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China turns ire on US over human rights issue

BEIJING: China turned its ire on the United States on Monday over its plan to sponsor a resolution criticising Beijing at an annual human rights forum in Geneva, accusing Washington of hypocrisy and "Cold War thinking".

State-run newspapers which were filled with threats towards Taiwan last week barely breathed a word on the subject after pro-independence candidate Chen Shui-bian won the island's presidential election on Saturday.

Instead, they carried commentaries accusing Washington of interfering in China's internal affairs and ignoring its own human rights abuses.

The newspapers said efforts to denounce Beijing at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, which opens on Monday, were doomed.

"The United States, which is always gesticulating about other countries' human rights records, turns a deaf ear and refuses to discuss its own notorious human rights record," the People's Daily quoted a senior Chinese human rights official as saying.

"We advise those countries and interest groups who have serious internal human rights problems yet seek to interfere in the domestic politics of other countries, to abandon their Cold War thinking and extreme political bias," it said.

The Communist Party newspaper showed a cartoon depicting the United States as a man covered in labels saying "racial discrimination" and "gun crime" and brandishing a club.

The Liberation Army Daily, China's main army newspaper, which carried daily rants last week warning the United States not to interfere over Taiwan, took up the human rights cry.

"You can see, with the reports on annual human rights and religious freedom on one side and the invasion of Panama and air attacks on Yugoslavia on the other, a shadow is cast over the pretty picture of international human rights," it said.

The U.S. State Department issued an annual human rights report last month, saying China's record worsened noticeably last year as it cracked down on the China Democracy Party, the Falun Gong spiritual movement, media and unregistered churches.

China turned the tables a few days later by issuing its own report on U.S. abuses.

The State Department and members of Congress have also protested to Beijing over the detention of Rebiya Kadeer, a Moslem businesswoman with links to Uighur separatists in China's western region of Xinjiang.

China said last week it had sentenced her to eight years in prison for providing intelligence to foreign institutions, although a Xinjiang newspaper reported she had simply posted newspapers to her husband in the United States.

U.N. human rights boss Mary Robinson said this month, after failing to clinch an agreement which she had hoped would help China ratify major international rights treaties, that China's human rights record had deteriorated.

However, she did not comment on the U.S. resolution.

Six leading human rights groups urged the European Union last week to back the resolution, and accused Beijing of using threats, blackmail and promises to prevent Europe from raising human rights in China.

The statement was signed by Amnesty International, Reporters without Borders, Human Rights Watch, Human Rights in China, the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues and International Campaign for Tibet.

However, the 15-member EU has yet to find a common position and diplomats say China is likely to escape rebuke. All attempts to censure China at the Commission have failed since 1990, the first session after the killings of student protesters in and around Beijing's Tiananmen Square in June 1989.-Reuters