David L. Chaplin II
Impunity Watch, Asia

KABUL, Afghanistan – Imagine local American police forces joined local and state gangs, and then attacked the very police station which they were previously employed. This is precisely what took place in Afghanistan according to the provincial governor of the Ghazni region.

In Khogeyani, volatile area southwest of the capital, the entire police force on duty Monday morning appears to have defected to the Taliban side. The New York Times is reporting that the “entire police force on duty Monday morning” in the district of Khogeyani “appears to have defected to the Taliban side.”

Musa Khan Haidar Zada, governor whom reported these events to CNN, indicated that defections were due to the poisonous influence of the Taliban.

Spokesman for the governor, Sayeed Esmaial Jahanger, told CNN that the Taliban took over the district without any violence and that 20 police were not seen again.

“This was not an attack, but a plot,” said Mohammed Yasin, the chief of the Khogeyani police force. “The Taliban and the police made a deal.”

Even a spokesman for the Taliban, said deal were cut and “the movement’s fighters made contact with the Khogeyani’s police force then sacked and burned the station. As officers vanished, so did their guns, trucks, uniforms and food.”

For months, through the tactic of “reintegration” American and Afghan officials have been promoting a plan to persuade multitudes of rank-and-file Taliban fighters to switch and fight on the side of the government. This tactic is one of the big hopes for turning the tide in the war, according to military officials.

The Taliban have developed a reintegration plan of their own.

The local police chief, who missed the attack, said he suspected a defection.

Zabiullah Mujahid, member of the Taliban said the Afghan officers decided to defect after “learning the facts about the Taliban.”

The Taliban reports that, “We never force people to join us,” said Mr. Mujahid, whose name is fictitious. “The police joined us voluntarily and are happy to work with us, and to start the holy war shoulder to shoulder with their Taliban brothers.”

The takeover of the station did not last long. Akbarzada said his office lost contact with the police station at about 5 a.m. Government forces arrived in Khogeyani about three hours later and found the station smoking and abandoned.

Mr. Akbarzada said his Afghan forces would be relentless in their recruitment.

“The Taliban exist in and around the district centers, and we have our own judges, courts, district governors and other officials,” he said. “We do our guerrilla attacks and then leave the district center. This is just a building.”

Provincial Governor Musa Khan Akbarzada insisted that security forces will continue to search for the police and the Taliban they joined with. Taliban spokesman Mujahid insisted that they were long gone, having melted into the countryside.

For more information, please see:

New York Times – Afghan Police Unit Defects to Taliban – 1 November 2010

CNN World – Police in Afghan might have defected – 2 November 2010

AntiWar.com – Afghan Police Defect to Taliban in Secret Deal – 1 November 2010

By Joseph Juhn
Impunity Watch Reporter, Asia

Xiao Aiying allowed cameras to film her in the hospital after being beaten and forced into abortion by government officials. (Photo Courtesy of Al Jazeera)

BEIJING, China – Twelve government officials entered into Xiao Aiying’s house where they kicked Xiao in the stomach before dragging her out of the house. Apparently, she was eight-months pregnant, which violated China’s one-child-per-family law. The officials said she and her husband already had a daughter. Xiao was then taken to nearby hospital where she was forced to have an abortion. The 36-year-old was restrained as doctors injected her with a drug to kill the fetus.

Her husband, Luo Yanquan, described the moment when officials burst into his home to Al Jazeera.

“They held her hands behind her back and pushed her head against the wall and kicked her in the stomach,” he said. “I don’t know if they were trying to give her a miscarriage.”

He also told Al Jazeera that they were informed by officials a month prior to the due date that they weren’t allowed to give birth to the new baby because they already have a daughter.

It’s been 30 years since the Chinese government implemented and began enforcing one-child-policy to reduce the 1.3 billion-plus population and cut unsustainable demand on resources.

This policy leads to an estimated 13 million abortions every year, with many of those ordered by local authorities. This kind of forced abortion is illegal in China, but such banning doesn’t prohibit or define late-term abortions.

When asked about the event, one official in the district where Mrs. Lou lives said that the procedure was undertaken voluntarily by Mrs. Lou and she consented to such an abortion, a claim which both of Lou’s strongly deny.

Mrs. Lou allowed Al Jazeera’s reporter to secretly interview and film her in hospital, but feared official retribution after making their ordeal a public one. In the footage she can be seen with large bruises on her arms.

“I have had this baby, feeling it moving around and around my belly. Can you imagine how I feel now,” she said.

Mrs. Lou’s experience comes a month after the government in Beijing said there would be no change of relaxation in strict family planning laws.

