VIDEO SHOW-TRIAL
John Simpson deplores the Chinese
government's attempt to discredit the dissident Harry Wu
WHEN THE grey, grainy video begins, it takes you a moment to realise what is hap- pening. A pleasant-faced man walks for- ward from a queue and hands his passport to a Chinese official. You can see from his eyes that he is apprehensive. Suddenly, men appear from either side and grab his arms. For a moment a look of horror crosses his face; then it is replaced with resignation and surrender. The recording shows the moment when Harry Wu, China's most wanted dissident, was arrest- ed on 19 June as he tried to enter China from Kazakhstan.
Wu is a man of remarkable courage. He served 19 years in Chinese prisons and labour camps, then managed to get out and settle in the United States. But he could never forget the others who were suffering as he had suffered, and he returned to China secretly as often as he could in order to uncover further evidence of the continuing abuse of human rights by the last great Marxist-Leninist dictatorship still to fall. His arrest has worsened United States-Chinese relations, though other western countries, keen to get their hands deeper in to the honey-pot, have tended to ignore it.
Harry Wu co-operated with the British television reporter Sue Lloyd-Roberts in producing a remarkable exposé for the BBC of the exploitation of prisoners in China. Their reports, which were shown in many parts of the world and won a number of awards, demonstrated how the Chinese authorities use forced labour to manufac- ture goods for sale abroad, and how they offer the internal organs of prisoners for the lucrative transplant industry. No one seriously doubts that these things go on; last year, indeed, the Chinese government admitted, at a UN committee hearing on torture, that it sometimes used the organs of dead prisoners. But the communist leadership disliked the bad publicity China received, and wanted revenge. After cap- turing Harry Wu in June, the chance came.
Last week, a Chinese civil servant, Lee Yang, began hawking copies of the video of Harry Wu's arrest and interrogation around the television companies in Hong Kong. Mr Lee is thought to work for a government-owned organisation in Bei- jing, Five Continental Media, but in Hong Kong he was operating out of the offices of a company called Robert Chau Produc- tions. At first he asked the ludicrous price of £35,000 for the video; the authorities in a closed society like China rarely under- stand how much things cost in the real world. In the end Mr Lee was glad to sell his wares for a tenth of that amount.
The video, amateurishly edited, was entitled in not-quite-English 'Just see the lies of Harry Wu'. What you actually see is brief clips of the allegations from the orig- inal BBC broadcasts, intercut with denials by Wu and by some of the people he and Sue Lloyd-Roberts interviewed for their reports. The centrepiece of the video, the interrogation of Wu, has the quality of a show-trial: there are no threats, no signs of anger or accusation, just a long confession. Marxist-Leninist regimes have always liked this kind of thing: the bogus credibility sat- isfies the masses' need for theatre. Wu's captors had nearly four weeks to work on him, but they will not have needed to use physical violence after the first day or so. The wrecking crew of psychopaths who interrogated prisoners for Stalin's NKVD in the treason trials of 1937 and 1938 found to their disappointment that the most effective form of torture involved neither electric shocks nor the rubber truncheon. All that was required was a few days and nights of sleep-deprivation, and even the strongest would crumble.
This is probably what happened to Harry Wu. In the video, which was shot by a cam- era high up on the wall of the interrogation room, he rubs his eyes several times and his speech is slurred and drowsy. 'Why did you tell these falsehoods?' the chief interroga- tor asks. 'Deceive people,' Harry Wu mum- bles. The BBC had made and edited the reports, he says; he didn't. The contrast with the alert, intelligent figure who appeared in the BBC's cutting-rooms when the original editing was being done is total; can someone ever recover from this devas- tation of the personality?
The Chinese, oblivious of the effect that such parading of a broken, tortured man has on free people, no doubt feel they have achieved something worthwhile. The pre- sent authorities in Beijing have tried simi- lar stunts before. In 1989, after the massacre in Tiananmen Square, they issued a video containing pictures shot by security policemen in the square during the democ- racy demonstrations. I recognised myself in one of the clips, handing something to a group of students. In the next shot the same students are unloading rifles from a lorry which was left in the square by the security police precisely in order to discred- it them. The commentary explained that foreign journalists gave the students money to buy weapons.
Yet by issuing the video of Harry Wu, the Beijing authorities have merely made it easier for us to accept his strongest allega- tions against them. A regime which can destroy the will of someone as courageous and clear-headed as Wu is also capable of, for instance, extracting the organs from a living prisoner. In Hong Kong Wu and Lloyd-Roberts interviewed a surgeon who had defected from China. 'I was ordered to take both kidneys from an anaesthetised prisoner,' he told them. 'Without both kid- neys, a person dies within twenty-four hours. The organs were taken away by mili- tary helicopter. I can only assume that it was for a high-ranking Party member.'
The reaction in the West to Harry Wu's abject confession has been interesting.
Some broadcasting organisations saw the episode as a chance to ingratiate them- selves with the increasingly profitable Chi- nese market at the expense of the BBC. The New York Times chose to emphasise an apparent inaccuracy in the film about the sale of organs: Wu and Sue Lloyd-Roberts thought that an operation which they filmed was a kidney transplant, when it was a heart transplant. This gave the Impression that Wu's entire condemnation of the Chinese authorities was somehow in question.
A different reaction came from the British popular press: none of the tabloids even bothered to mention Harry Wu. Gazza had gone round to his girlfriend's house in a big limousine to impress her, and the tabloids needed a lot of space to tell the story. I was reminded of a Polish Journalist who escaped to London during the martial law crisis of 1981, only to find that events in Warsaw were largely ignored by the popular press. 'You mean to tell me,' he said, 'that your newspapers can publish anything they want, and yet they actually prefer not to tell people what is happening?' Absolutely. We are free to ignore it when someone like Harry Wu risks life and sanity to tell us the truth. The freedom to be pig-ignorant is something to be cherished.
John Simpson is associate editor of The Spectator and foreign affairs editor of the BBC
Previous page
