Category Archives: China

[Cultural Survival’s Report]

When [Peter] Niggli, Bonnie Holcomb, and the research director of Cultural Survival, Dr. Jason W. Clay, arrived in Sudan in February 1985 to interview the Tigreans and others who had escaped over the border, the resettlement issue was an interesting sideshow to the main famine story. Western journalists and diplomats in Ethiopia had caught glimpses of people being herded onto trucks and airplanes. One U.S. diplomat went so far as to say that “the selection process recalled Auschwitz.” From the little that could be discerned, resettlement appeared to be yet another indication, if any was needed, of the Marxist regime’s insensitivity to its own people. But there the issue ground to a halt for lack of evidence. Resettlement areas simply were off limits to almost all foreigners, except those on prearranged tours to model camps. The government denied that the program was not voluntary or that it was motivated by any factor besides the humanitarian desire to relocate drought-stricken peasants to more fertile areas in the west and southwest of the country. Western relief officials stationed in Addis Ababa, whose presence depended on the good will of the local authorities, tended to back up the regime’s assertions….

Cultural Survival, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, came to Sudan with especially impressive credentials. Founded in 1972 by a group of social scientists at Harvard University, its reports on endangered ethnic groups in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have criticized right-wing and left-wing governments alike and have been utilized by the World Bank, USAID, and foreign governments to judge a country’s human rights record and need for development assistance. Clay’s team interviewed 277 Ethiopian refugees at six sites in eastern Sudan … using local translators who were not connected with the TPLF [Tigrean People’s Liberation Front]. (Bonnie Holcomb, who speaks Oromo, helped with some of the translations.) All interviews were taped and then translated a second time by other translators back in the United States. More than half those interviewed were selected at random and, in almost all cases, involved more than 5 percent of the total population of each camp. This was a statistically huge sample. (Harris Polls, for instance, rely on .0004 of 1 percent of the U.S. population.) As Clay told me in a letter, “Methodologically, you cannot touch [criticize] the data that we collected” about conditions in Ethiopia ”as it relates to the refugees in Sudan.” …

To my knowledge, no study of the Great Leap Forward in China or the actions of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia was as well packaged as was Cultural Survival’s Politics and the Ethiopian Famine 1984-1985, a 250-page monograph, served up with an array of attractive maps, whose results–if you could wade through the overwhelming details (few could)–were absolutely devastating.

“All those interviewed insisted that they had been captured by government troops and forced to resettle…. Ten percent of all those interviewed reported that they witnessed people being killed who tried to escape.” More than 40 percent said they were beaten. More than 85 percent said they had been separated from at least one member of their immediate families; 70 percent were separated from all members of their immediate families. Amete Gebremedhin, a Tigrean in her early forties, stated that after she and a group of other captured women protested to the militia about being separated from their husbands and children, “the soldiers laughed and said: ‘What do you care about your children, you will find new ones in Asosa.'” …

Everyone interviewed said people had died en route to the resettlement sites; 60 percent said they actually saw people die. Clay’s analysis of the death figures was the most comprehensive and the most controversial part of his research.

The death rates reported by the refugees ranged from 33 deaths per 10,000 people per day to 270 deaths per 10,000. These rates are extremely high given that the camp populations were comprised almost entirely of adults. Such figures were consistently reported from a number of different refugees from different areas. Furthermore, they were relayed by people who did not know each other…. Some of the resettled people were undoubtedly malnourished as a result of declining agricultural production in their homelands, but many had not experienced famine until they were captured for resettlement….

These figures raise … the question of how many of the 400,000 people who were resettled by June of 1985 are still alive. If even the most conservative estimates of the death rate (33 per 10,000 per day) are halved and then halved again (i.e., reduced by 75 percent), then 50,000 to 100,000 of those resettled in this massive program may already have been dead by July 1985.

[Diplomat and NGO Reaction]

The figure of “50,000 to 100,000” dead set the aid communities in Khartoum and Addis Ababa ablaze. It was a higher death rate than that at the emergency feeding camps on the Sudanese border at the height of the famine, and most of the Ethiopians who perished in Sudan were children and old people–of which there were very few in the resettlement program. Father Jack Finucane, the head of Concern, an Irish aid group in Addis Ababa, saw the death rates in an article I wrote for The Wall Street Journal about Cultural Survival’s report and told a group of sixty foreign aid workers assembled on October 19, 1985, at the RRC headquarters, “I’ve read it and I don’t believe it.” Finucane said that in visits he and other members of Concern made to the resettlement area, there were no indications of any such horrors. But as it turned out, one month earlier, at a private meeting at the Hilton Hotel where only Western ambassadors and some aid officials were present, Finucane told a different tale; about a half million people were being displaced in “horrible conditions.” Of seventy-seven resettlement areas, only two or three had succeeded, he had said. In a July 29, 1985, letter to his home office, Finucane wrote it was safe to assume that 25 percent–or 125,000–of the settlers had died.

