Arcadia Foundation

A Chinese dissident who tried to help victims of last year’s Sichuan earthquake was jailed for three years on Monday on charges of illegally possessing state secrets, his wife said, decrying the sentence as “revenge“.

The court decision is another sign that China is in no mood to ease political controls after last week’s visit by U.S. President Barack Obama, who pressed the government on human rights.

Huang Qi was convicted by a court in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in the nation’s southwest where the earthquake on May 12 last year killed at least 80,000 people, including children crushed in schools that collapsed.

A veteran human rights activist, Huang was detained in June last year after offering to help parents protesting that schools which fell in the quake were vulnerable due to shoddy and corrupt building practices. The government has said that 5,335 schoolchildren died in the earthquake or remain missing.

Huang’s wife, Zeng Li, who attended the hearing, said he received the maximum sentence for charges of illegally possessing state secrets, but the judge and prosecutors did not say in the courtroom what secrets he was accused of holding.

“They still won’t say what the specific charge is, not even at the verdict. They just spoke of documents related to a certain matter,” Zeng stated by telephone.

“I think it was revenge for the earthquake and his other work. But the court would not even give me a copy of the verdict.”

In Honduras, voters are preparing to choose a new president Sunday from the political establishment that has dominated Honduras for decades.

No one is pushing the leftist agenda of the ousted leader, who said he was trying to lift a country where seven in 10 people are poor. He was also disturbing a deeply conservative society that has long cherished peace and stability.

“It’s a risk-averse culture,” said Manuel Orozco, a Central America expert with the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue.

Even many of the poor who supported Zelaya as he aligned himself with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Latin America’s new left say they will vote for conservative front-runner Porfirio Lobo, a wealthy 61-year-old businessman who is ahead by double digits in the polls.

“I will vote for the one who can fix this and give us work right now, because those suffering are the poor,” said Reina Gomez, a single mother who supported Zelaya in 2005.

Honduras has always been run by a handful of families who control the news media, economy and every power sphere from the military to the Supreme Court.

While many Hondurans want reform, they were slow to trust Zelaya, a wealthy rancher elected from one of the two major conservative parties.

Zelaya “belongs to the elite, and he chose to dismiss his own peers and paid the price for that,” Orozco said. “Those leaders have a hard time communicating their message. They think that because you like the poor, the poor are going to like you.”

The proliferation of kingdoms and chiefdoms in Uganda and the concerted calls for ‘majimboism’ in Kenya do not augur well for a regional political federation.

According to the EAC secretary general, Mr Juma Mwapachu, if the region was really committed to a viable political partnership it should do away with ethnic political groupings like the kingdoms being promoted in Uganda.

He further noted here on Tuesday that equally important was the issue of checking and taming political violence that engulfed Kenya immediately after the 2007 general election.

Mr Mwapachu sounded these warnings in a speech to open the 12th Conference on Democratic Transition in East Africa organised here by the Research and Education for Democracy in Tanzania (REDET) of the University of Dar es Salaam.

He said the organisation of the conference in Arusha, which is hosting celebrations of the EAC 10th Anniversary, was relevant and timely.

It will contribute towards addressing political challenges facing the regional integration process, he explained.

He said another political challenge that should be squarely addressed in the context of the EAC political federation is the issue of Zanzibar in the Union Government of Tanzania.

Mr Mwapachu said he was upbeat about the recent consensus reached by the Zanzibar Revolutionary Government and the opposition Civil United Front.

He told journalists that a government of national unity or a coalition in the isles would be okay provided it addressed the pertinent issues that for many years had divided Zanzibaris.

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