a barracks corridor. Mr. Khramov said he chose to become an activist while still on the train to the colony, after a fellow inmate advised him that it was the best tactic for survival or early release.

The ranks of the activists were greatly increased over the past decade under a strategy to regain control of the barracks from gangs headed by the so-called authorities, said Valery V. Borshov, a former member of Parliament who oversaw a committee on prison reform. Reinforcing the Discipline and Order Squads, he said, harked back to the Soviet-era technique for barracks management.

“It was reminiscent of the kapo in the fascist camps,” Mr. Borshov said of empowering some prisoners to act as guards. The activists would do things like beat confessions out of prisoners, an activity that was tantamount, he said, to outsourcing abuses of human rights. “It’s a very dangerous system, and it was only abolished in Russia this year.”

Aleksei V. Chudin, the deputy warden at Mr. Khramov’s colony, and a lifelong guard in the gulag, said he saw the wisdom in the new policy to limit barracks violence. But he said the hierarchies created by male criminals in prison would never go away.

Breaking up barracks of a hundred inmates into cells with four men, he said, will just create more of them.

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The departure effectively removes the biggest foreign player from the world’s most populous and fastest-growing internet market. But the ramifications beyond page B1 of the Wall Street Journal are far more severe.

Access to information is a fundamental pillar of human rights. Through forcing Google out, China is now ostentatiously and abhorrently a symbol of prosperity first, society later. With systematic blackouts throughout politically-tumultuous regions of the nation, with millions upon millions of citizens denied even basic access to the internet and with what little information was open and debatable now forced to leave town, China has become a nation under a heavy veil of repression.There was really no other option for those at Google. EE Times’ Dylan McGrath wrote that “…for Google to tuck its tail between its legs and continue to abide by Chinese government censorship policies could not be construed as anything but evil“.

Google’s closure in China would leave the internet-which has about 400 million users-more than any other country in the world, almost completely dominated by local companies, companies which have no choice but to adhere to Chinese law and accept the heavy censorship as to the disclosure of information.

Economically, “the danger for the Chinese internet scene is that it becomes a less competitive place“, said Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of Danwei.org, a site about the media and the internet in China.

In this age of geopolitical assertiveness from the rising China, we note that human rights have become less and less relevant even in discussing the nation’s ongoing affairs. It is truly a travesty that not only will atrocities to basic rights in China be pigeonholed in the wayside, they will now not even be able to be found at all.

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Outside the court, US and European diplomats called for the immediate release of the 54-year-old Liu, a writer and one-time professor who was first detained in December 2008 after co-authoring a manifesto calling for political reform in China.

US ambassador Jon Huntsman said in a statement after the ruling that Washington was “disappointed” and lamented what he called the “persecution” of citizens expressing their political views.

Liu had been jailed before over the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy protests.

Last month, four retired Communist Party officials signed an open letter to the government calling for a review of Liu’s case. They suggested his conviction violated some of the principles for which they had fought.

“His harsh sentence is a stark reminder to the Chinese people and the world that there is still no freedom of expression or independent judiciary in China,” says Roseann Rife, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Amnesty International.

Liu, a scholar and literary critic, was charged with “incitement to subversion” because he coauthored Charter 08, a petition for political freedom and an end to the ruling Communist party’s monopoly of power. The online petition has garnered thousands of signatures since it was released just over a year ago.

His wife, Liu Xia, was given rare permission to attend yesterday’s brief court hearing, after being barred from the trial itself.

She told The Australian this week: “History will prove that Xiaobo is right.”

In his appeal, his lawyers said the court “lacked the commonsense” to distinguish between the government and ruling party, which Liu had criticised, and the state — which he did not attack.

They also pointed to abuse of process — including Liu’s detention in solitary confinement in a small, windowless cell rather than in his home as required by law.

Charter 08 was originally signed by 303 people from a cross-section of China — intellectuals, editors, lawyers, artists and people who described themselves as peasants and workers.

It then attracted a further 10,000 signatories. The ruling Communist Party was concerned that so many people had been able to communicate their support for discussion about the authority of its rule without its knowledge.

The manifesto took its name from Charter 77, a petition written in 1977 against Soviet occupation by Czech intellectuals, led by Vaclav Havel, who went on to become president for 14 years.

Mr Havel and a group of Czech politicians have nominated Liu for the Nobel Peace Prize.

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