Finucane’s reversal, whereby he independently confirmed from the Ethiopian side the main points of Cultural Survival’s Sudan-based research, only to deny it all at a public forum in the presence of Ethiopian officials, was laid out in a November 3, 1985, article by David Blundy in the Sunday Times (of London). When Blundy, then one of the paper’s leading foreign correspondents, asked the chair of the Band Aid coordinating committee in Addis Ababa, Brother Augustus O’Keefe, about the discrepancy, O’Keefe replied, “That was a private meeting [the meeting between Finucane and the ambassadors]. I won’t talk about it. The press have done a lot of damage here. I have never heard about any problems with resettlement.”

It was a familiar pattern: back up the research of Cultural Survival and Berliner Missionswerk in private, but condemn it in public. The Red Cross League, for example, did a study on resettlement in the summer of 1985 that corroborated much of what Clay’s resettlement study had found, including the death rate. But the report was kept secret. (Oddly enough, the Canadian Embassy in Addis Ababa was a true believer in resettlement, even in private. One Canadian diplomat actually told me that the West had to get involved in a big way in resettlement, in order to have “influence here.” When I mentioned to another Canadian official, whom I met in Sudan, that Canada was assisting resettlement through funding to private agencies involved in the program, he got very angry and proceeded to launch a tirade against U.S. human rights abuses in the Third World. At the time I knew of no other country about which the views of the Canadian and U.S. governments were as divergent as on Ethiopia. Officials in the U.S. State Department and National Security Council had been extremely critical of Canada’s policy toward resettlement. In Addis Ababa, the two embassies literally represented opposing camps. Some of the Canadians I met appeared absolutely driven about proving that–at least as far as Ethiopia was concerned–they had a foreign policy truly different from that of the United States. In Canada itself this policy was criticized. This was one of the stranger aspects of the famine emergency.)

The spinelessness of the aid community in Addis Ababa was demonstrated a few months later, in December 1985, when the inevitable happened–one of their own went public about the appalling consequences of resettlement. Medecins sans Frontieres [MSF] published a report entitled, “Mass Deportation in Ethiopia,” alleging that with a death rate of 20 percent, as many as 300,000 people were likely to die in the resettlement program, of which up to 100,000 already had. The report noted that “one of the most massive violations of human rights” was “being carried out with funds and gifts from international aid.” The French group quickly was expelled from Ethiopia, while the rest of the aid community chastised the group for getting involved in “politics” when it should have been keeping its nose to the grindstone of relief work. Apparently, nobody in Addis Ababa was drawing the distinction between “politics” and gross violations of human rights. The kiss of death to the French group’s presence in Ethiopia was administered by the United Nations, which publicly defended resettlement by saying that the French organization’s charges could not be taken seriously because it was the only group in the field making such accusations….

[U.S. Media Reaction]

In early 1986, MSF took its case to the court of U.S. public opinion, which barely paid attention, even though the United States was providing almost as much aid to Ethiopia as was the rest of the world combined. A Washington press conference, among other activities, got the French doctors onto the front page of The New York Times for a day and into the editorial pages of several important dailies. But the story had difficulty making the evening news on the major networks because there was no footage of the settlers being abused. Also, this was the period of the Challenger disaster. Therefore, the impact of MSF’s revelation on the general public was marginal. And as one refugee official in Washington explained to me, “Suzanne Garment of The Wall Street Journal was the only big columnist to write about it, so everyone around here dismissed it as just a right-wing issue.” As limited as MSF’s effect was, it was still greater than that of Cultural Survival. This was in a way unfortunate because MSF, a relief group whose investigation was not as well grounded academically proved a much softer target for supporters of resettlement than did the Harvard-based Cultural Survival…. The daily news media, by this time obsessed with the southern part of the African continent in place of the Horn, did little to put the findings into perspective or to investigate the matter further. The editorial page of The Wall Street Journal was a constant exception to this rule, but like all opinion pages, it didn’t have quite the credibility of a hard news section, and the page’s conservative slant meant that liberals often distrusted it….

