Report Criticizes 2008 Chinese Crackdown in Tibet BEIJING ? A detailed report by Human Rights Watch says Chinese security forces violated international law in suppressing the Tibetan protests and riots of 2008 by indiscriminately beating, detaining and fatally shooting civilians in towns across the vast Tibetan plateau in western China. The report, released on Wednesday night, said security officers, mostly ethnic Han members of the People?s Armed Police, a paramilitary branch charged with domestic security, used disproportionate force in trying to control Tibetans, including against women, teenagers, monks and nuns. In at least three cases, security officers fired live ammunition into crowds and killed people, the report said, citing witness accounts. In several protests, security forces used batons or other weapons to beat unarmed protesters until they were bloody and motionless, the report said. Hundreds of detainees remain missing. The report also traced the origins of the deadly ethnic rioting in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, to brutal attempts by security forces to suppress a peaceful protest by monks on March 10, four days before the riots broke out. The 73-page report, based on interviews with 203 Tibetan witnesses who had fled China and visitors who were in the Tibetan areas at the time, is the most comprehensive independent assessment so far of the mayhem two years ago. While the broad contours of the violence were known, many of the witness accounts and details of events in the report had not been documented before because foreign journalists were barred from the Tibetan areas. The authors said the report ?finds that the scale of human rights violations related to suppressing the protests was far greater than previously believed, and that Chinese forces broke international law ? including prohibitions against disproportionate use of force, torture and arbitrary detention, as well as the right to peaceful assembly ? despite government claims to the contrary.? ?It also reveals that violations continue, including disappearances, wrongful convictions and imprisonment, persecution of families, and the targeting people suspected of sympathizing with the protest movement.? Chinese officials have said the security forces exercised sufficient restraint and that Tibetans perpetrated the most heinous acts of violence. At least 19 people were killed in the rioting that unfolded in and around Lhasa on March 14, 2008, when Tibetans burned and looted hundreds of stores run by Han and ethnic Hui merchants, the Chinese government said. Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, reported in spring 2008 that more than 150 episodes of unrest took place from March 10 to March 28 in Tibetan areas. The government has blamed the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, for catalyzing the protests, although the Dalai Lama has denied any such role. ?In dealing with the incident, all related departments abided by the law and enforced it in a civil manner,? Qin Gang, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said Thursday in a written statement responding to faxed questions about the report. ?The accused are fully guaranteed the rights of litigation, and their ethnic customs as well as their dignity are respected.? The report said the three documented cases in which security forces fired live ammunition at protesters were in Lhasa and the prefectures of Aba and Ganzi, both in Sichuan Province. The authors said the Chinese government had so far acknowledged only one episode in which any protesters were killed. Photographs have circulated on the Internet of bodies with bullet wounds that were supposedly the result of the shootings in Aba. The violence took place on March 16, when thousands of Tibetans protested near the Kirti Monastery and were confronted by security forces. The bodies of the civilians were taken into Kirti. An initial report by Xinhua said security forces killed four protesters in self-defense, but that report was later changed to say protesters were wounded. The Human Rights Watch report gives a detailed timeline of how the rioting in Lhasa broke out March 14. The first violence took place on March 10, when the police beat and arrested monks from Sera Monastery who were holding a peaceful protest in front of the Jokhang Temple, the report said, citing witness accounts. Later that day, 300 to 400 monks from the Drepung Monastery marched to demand greater religious freedom, and the police arrested up to 60 of them. Other protests took place the next two days involving monks and nuns, and the police forced them back to their monasteries. On March 14, civilians threw rocks at police officers at 11 a.m. when the police tried to confront protesting monks at Ramoche, a small temple in central Lhasa. The police retreated, and no security forces showed up in central Lhasa for the next 24 hours. Under those conditions, the rioting and killing began.