“Our ten-year-old daughter has been excited about having a little brother or sister but I don’t know how I can explain to her what has happened,” Mr. Lou said.

For more information, please see:

The Daily Mail – China forces woman into abortion at EIGHT months for breaching one-child policy – 22 October 2010

The Uyghur News – China’s One-Child Policy Forces Woman to Have Abortion at 8 Months – 25 October 2010

Metro – China ‘forces’ woman into having abortion while eight months pregnant – 22 October 2010

David L. Chaplin II
Impunity Watch, Asia

BEIJING, China – “President Obama, as the father of two girls yourself, please ask President Hu Jintao of China to tell this daughter where her father is…If the Chinese government has murdered my father, I beg President Obama to ask President Hu to let us bury him.” These are the desperate words from the daughter of China’s leading Human Rights attorney, whose profession has become another example of how China silences critics.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, Mr. Gao hasn’t had the privilege of courts and jails but has simply disappeared, without any official word on the circumstances of what his family and most observers believe to be his detention by the government.

In 2009, in the article “Dark Night, Dark Hood and Kidnapping by Dark Mafia,” which was published on the Internet, Gao Zhisheng described the atrocious torture inflicted on him by police during his imprisonment in 2007, including cruel beatings, shocking his gentiles with electric batons, damaging his eyes by blowing cigarette smoke into them for hours, inserting toothpicks into his penis, etc. Gao’s exposé shocked the international community. (Epoch Times)

The teenage daughter, Grace Geng, one of China’s most respected human rights advocates has pleaded to President Barack Obama for help finding answers to questions few can answer.

Grace Geng, her mother and brother finally fled China with her mother last year, and are now living in the United States.

In an open letter to the president, saying her father had been tortured and she too had been beaten by police and barred from going to school, 17 year-old Grace, wrote a letter published by the Wall Street Journal with the words: “Six months ago last week the Chinese government kidnapped my father. He was abducted for exercising his right to freedom of speech.”

In what has been five years of tracked oppression by the hands of the world’s leading economy, Gao Zhisheng, since: 2005: authorities have closed down Gao Zhisheng’s law practice; Dec 2006: Convicted of subversion and sentenced to house arrest; Sept 2007: Says he was tortured during a period of detention; Jan 2009: Disappears; last seen accompanied by security officials; Mar 2010: Reappeared for a month before disappearing again.

Accompanied by Beijing lawyers Teng Biao and Li Heping, Gao Zhisheng’s eldest brother Gao Zhiyi recently reported the case to Xiaoguan Police Station in Beijing’s Chaoyang District, but police refused to register the case or take a written statement. (BBC)

In an interview with Sound of Hope Radio Network, Li Heping said that communist authorities often illegally torture petitioners, political dissidents, and rights defenders. Citizens are arrested for seeking redress of grievances. Lawyers who defend them are also implicated and persecuted.

Mr. Gao’s circumstance alongside Liu Xiaobo’s, the jailed academic awarded the Nobel Peace Prize months ago, are patterns of the Chinese Communist Party’s increasing persecution of human rights defenders in China.

Li Heping worries that the Chinese people cannot do anything about the communist state’s illegal practices. “Another way to put it is that this is the regime’s scoundrel way. What can you do about it?” 

For more information, please see:

Wall Street Journal – Again, Where Is Gao Zhisheng? – 28 October 2010

BBC – Daughter pleads for missing China lawyer Gao Zhisheng – 28 October 2010

The Epoch Times – Beijing Police Refuse to Register Gao Zhisheng’s Missing Case – 24 October 2010

David L. Chaplin II
Impunity Watch, Asia

HANOI, Vietnam – In South Vietnam, the police arrested two bloggers in a new crackdown on public criticism against the state. The government’s politically motivated prosecutions of independent bloggers and critics of the government violates their rights guaranteed under international law and spotlights the country’s poor human rights record, Human Rights Watch said.

The current governing Communist Party is planning to hold its five-year congress in January, when party leaders will be selected in a secretive election process and will map the country’s course for the next five years. The “pre-Party Congress crackdown” have heightened their scrutiny and government critics are being targeted.

“The Vietnam government is shameless in constructing charges and rationales to keep peaceful critics like Dieu Cay behind bars,” Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. ”

It was the latest in a series of rights violations against politically-oriented bloggers, Human Rights watchdogs said.

“In a country where the state controls all traditional media outlets, independent bloggers have emerged as important sources of news, information, and social commentary,” Robertson said. “The government should embrace the key role that independent bloggers are playing in society instead of harassing and imprisoning them.”

“They’re just making it up as they go along,” he said.