Even after Clay and Holcomb’s report was published, journalists tended to write about the skeptical reaction in the relief community, rather than to hunt down the actual victims in order to hear their firsthand accounts….

As I see it, the fundamental flaw in the resettlement story was that it was a foreign news item with no domestic spinoff. Because the United States, despite its generous aid, was not influential in Ethiopia–and had not been for a decade–it was a tragedy for which the Reagan administration bore absolutely no responsibility. Although private donations to certain charities were indirectly assisting resettlement, as were public donations from other governments, USAID always was careful to channel U.S. aid to relief operations unconnected with the program. Thus, there was nothing to dig up against the administration, and the herd instinct in the media never was activated. Even after the MSF visit, journalists almost never raised the matter at State Department briefings. Ethiopia had been “lost” years before, and U.S. interests were not being jeopardized by the inhuman actions of Ethiopia’s regime. The country now was part of that zone of darkness where literally anything could happen away from the television cameras. Had the deaths occurred at the hands of a colorful madman, like Idi Amin or Muammar Gaddafi, or even someone less well known but just as crazy, like the former “emperor of the Central African Empire,” Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the story could have been rescued from oblivion. But Mengistu was far too efficient a killer to be distracted by buffoonery, so his crimes had little mass-market appeal….

But, again, it wasn’t only the media, nor even just the human rights organizations that weren’t interested, but Western governments as well…. In fact, as a National Security Council staffer revealed, after the United States got independent intelligence confirmation of the main findings of Clay’s report, Secretary of State George Shultz was ready to enter a U.N. resolution condemning the Mengistu regime, but backed down after receiving absolutely no support from the United States’ Western allies, who did not want their aid programs in Addis Ababa jeopardized.

SOURCE: Robert Kaplan, Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea (Vintage, 2003), pp. 111-127

Has anything at all changed in the modus operandi of the International Community™ since 1984? Anything?

Vanuatu has a uniquely nuanced stance on relations with China and Taiwan. The foreign minister recognizes the former, while the prime minister recognizes the latter–or at least did so on Wednesday.

via Simon World

The New York Times reports on the tribulations of China’s Guangzhou Crocopark.

China’s Forestry Department eliminated steep duties on imported breeder crocodiles nearly a decade ago. The hope was that low wages, highly skilled farmers and well-developed road and port networks would turn China into a highly competitive producer of crocodile meat, hides, shoes, purses and other goods.

But impotence, obesity, runny noses and finicky palates among the crocodiles have made this dream difficult to realize. Imported by the tens of thousands from tropical Thailand, the crocodiles have had trouble adapting to slightly cooler southeastern China and have been slow to breed, prone to infections and reluctant to eat anything but expensive chicken breasts.

The biggest problem has been that male crocodiles eat more in the late autumn and early winter here than they do in Thailand. They become so plump that they show little interest in sex during the spring mating season, said Li Mingjian, the deputy general manager of Crocopark Guangzhou here, now one of the world’s largest crocodile farms, with 60,000 to 70,000 animals.

“They don’t chase the females,” he said. “They’re very fat guys. They just eat, eat, eat.” …

The next problem did not become apparent for more than a year. Wily Thai crocodile merchants had offered the Chinese buyers a discount if they would accept a mixture of male and female crocodiles of all ages, and warned that it was difficult to identify the genders of young crocodiles.

As the crocodiles grew, it became apparent that the park had far more combat-prone males than it needed, especially as only one male is needed to breed three females.

To make matters worse, many of the larger females proved to be surprisingly old and no longer fertile.

The Thai merchants “would say, ‘This lady laid 40 eggs last year,’ and the next year she would lay none,” Mr. Li recalled. “They were grandmothers.”

In its early years, the Japanese Foreign Ministry [Gaimusho] occupied a premiere position among Japan’s new government institutions, in part because it was the chief agency responsible for the relations with the West that were so central to both the domestic and foreign goals of the Meiji state. The institution and its mainstream bureaucrats came to be Western-oriented, founding the tradition of orthodox Kasumigaseki [‘Foggy Gate’] diplomacy, which called for Japan’s cooperation with the leading Western powers: the United States and Great Britain. This foreign policy tradition remained closely identified with the Foreign Ministry both domestically and internationally, even when Axis-oriented diplomats dominated the ministry during Japan’s official defiance of Anglo-American cooperation from 1931 to the end of the Pacific War. Japanese leaders imbued with a belief in an Anglo-American-centered world order reemerged during the Pacific War first to prepare for and then to lead Japan in the new American-centered cooperation that would be the framework of the postwar period. Many postwar leaders were former Foreign Ministry officials.

