Tag Archives: Repression

News

Anti-government protesters shot to death by pro-Yanukovych gunmen in Ukraine

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From the leftist New York Times.

Excerpt:

Security forces fired on masses of antigovernment demonstrators in Kiev on Thursday in a drastic escalation of the three-month-old crisis that left dozens dead and Ukraine reeling from the most lethal day of violence since Soviet times.

The shootings followed a quickly shattered truce, with enraged protesters parading dozens of captured police officers through Kiev’s central square. Despite a frenzy of East-West diplomacy and negotiations, there was little sign that tensions were easing.

President Viktor F. Yanukovych lost at least a dozen political allies, including the mayor of the capital, who resigned from his governing Party of Regions to protest the bloodshed. Mr. Yanukovych conferred with three foreign ministers from the European Union who had come to press for a compromise solution, practically within sight of the main conflict zone in downtown Kiev.

The sights of bullet-riddled bodies slumped amid smoldering debris, some of them shot in the head, and screaming medics carrying the dead and wounded to emergency clinics, including one in a hotel lobby, shocked the country and the world. The opposition said that at least 70 and as many as 100 people had been killed, while municipal authorities put the day’s death toll at 39.

[…]Sviatoslav Khanenko, a lawmaker and a head of the medical service of the National Resistance Headquarters, said by telephone that about 70 people had been killed and more than 1,000 had been wounded. Some news reports said 100 people had been killed.

The death tolls could not be corroborated. But even at the lower casualty numbers reported by Kiev’s municipal health authorities, Thursday was the most lethal day in Ukraine since independence from the Soviet Union more than 22 years ago.

Negotiations are underway, but no deal has been reached:

The foreign ministers of Germany, Poland and France met with Mr. Yanukovych for more than four hours on Thursday, and then announced that they would stay in Kiev overnight to continue their discussions. “Ahead of us is a night of heavy negotiations,” Marcin Wojciechowski, a spokesman for the Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, wrote on Twitter.

After the initial round of meetings, the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, said at a news conference in Warsaw that there were some indications that Mr. Yanukovych would be willing to schedule earlier parliamentary and presidential elections, something he had previously resisted. The presidential elections are scheduled for March 2015.

The great fear now is that the pro-Russia government will declare a “state of emergency”, which would mean the deployment of the army and more killing of innocent protesters.

The protests were started by the pro-Russia President’s refusal to sign a free trade deal with the European Union. A free trade deal would displease his Russian masters, even it would help lift Ukraine out of poverty. 

As usual, conservative Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper is leading the way.

Excerpt:

Canada is expanding a travel ban on senior members of the Ukrainian government and imposing economic sanctions on President Viktor Yanukovych, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced in an emailed statement Thursday.​

“Canada continues to be outraged by the ongoing violence in Ukraine,” Harper said in the statement.

“Our government has responded by introducing a travel ban on the regime’s senior leaders and announcing medical aid to assist the protesters in their time of need.”

Ukrainian citizens, Harper said, “must be allowed to exercise their democratic right to peaceful protest without being subjected to deadly force and appalling brutality.”

The government is expanding travel restrictions originally announced on Jan. 28 and imposing economic sanctions on the Yanukovych regime and its supporters, the news release said.

The travel ban means the officials sanctioned won’t be allowed into Canada.

“You are not welcome in Canada and we will continue to take strong action until the violence against the people of Ukraine has stopped and democracy has been restored,” Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander said at a press conference to announce the sanctions.

[…]The economic sanctions are to “freeze any assets in Canada belonging to senior Ukrainian government officials,” according to a release from Harper’s office.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State John Kerry gave a speech asserting that global warming is as big a threat to the world as terrorism.

News

Chinese Communist Party members increasingly attending church

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From CNS News.

Excerpt:

More Communist Party members in the Peoples Republic of China are attending church, according to the U.S. State Department’s latest report on International Religious Freedom.

“Although CCP members are required to be atheists and generally are discouraged from participating in religious activities, their attendance at official church services in Guangdong Province was reportedly growing, as authorities increasingly chose to turn a blind eye to their attendance,” the report stated.

Representative Frank Wolf (R-Va.), who authored the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, backed up claims that more Chinese Communists as well as members of the media are becoming Christians, despite continuing religious repression in China.

“It is definitely taking place around the country,” Wolf told CNSNews.com. “There’s a large number of Chinese who have become Christian, there are a number of people in the government and even some in the media who have become Christians.”

[…]The International Religious Freedom Report, released on July 30, also noted that in 2011, there was a “marked deterioration” of religious freedom in China.

The report discussed the persecution of religious groups, including Christians, Uighur Muslims, Catholics and Tibetan Buddhists:

“Some religious and spiritual groups are outlawed. Tibetan Buddhists in China are not free to venerate the Dalai Lama and encounter severe government interference in religious practice,” the report said.

“The government continued to severely repress Muslims living in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and other parts of China. Crackdowns on Christian house churches, such as the Shouwang church in Beijing, continued.”

The report also noted that Chinese authorities broke up Christmas and Easter celebrations and designated many Christian groups as “evil cults.” Authorities also detained numerous Uighur Muslims without bothering to discern between peaceful worship and criminal activity.

Many Catholic clergymen who remain loyal to the Vatican instead of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA) also have been detained by the Communist regime.

[…]The Chinese constitution permits the citizenry to hold religious beliefs, but restricts the practicing and worship of religion to “normal religious activities”—a term that is left undefined by the constitution.

Since 1999, China has been designated by the U.S. State Department as a “Country of Particular Concern” under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998.

What’s striking to be is how similar the views of the repressive Chinese government are to the views of many atheists in the West. In China, even religious people have to act like atheists in public. It’s an atheist paradise. It reminds me a little of what is happening here with Obamacare and religious institutions being forced to provide abortion-inducing drugs against their consciences.

Commentary

Does the mainstream media tell the truth about Cuba?

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From the Heritage Foundation.

Excerpt:

Last week, just outside Cuba’s holiest Catholic shrine, government thugs attacked in plain daylight a group of opposition women — beating them, stoning them and stripping them naked to the waist. The women, mostly black and middle-aged, suffered this public humiliation because they were trying to find a dignified way to bring attention to the plight of their husbands, who are in prison for freely speaking their minds.

The archbishop of Santiago de Cuba has condemned the attack. You can find an eyewitness account in Spanish in the above video.

It should make for poignant watching today, the anniversary of the start of the Cuban Revolution.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing unusual in this grotesque attack on the Damas de Blanco (or Ladies in White, the harassed association of wives of political prisoners) on the street outside the shrine of Our Lady of La Caridad del Cobre. It’s routine for Cubans to be publicly degraded, brutalized and imprisoned when they dare speak their minds. Their daily existence has been one of fear and wretched suffering for 50 years now.

Yet the chances are that you probably haven’t heard about this story. A quick Google search of the attacks on the Damas de Blanco turned up only about five hits, none from a major publication. Why?

Not because it’s a dog-bites-man story (literally, in this case), as some journalists might have you believe. No, it’s simply because the media don’t report the daily attacks on the Cuban dissidents.

The left in America seems to really approve of communism in Cuba. One wonders if they have any idea what really goes on there. Or maybe they do know, and they approve of it.