Pentagon Faces Growing Pressures to Trim Budget WASHINGTON ? After nearly a decade of rapid increases in military spending, the Pentagon is facing intensifying political and economic pressures to restrain its budget, setting up the first serious debate since the terrorist attacks of 2001 about the size and cost of the armed services. Lawmakers, administration officials and analysts said the combination of big budget deficits, the winding down of the war in Iraq and President Obama?s pledge to begin pulling troops from Afghanistan next year were leading Congress to contemplate reductions in Pentagon financing requests. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has sought to contain the budget-cutting demands by showing Congress and the White House that he can squeeze more efficiency from the Pentagon?s bureaucracy and weapons programs and use the savings to maintain fighting forces. But the increased pressure is already showing up in efforts by Democrats in Congress to move more quickly than senior Pentagon officials had expected in trimming the administration?s budget request for next year. And in the longer term, with concern mounting about the government?s $13 trillion debt, a bipartisan deficit-reduction commission is warning that cuts in military spending could be needed to help the nation dig out of its financial hole. ?We?re going to have to take a hard look at defense if we are going to be serious about deficit reduction,? said Erskine B. Bowles, a chief of staff to President Bill Clinton who is a co-chairman of the deficit commission. Senator Judd Gregg, a Republican from New Hampshire who is also on the debt commission, said that if the panel pushes for cuts in discretionary spending, ?defense should be looked at,? perhaps through another base-closing commission. Mr. Gates is calling for the Pentagon?s budget to keep growing in the long run at 1 percent a year after inflation, plus the costs of the war. It has averaged an inflation-adjusted growth rate of 7 percent a year over the last decade (nearly 12 percent a year without adjusting for inflation), including the costs of the wars. So far, Mr. Obama has asked Congress for an increase in total spending next year of 2.2 percent, to $708 billion ? 6.1 percent higher than the peak under the Bush administration. Mr. Gates is arguing that if the Pentagon budget is allowed to keep growing by 1 percent a year, he can find 2 percent or 3 percent in savings in the department?s bureaucracy to reinvest in the military ? and that will be sufficient money to meet national security needs. In one of the paradoxes of Washington budget battles, Mr. Gates, even as he tries to forestall deeper cuts, is trying to kill weapons programs he says the military does not need over the objections of members of Congress who want to protect jobs. Mr. Gates enjoys bipartisan support on Capitol Hill and has considerable sway within the administration. But while he may hold the line against major cuts for now, analysts say support for military spending could erode quickly once the Pentagon withdraws a substantial number of troops from Afghanistan. ?In the case of the Pentagon, they have been living very fat and very happy for so very long that they?ve almost lost touch with reality,? said Gordon Adams, who oversaw national-security budgets under President Clinton. Senator Daniel K. Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii and chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said that he would be looking first at tax increases and changes in Social Security and Medicare to lower the deficit, and that there was ?no way? Congress would make major cuts in the military while more than 100,000 troops were still at war. But once most of them return, ?I?m pretty certain cuts are coming ? in defense and the whole budget,? he said. The course of the war in Afghanistan will no doubt have an impact on the debate, as might the outcome of the midterm elections and ultimately the 2012 presidential race. But the first signs of pressure on military spending have surfaced, as both the House and the Senate are moving to trim the administration?s Pentagon budget request for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1. The Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee voted last week to cut $8 billion from the Pentagon?s request for an $18 billion increase in its basic operations. Representative Norm Dicks, Democrat of Washington and chairman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, is planning to trim $7 billion from the administration?s budget request. ?There?s a lot of support up here for restraint,? he said.
Israel Puts Off Crisis Over Conversion Law JERUSALEM ? A growing crisis between American Jews and the Israeli government over a proposed law on religious conversion was averted ? or at least delayed ? this week, with both sides agreeing to a six-month period of negotiation. But the depth of American anger and the byzantine complexity of Israeli politics suggest that a solution is a long way off. Late Thursday night, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement that Natan Sharansky, the head of the Jewish Agency, would lead a committee of the Reform, Conservative and Orthodox movements and that no conversion law would be submitted before January. Litigation in the Israeli Supreme Court on the same topic led by the Reform and Conservative movements would be suspended for the same period. The idea of delay came from Mr. Netanyahu, who said this week that the proposed law, which had passed a parliamentary committee, ?could tear apart the Jewish people.? He had received tens of thousands of enraged e-mail messages from American Jews who had been urged to contact him by their rabbis. Many American Jews consider the Netanyahu government to be too hawkish, and the conversion controversy is seen by some analysts here and in the United States as a proxy for a broader set of disagreements, including settlement