Such continuity in Japanese worldviews has led Akira Iriye to conclude that the war and Japan’s period of defiance against the “existing order” were aberrations. The spirit of Anglo-American cooperation was thus the stable element that brought about the peaceful postwar order and Japan’s compliance within the framework of the Japanese-American security system. Although this view is valuable for an understanding of the evolution of Japan’s postwar stability, it gives little indication of the reasons for the instability of prewar Japanese institutions, international alliances, and even the career patterns of the Anglo-American-oriented bureaucrats and statesmen.

As an institution, the early Gaimusho [‘Foreign Ministry’], with its view toward the West, was slow to focus on the importance of China policy and China expertise. This is not to say that within its ranks China specialists did not develop but that their advice and concerns had only indirect influence on senior bureaucrats, who were more concerned with Japan’s friendly relations with the West. China service diplomats were also posted primarily to consular roles in China, where their perceptions of international relations were profoundly shaped by the international communities they administered and their close appreciation of the changing Chinese political scene.

As time went by, yet another divergent opinion group opposing enthusiastic pro-Western policy began to coalesce. At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, their early views and leadership surfaced and worked to create a new internal division, the Board of Information, that loosely addressed group members’ nationalistic views on foreign policy during the otherwise liberal 1920s. In the 1930s, this opinion group emerged fully formed as the group of Gaimusho reform bureaucrats who were quick to attack their pro-Anglo-American seniors, particularly for their weakness (not just “softness,” but lack of expertise) in China affairs. Thus, the opposition to Anglo-American-oriented or Kasumigaseki diplomacy, if not mainstream until after 1930, nevertheless had a long history and a serious level of support before then.

The fate of China service diplomats over the course of the struggles between these two groups revealed the complexity of prewar politics and diplomacy…. For example, both groups worked hard to bring about tariff reforms for China in the mid-1920s, and both were inclined to early Japanese recognition of the new Nationalist regime under Jiang Jieshi [= Chiang Kai-shek]. However, during the Manchurian Incident, China specialists in the field … were keenly disappointed in the lack of strong opposition in their Tokyo superiors … to the army’s takeover.

Seen from their eyes, Kasumigaseki diplomacy failed on two counts. First, it failed to recognize the crucial importance of China’s sovereignty to maintaining the status quo and Japan’s position in the framework of world affairs. Second, it failed to take a stand against the new institutional adjustments in Japanese administration in China, which set the pace and tone for the continuing process of dismantling Gaimusho jurisdiction in China altogether. Kasumigaseki diplomacy preferred to ignore the contradictions inherent in the Japanese takeover of Manchuria, as did the Western Great Powers when they failed to take significant actions. For the Gaimusho, however, the consequences in terms of national prestige and real jurisdictional powers were far more immediate than for the Great Powers.

In the 1930s, the reform bureaucrats, in seeking to “renovate” their ministry and effect more positive policy in the non-Western world, bestowed more recognition and rank on China service diplomats. In particular, men with long experience in China came to lead the ministry’s Bureau of Asiatic Affairs, which played a crucial role in day-to-day decision-making during periods of conflict in China. Particularly in the Gaimusho, Anglo-American-oriented leaders were deprived of power and influence, if not office, during the 1930s. Resistance to Japanese expansionism came, not from them, but from China service men. Kasumigaseki diplomats could do little else but watch and tacitly support the efforts of China diplomats … who fought to prevent further military action in China and further erosion of Gaimusho authority there. Their efforts failed; both war with China and the replacement of Gaimusho jurisdiction with that of new agencies continued throughout the height of the Pacific War.

This loss of control did not happen overnight. It began with challenges to Gaimusho authority following the Russo-Japanese War, continued throughout the 1910s, and was renewed with great force in the 1930s. The loss by Kasumigaseki diplomats of their roles in decisions about the administration of China affairs stemmed in part from their own lack of concentration on or attention to this significant sphere of their institution’s activities. Mid-ranking bureaucrats, such as the China service men, were vocal in their criticisms during such impasses as the Manchurian Incident and the aftermath of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, but their superiors were not quick to take heed.