“The Vietnam government is shameless in constructing charges and rationales to keep peaceful critics like Dieu Cay behind bars,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. ”

Authorities submitted an unofficial statement saying Dieu Cay, the name for a traditional pipe, was being investigated under Penal Code Article 88, which covers “propaganda against the state”.

Dieu Cay is the founder of an independent group called the Club of Free Journalists. The tax charges were widely viewed as a pretext to muzzle his criticism of the government and its policy toward China. On October 18^th, police in Ho Chi Minh City also arrested Phan Thanh Hai, another member of the group. Two other members, Ta Phong Tan and Uyen Vu, both bloggers, were placed under intrusive police surveillance at their homes. Police also briefly detained a democracy activist, Do Nam Hai, on October 19 according to the New York based Human Rights watch dogs.

Vietnam bans opposition political parties and independent media require all associations, religious groups and trade unions to come under government control.

The 17th summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which begins on October 28^th in Hanoi, provides an excellent opportunity for ASEAN heads of state and other governments to raise concerns about the persecution of government critics, Human Rights Watch said.

Dieu Cay, charged with tax evasion was sentenced to a 30 month jail sentence after inspiring people to protest at the Olympic torch ceremonies in Ho Chi Minh City shortly before Beijing Olympics. Cay criticized China’s policies in Tibet and Vietnam’s handling of the disputed Spratly islands in the South China Sea.

For more imformation, please see:

Human Rights Watch –Vietnam: Free Peaceful Bloggers and Government Critics – 22 October 2010

Qatar Tribune – Vietnam blogger’s jail-term ends, but yet to be freed – 26 October 2010 

GMA News – Vietnam arrests 2 bloggers over anti-govt remarks – 26 October 2010

David L. Chaplin II
Impunity Watch, Asia

In what was a pivotal test for Afghanistan’s inexperienced democracy spell business as usual. Recent evidence of fraud has presented the questionably elected President Karzai with a stained reputation.

After the devastating announcement on Monday that the Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission released of ballot-box stuffing and bribery have tainted the vote.

Meanwhile, the UN-backed Afghan Electoral Complaints Commission is investigating more than 4,000 formal complaints.

Since then 1.3 million votes of the total of 5.6 million ballots have been cancelled out because of fraud.  That means about 23 percent of the total votes were tossed out, the election commission said Wednesday.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai pledged to cut corruption and increase transparency after he was re-elected in August 2009 election that was later deemed fraudulent by the United Nations and other vote-monitoring organizations.

More than 220 candidates are being investigated for fraud in the election, turnout for which was around 40%.

More than 2,500 candidates stood for 249 seats in the lower house of parliament, the Wolesi Jirga. Sixty-eight seats have been set aside for women.

The current parliament is stacked with former warlords and power brokers, and many of the candidates in September’s election have ties to Afghanistan’s old elite.

Final results are not expected before the end of the month once poll investigators finish their work.

“Turnout is around 5,600,000, the valid vote is 4,265,347, and the invalid vote is around 1, 300, 000,” Fazil Ahmad Manawi, head of the Independent Election Commission (IEC), said on Wednesday.

Deputy chief of election commission, Zekria Barikzai, cautioned that the number of votes thrown out was similar to the votes thrown out in the presidential election which cast Karzai the victor.  “In parliamentary election some of the powerful local people tried to influence the process,” Barikzai said.

Paul Wood, BBC News, said despite the throwing out of 1.3 million votes, there will probably be no rush by the international community to condemn the election.

Ultimately, the poll’s measure of success will be how it affects the stability of the country. There was widespread intimidation during the vote, with Taliban insurgents threatening people not to take part.

Many observers had hoped that the parliamentary elections would show the Afghan government’s commitment to reforming its corrupt bureaucracy.

“These elections will do little to alter Afghanistan’s system of patronage politics, and will certainly not alter the balance of power,” a Western official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said.

The official said the parliamentary poll represented “politics as usual, just as corrupt and just as violent as last year”.

It is an outcome that NATO and the international community can live with and so these elections will no doubt be judged a success, said Wood.

Afghanistan lacks political parties and parliamentary blocs form according to ethnic or geographical alliances.

Despite weak parties, powerful patronage networks, and entrenched corruption, the Wolesi Jirga (lower house of parliament) acts as a check on the power of President Hamid Karzai.

For more information, please see:

Al Jazeera English –Afghan officials cancel 1.3m votes – 20 October 2010

BBC – Afghanistan rules 1.3m paralimentary votes are invalid – 20 October 2010

CNN World – More than 20 percent of vote thrown out in Afghan election – 20 October 2010