FUNDING EVIL

China Meets AIDS Crisis With Force: Police, Not Physicians, Answer Villagers' Pleas (Philip P. Pan, August 18, 2003, Washington Post)

Xiong Jinglun was lying in bed on the night of the raid, resting his frail, AIDS-weakened body when the shouting outside jarred him awake. The 51-year-old farmer struggled to his feet and shuffled out of his shack to investigate, but someone had cut off the electricity in the village, and it was difficult to see in the pitch dark.

Suddenly, several men wearing riot gear and military fatigues surrounded him, struck his head with a nightstick and knocked him to the ground, he recalled. Xiong begged them to stop hitting him, crying out that he was an old man, that he had AIDS. But he heard one of the assailants shout: "Beat them! Beat them even if they have AIDS!"

A few days earlier, residents of this AIDS-stricken Chinese village had staged a protest demanding better medical care, rolling two government vehicles into a ditch to vent their frustration. Now, local authorities here in central Henan province, about 425 miles northwest of Shanghai, were answering their appeal for help. But instead of doctors, they sent the police.

More than 500 officers, local officials and hired thugs stormed the muddy hamlet of 600 residents on the night of June 21, shouting threats, smashing windows and randomly pummeling people who got in their way, witnesses said. Police jailed 18 villagers and injured more than a dozen others, including an 8-year-old boy who tried to defend his sick mother.

"They beat me because I stepped outside," Xiong said, coughing and pointing out scars and bruises on his head, arms and legs. Like many villagers, he said was afraid the police would return. But he agreed to an interview, saying, "I'm going to die anyway."

The desperation of residents in Xiongqiao and the local government's blunt response has complicated China's bid for $100 million in aid from the U.N. Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria. AIDS activists have demanded human rights guarantees from the government as a condition for any funding. [...]

"If you give China money, then you should require they add these human rights protections," said Wan Yanhai, an AIDS activist who was detained briefly last year for distributing a government AIDS report. "If you don't stand with the AIDS activists and empower them, these funds may be corrupted. They may be used to hire thugs to beat people with AIDS."

Even if China didn't use international funds to abort children and beat people with AIDs, even if they used the money in humane ways, it would still be freeing them up to use other monies to oppress their own people. We should be working to topple the regime, not helping to prop it up. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 18, 2003 5:09 PM