The prewar period, then, witnessed a complex shifting of dominance among different policy advocates and among different institutions and branches of government. The Gaimusho’s rise and fall may be compared, for example, to the fluctuating power of the military forces or the rise and fall of party politics. As is often suggested, closer examination of interministry rivalry and shifting power balances across the individual bureaucracies might also reveal much more about the processes and the generally unstable patterns of the Japanese government. To label the 1930s and the war as “aberrant” ignores the systemic instability that seems to have plagued Japan from late Meiji times until the postwar period. The Anglo-American-oriented tradition in diplomacy was only one critical force among many influencing the processes of politics and foreign affairs in the prewar period.

Anglo-American-oriented bureaucrats and statesmen did return to prominence to mastermind Japan’s new cooperation in an American postwar order. Men such as postwar Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru did rely on the prewar Kasumigaseki tradition to bolster their pro-Anglo-American credentials and consolidate power in a time of American intervention in Japanese leadership processes. But circumstances had changed again, much to their advantage and not for indigenous reasons. Yoshida as postwar prime minister did exhibit some institutional loyalties to the Gaimusho. As Chalmers Johnson has described, Yoshida firmly opposed expansion of the power of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry over that of the Foreign Ministry, which still nominally controlled trade. His losing battle to maintain normal diplomatic relations with China in the face of American opposition must have been rooted, in part, in his 1920s experience as a China consul and in his belief, not directly derived from Kasumigaseki diplomacy, in the importance of the Sino-Japanese relationship.

Other orthodox Anglo-American-oriented diplomats who emerged in the postwar period as leaders included … Shigemitsu Mamoru. Shigemitsu, in a curious twist of fate, first received a sentence of seven years’ imprisonment as a Class A defendant in the Tokyo war crimes tribunal, only to be released early in 1950 to enter a life of politics, culminating in his return to the foreign ministership in the Hatoyama cabinets. Aside from Kasumigaseki credentials, these men all had their history of high rank and powerful connections to parlay into new prominence.

China service diplomats had neither of these qualifications. Their record of China service had never given them high position and connections, and during the 1931-1945 period they had remained active Foreign Ministry officials. Many, in fact, had served out the war in Asian posts and were liable to suspicion for their participation in Japanese wartime administrations…. China service men, however, played significant roles as witnesses in the Tokyo war crimes tribunal and helped fashion the prosecution’s interpretation that the Japanese military had primary responsibility for Japan’s expansionist policies…. They had, after all, been eyewitnesses to the abuses of the army in the field in China during the time of the Manchurian Incident and later. Their experiences reconstructing events at the war crimes trial may have motivated some … to immediately write memoirs reflecting this experience. Others … either recorded their experiences prior to the end of the war or later based them in good part on prewar and wartime diaries. In any event, a great many of them wrote to clarify the historical record about Japan’s actions in China, and these memoirs have proved invaluable as sources over the years. Aside from writing, however, China service diplomats seem to have ended their lives quietly in private, not public, capacities.

Finally, the Gaimusho never recovered its pre-1930 status among Japanese governmental agencies. Long after the war, of course, as a former aggressor, Japan had only a limited capacity to play a part in international affairs, and the Gaimusho had rather few posts abroad to fill. When Japan’s international relations opened up again, many of its international agencies and delegations were also economic in nature, promoting the well-known Japanese approach of “economic diplomacy” and giving authority to the more economic ministries. The truth, however, is that diplomatic bureaucracies worldwide have declined in proportion to the speed and ease of modern communications and travel. Today, summit meetings and hotline telephone communications put heads of government in constant touch. Consulates everywhere today are staffed by members of widely varying ministries from home who have their own direct links to host and home country.

The China consuls served in positions defined by a unique, unstable, and temporary system of prewar unequal treaties. Their ministry never quite took stock of the implications of the privileges of this office, nor did it fully recognize the invaluable experience of these diplomats. On both counts, the Japanese Foreign Ministry failed to respond, or when it did, response was too slow and too late. As other agencies of the Japanese government usurped the consular role in China, they also radically altered the nature of the treaty port consul to fit the coming time of war.

SOURCE: Japan’s Imperial Diplomacy: Consuls, Treaty Ports, and War in China, 1895-1938, by Barbara J. Brooks, Studies of the East Asian Institute, Columbia U. (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2000), pp. 208-213 (Read full H-NET Review.)