Chen Guangcheng lawyer says dissident feels ‘pressure’ and fears for his safety
By Keith B. Richburg and Jia Lynn Yang, Updated: Wednesday, May 2, 1:08 PM
BEIJING — A lawyer for blind activist Chen Guangcheng on Wednesday questioned a U.S.-brokered deal to guarantee Chen’s safety in China and said that, after leaving the protection of the U.S. Embassy here, the dissident may have no choice but to go to the United States.
Chen traveled from the diplomatic compound to a Beijing hospital with U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke on Wednesday afternoon, but soon found himself surrounded by Chinese plainclothes police, with no American diplomats in sight.
While U.S. officials insisted that they had received promises from the Chinese government that assured the safety of Chen and his family, activists and Chen’s lawyers said Chen apparently either agreed to the deal under duress or, after arriving at the hospital, began having second thoughts.
“The Chinese government has made many promises on many things, but they never keep their promise,” Chen’s lawyer, Teng Biao, said. “They like to punish people afterward.”
Activists who had spoken with Chen said he had been told that his wife and children, who had been brought to the capital to be reunited with him, would be sent back to Shandong province and could be beaten to death if he did not exit the U.S. diplomatic compound.
Zeng Jinyan, a blogger and activist married to Chen’s friend Hu Jia, said on her Twitter account that Chen “always insisted on staying in China,” and that U.S. diplomats at the embassy “asked Chen repeatedly and respected his will.”
She said Chen’s wife, Yua Weijing, said she was the one who persuaded Chen to leave the embassy to meet her and the children. “On the phone tonight, Chen Guangcheng told me for the first time that his whole family wanted to leave,” Zeng wrote.
Chen fled months of de facto house arrest last month and sought refuge for six days at the U.S. Embassy. American officials said Wednesday that they accepted him at the embassy on humanitarian grounds. As part of the deal reached with Chinese officials in four days of marathon negotiations, they say, the Chinese government agreed to allow Chen and his family to move away from their village and investigate why authorities in the village allowed armed thugs in plain clothes to confine Chen in his house and prevent others from seeing him.
The State Department sharply denied claims that embassy officials or diplomats had told Chen that the Chinese government was threatening his wife or children.
“At no time did any U.S. official speak to Chen about physical or legal threats to his wife and children,” said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland. “Nor did Chinese officials make any such threats to us.”
Nuland said that U.S. officials understood that if Chen stayed in the embassy, Chinese officials would bring the family back to Shangdong and they would lose their ability to negotiate for a reunion. She added that at no point did Chen request political asylum.
“At every opportunity, he expressed his desire to stay in China, reunify with his family, continue his education and work for reform in his country,” said Nuland. “All our diplomacy was directed at putting him in the best possible position to achieve his objectives.”
Still, what initially seemed like a potential human rights victory for the Obama administration was spiraling quickly into a potentially worst-case scenario, fueled by a series of Twitter updates.
Chen was no longer under American protection, it was not clear whether he had left on his own free will or under coercion, and while U.S. officials said they had been promised access to Chen in the hospital, Britain’s Channel 4 news quoted a conversation with Chen in which he seemed confused and upset that no U.S. diplomats were around.
“Nobody from the (U.S.) embassy is here. I don’t understand why. They promised to be here,” Channel 4 quoted Chen as saying.
Teng, the lawyer, told The Washington Post that he spoke with Chen several times during the evening. “He felt his safety is threatened. He feels pressure now,” Teng said. “In fact, from his language, I can tell that the decision to leave the is embassy was not 100 percent his idea.”
In the meantime, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner were in Beijing, preparing for a high-level summit between the two countries on trade and security issues.
“I’m somewhat surprised by the U.S. government’s willingness to accept the Chinese government’s assurances or even to get Hillary Clinton to work for Chen’s safety in the long term,” said Nicholas Bequelin, senior Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, based in Hong Kong. “It seems they’ve taken a huge risk with this’”
Some human rights activists briefed by U.S. officials said Chen may have felt threatened only after arriving at the hospital. “There’s the situation before he left (the embassy), and the situation after,” said one activist, who asked to speak anonymously because he was involved in an off-the-record conversation with Michael Posner, the assistant Secretary of State for human rights; Harold Koh, the State Department legal adviser; and Samantha Power, from the National Security Council.
Frank Jannuzi of Amnesty International said he also was briefed by Posner and Koh and that they said that Chen was “adamant from Day One” that he wanted to remain in China. While there is not such thing as a perfect guarantee, Jannuzi said the government officials told him, the Chinese made unusually concrete assurances and the U.S. Embassy was determined to monitor Chen’s well-being.
At the same time, leading Chinese dissidents were deeply skeptical. Bob Fu, president of the U.S.-based advocacy group ChinaAid, said he has not been able to reach Chen since he left the embassy and considers him “missing.”
Fu said he had received alarming reports by phone from friends in Beijing that sharply contradicted the official U.S. version of the negotiations with Chen and the circumstances under which he agreed to leave the U.S. embassy.
