(CNSNews.com) – Negotiations now under way to reach a free-trade agreement between
Australia and China will have no bearing on the way Australia handles a Chinese
diplomat who is seeking asylum, Australian Prime Minister John Howard said.
Chen
Yonglin’s application for a protection visa would be treated on its merits, and
would "not be influenced by trade and economic considerations,"
he
said Thursday.
Howard was speaking after more allegations emerged of Chinese
spying on dissidents in Western countries, including the United States.
Chen,
who has been in hiding with his wife and daughter since leaving the Chinese consulate-general
in Sydney last month, caused a stir when he made an appearance at a weekend rally
marking the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
He claimed Beijing
had up to a thousand spies in Australia and that it also had kidnapped some Australia-based
dissidents, returning them to China.
He said his job as first secretary
at the consulate for four years had involved monitoring dissidents and adherents
of Falun Gong, a meditation movement China has outlawed and is trying to stamp
out.
Chen also complained that the Australian immigration authorities had
not taken his case seriously, which he said prompted his decision to go public.
The government’s handling of the case came under fire, with critics charging
that it was reluctant to grant Chen asylum for fear of antagonizing the notoriously
sensitive Chinese regime in the light of negotiations for a lucrative free-trade
agreement (FTA) with the region’s fastest-growing economy.
In his first
public remarks on the issue, Howard said in Sydney that Chen’s request for a special
visa allowing him to stay in the country was "not going to be influenced
by the amount of iron ore or coal that we sell to China."
He compared
the situation to an earlier one in which Australian farmers complaining about
American trading policies had urged the government to use its strategic relationship
with Washington to demand changes to U.S. trade practices. The government refused
to allow the matter to affect the military alliance.
"In relation
to the United States we separated trade and economics from politics and strategy,"
he said. "Now we adopt the same approach with the Chinese."
"I’m
sure that our Chinese friends will understand that when it comes to issues like
this, you make a decision on the merits."
Health Minister Tony Abbott
separately told reporters that Chen was "at no risk of being sent back to
China."
China is Australia’s third-largest trading partner, after
Japan and the U.S.
‘Torture’
Since Chen made his high-profile bid,
another Chinese defector has come forward to support his spying claims.
Former
state security official Hao Fengjun, who is also seeking asylum, said a network
of spies and informants did exist in Australia. He said they reported directly
to the state security bureau in China, rather than to Chinese diplomatic missions.
Hao said he was a member of the 610 Office, a unit which human rights researchers
say was set up in 1999 specifically to tackle the Falun Gong.
Named for its
date of inception (June 10), its official title is "Office of the Leadership
Team to Handle the Falun Gong Issue."
Hao said he collated and analyzed
documents sent by informants spying on Falun Gong and other groups in several
countries, including Australia, the U.S., Canada and New Zealand.
In Beijing,
foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao dismissed the spying allegations, calling
them "fabrications and lies."
Liu said China-Australia relations
should not suffer as a result of the incident.
Australian Attorney-General
Philip Ruddock indicated that intelligence agencies were investigating the spying
claims.
Following the disclosures made by Chen and Hao, the lawyer of a
third Chinese man — a former security official who already has refugee status
— has gone public with his client’s claims of witnessing abuses and torture carried
out by plainclothes members of the 610 Office, which he called an "insidious
Gestapo apparatus."
The defector’s lawyer, Bernard Collaery, told
Australian television his client had fled to Australia and applied for asylum
after witnessing and being unable to prevent the beating to death of a Falun Gong
prisoner "with the use of electric prods."
The series of public
allegations has put pressure on Howard’s government, whose political opponents
have questioned the morality of negotiating an FTA with a regime notorious for
violating human rights.
In New Zealand, center-left Prime Minister Helen
Clark is also seeking an FTA with China, and is also facing criticism because
of the human rights issue.
"Kowtowing to China has upset New Zealanders
right across the political spectrum," Green Party co-leader Rod Donald said
in a speech Saturday.
"No one can understand how Helen Clark, who
has a strong reputation for standing up for human rights, can turn a blind eye
to the many abuses the Chinese regime perpetuates on the people of occupied Tibet
and on its own citizens."
Beijing banned the Falun Gong movement in
1999, describing it as a threat to state security. At the time the government
estimated the number of adherents at at least 70 million.
Practitioners
claim it is a peaceful movement with roots in traditional Chinese culture, practiced
in 60 countries around the world.
Since the Chinese crackdown began, the
Falun Dafa Information Center in New York says it has verified more than 2,300
deaths.
The U.S. State Department said in its most recent global report
on human rights that "tens of thousands of [Falun Gong] practitioners remained
incarcerated in prisons, extrajudicial reeducation-through-labor camps, and psychiatric
facilities."
The group in Australia issued a statement Thursday urging
Canberra to grant asylum to the two defectors, and voicing the hope that "just
as with the concentration camps in Nazi Germany, the treatment of Falun Gong practitioners
and what they have been subjected to in these labor camps will not remain a secret
for much longer."
http://www.townhall.com/news/politics/200506/FOR20050610a.shtml
Posting date: 10/Jun/2005
Original article date: 10/Jun/2005
Category:
Media Report