building and the Gaza blockade. ?Please join me in writing an e-mail to Prime Minister Netanyahu to call a halt to this historic mistake,? wrote Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Congregation Ansche Chesed on the Upper West Side last week in a typical appeal. ?Judaism and the Jewish people do not belong exclusively to the most reactionary among us!? Rabbi Shlomo Amar, the chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel, said in an interview that Mr. Netanyahu had told him he needed American Jews on his side in his negotiations with President Obama over peace with the Palestinians and the controversy over the conversion bill was getting in the way. The bill that so enraged American Jewish leaders was actually aimed at making conversion easier for the 300,000 Israelis who moved here from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s and are not, by Orthodox rabbinic law, considered Jewish because they come from mixed parentage. The law would have done that by granting conversion powers to local rabbis across the country, a group considered closer to their communities. But after objections from the ultra-Orthodox, the bill formally placed authority for conversion in the hands of the chief rabbinate and declared Orthodox Jewish law to be the basis of conversion, making Americans fear that their more lenient conversion processes would be invalidated. As Rabbi David Schuck of the Pelham Jewish Center in Westchester said of the bill, ?It spits in the face of Diaspora Jews in particular, and if passed, it would be an acquiescence of the majority of Israeli Jews to a fundamentalist interpretation of Judaism.? This was the only issue over the past six years on which he had asked congregants to take political action, he said. David Rotem, the lawmaker behind the conversion bill, said in an interview that such views were based on a misreading of it. ?They need to check the facts before they speak,? he said of Reform and Conservative Jewish leaders. ?They are acting like absolute idiots.? The question of ?who is a Jew?? is as old as the State of Israel. The more liberal forms of Jewish practice advocated by the Reform and Conservative movements, with which most American Jews are affiliated, have never taken root here. Israel has left liturgy in the hands of the Orthodox, with most Israeli Jews leading almost completely secular lives, seeking out rabbis only at birth, marriage and death. The idea is that helping to build the Jewish state is their central means of expressing their ethnic identity. By contrast, Jews abroad seek one another out in synagogues, and have come up with ways to integrate spirituality with identity, forging rituals that respect tradition while adjusting to careers and life in a non-Jewish world. The two approaches to Jewish identity have coexisted, and while there have been tensions they rarely came to blows. But several developments of recent years have altered that. First, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking immigrants not considered Jewish has created an acute need in the eyes of Israeli leaders to find a way to integrate them in keeping with rabbinic tradition. Otherwise, they will not be able to marry, divorce or be buried here within Jewish tradition, and their children will feel deeply alienated. Mr. Rotem calls them ?a ticking bomb.? Second, the chief rabbinate, which for decades was in the hands of Orthodox Zionist parties, is now largely controlled by the non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox, who are both more liturgically rigid and less concerned with building Israel, integrating Russian speakers or keeping American Jews on board. This came about largely because the Zionist Orthodox movement had focused so heavily in recent years on settlement building in the West Bank and allowed control of religious issues to slip from its hands. Finally, American Jews, who are mostly politically liberal ? some 80 percent voted for President Obama ? have felt their attachment to Israel strained during its military operations in Lebanon and Gaza and the recent attack on a Turkish flotilla seeking to break Israel?s Gaza blockade. And since the conversion bill is being sponsored by Yisrael Beiteinu , the nationalist and mostly right-wing party of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, conditions were especially ripe for mistrust. ?There is increasing discomfort among American Jews with Israel,? commented Rabbi Donniel Hartman, president of Jerusalem?s Shalom Hartman Institute , which is devoted to exploring Jewish issues. ?This issue is a place where they can express the displeasure that they might not be willing to state on the flotilla and other political matters.? For that reason, some here, even among those sympathetic to the Reform and Conservative movements, like Rabbi Hartman, feel that the American reaction to the Rotem bill was overly aggressive. ?They overstated this one,? he said. Meanwhile, the Reform and Conservative movements believed that the Supreme Court here was looking favorably on their attempt to gain legitimacy for their conversions. A likely decision in their favor drove the rabbinate to push back through backing this legislation. Mr. Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident who once led a Russian immigrant political party here and who will head the conversion compromise search, said by telephone that intensive contacts over the past week had created increased understanding between the sides. He added that at a time when Israel?s legitimacy was increasingly under attack the Jewish people needed unity and that the legitimacy of all strains needed to be acknowledged. Most observers, however, see a looming confrontation. As David Horovitz, the editor of The Jerusalem Post, put it in his weekly column on Friday, ?What we are facing is an explosive global crisis over Jewish identity ? a huge, snowballing disaster that is ripping Israeli-Diaspora relations.?