He said friends of Chen who saw him briefly after he left the U.S. compound said he had done so “reluctantly” and that Chinese authorities had told him if he did not accept the deal, he would “never see his wife and two children again.”
State Department officials, in their conference call with rights groups, described four days of intense, round-the-clock negotiations with Chen and Chinese officials inside the embassy.
According to Fu and others who were part of the call, the officials said Chen made it clear he wanted to remain in China. They said the Chinese finally agreed to allow him to study at a university and live as a free man, as he requested. But they also said it was up to rights groups and the international community, not just the U.S. government, to make sure China lives up to those commitments.
Fu described the negotiations as “a hasty effort” by the United States to “save the big items” in the imminent bilateral talks. Fu speculated that Chen had been “pressured by both sides to clear the cloud before the beautiful banquet” that Clinton, Geithner and their Chinese counterparts will attend.
“But the Chinese are not serious or sincere,” he said. “They see Chen as a troublemaker. How can we trust a government that has beaten and imprisoned him and mistreated his family for so long?”
Fu said friends who spoke to Chen’s wife today said she described hundreds of “thugs with big sticks” waiting at their village compound.
Chen sought refuge at the embassy last Thursday. He was using a crutch, because of an injury to his foot that he sustained when he fell over a wall during his escape. “On humanitarian grounds, we assisted Mr. Chen,” a State Department official said.
At Chaoyang Hospital, Chen was apparently taken to the VIP clinic. The area was blocked off from reporters by hospital security guards and plainclothes police.
The U.S. acknowledgment that it had sheltered Chen left China fuming. "The U.S. method was interference in Chinese domestic affairs, and this is totally unacceptable to China," Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said, according to the state-run news agency Xinhua. "China demands that the United States apologize over this, thoroughly investigate this incident, punish those who are responsible, and give assurances that such incidents will not happen again."
Clinton, who spoke by phone with Chen in what U.S. officials described as an “emotional” conversation, said in a statement that she was “pleased that we were able to facilitate Chen Guangcheng’s stay and departure from the U.S. Embassy in a way that reflected his choices and our values.”
Mr. Chen has a number of understandings with the Chinese government about his future. . . . Making these commitments a reality is the next crucial task,” Clinton’s statement said. “The United States government and the American people are committed to remaining engaged with Mr. Chen and his family in the days, weeks, and years ahead.”
Chen's case had presented the U.S. with a thorny diplomatic dilemma. Chen wanted to remain in China to fight for people's rights, friends said. But with security officials rounding up the activists who helped Chen escape and who sheltered him, U.S. diplomats risked seeing Chen arrested if he left the embassy without some formal guarantees for his safety.
The American officials said Chinese authorities agreed to investigate the “extralegal” activities of the local authorities in Chen’s hometown, who have allowed armed men to effectively confine Chen to his farmhouse in Shandong province for 19 months, preventing celebrities, journalists and others who tried to visit him from entering.
Senior officials said they became extremely close with Chen during the negotiations — often holding his hand when they spoke. One official called the talks with Chinese officials as “intense but collaborative.”
Officials said U.S. diplomats “will take a continuing interest in the case of Mr. Chen and his family,” and would be checking on him in “regular intervals” to confirm that the Chinese government’s commitments to Chen are carried out.
Fu, of ChinaAid, said he was concerned that “the U.S. government has abandoned Chen” and that the Chinese government is “using his family as a hostage.”
Chen is not charged with any crime. In a video appeal he made to China's Prime Minister Wen Jiabao after escaping house arrest, he asked that the local authorities who kept him imprisoned be investigated and charged.
Locke, the U.S. ambassador, spoke to The Washington Post via telephone at about 3:20 p.m. local time to say he was in a van with Chen, stuck in traffic but en route to the hospital. Locke then handed the phone to Chen, who introduced himself: “This is Chen Guangcheng.”
An embassy official said Chen specifically asked to speak to The Washington Post, which first highlighted Chen’s battle against forced abortions in 2005. Embassy officials said they scrambled among themselves to see who had a cell phone that could be used to allow Chen to speak with his lawyer and with Clinton, and to place the call to the Post’s Beijing bureau.
At the end of the call with Clinton, who had arrived in Beijing earlier in the day, Chen said: “I want to kiss you,” a State Department official said.
Liu, in the statement carried by Xinhua, said China was "strongly dissatisfied. The practice the U.S. has taken interfered China's internal affairs, which China will never accept.
"The U.S. should rethink their policies and practices and take practical actions to maintain the overall relations between China and the United States,” Liu said. “China is a country under the rule of law, and legitimate rights and interests of citizens are protected by constitution and the law. Any citizen has an obligation to abide by the constitution and the law."
A State Department official indicated no apology would be forthcoming from the United States over the episode. “This was an extraordinary case involving exceptional circumstances,” he said, “and we do not anticipate it being repeated.”
Chen Guangcheng lawyer says dissident feels ‘pressure’ and fears for his safety - The Washington Post
I love when people pretend they speak for their governments.
