Japan furious at UNESCO listing Nanjing Massacre documents | Japan may halt funding for UNESCO over the organization's decision to include documents relating to the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in the latest listing for its "Memory of the World" program.

Oh I know, let's get whole Tibet registered too!

Torture, hunger, mobile sterilisation units ... the brutal reality of Tibet 2008

The documentary's investigation began with the notorious 2006 shootings on the Nangpa La pass, when unarmed Tibetans trying to leave the country were gunned down by Chinese border guards.

Two Tibetans were killed and 32 detained, interrogated and then sent to a labour camp 150 miles from Lhasa.

The experiences of one of those held, Jamyang Samten, now 16, gives a clue to the fate of Tibetan protesters now in the hands of the Chinese police.

He told the programme makers he was given electric shocks with a cattle prod, chained to a wall and hit in the stomach by a guard wearing a metal glove.

If he made a minor mistake in his interrogation, he would be beaten with a chain.

"The way the Chinese tortured was terrifying," he said.

"They beat us using their full strength. Sometimes they forced us to take off our clothes. We were locked up in a room with our arms and legs handcuffed and they beat us. The chain injured the surface but not the inside of the body.

"If they hit us with the electric baton, our entire body trembled and gradually we were unable to speak."

Jamyang was eventually released and finally made it over the border to Kathmandu in Nepal after paying a guide the equivalent of £210.

Tibetan women are also forcibly prevented from having children, despite supposedly being exempt from China's strict birth-control laws, the film's director Jezza Neumann discovered.

Measures include monitoring menstrual cycles, forced abortions and sterilisation if women cannot afford a fine for having a second child.

One woman, a married farmer, described her agony at a forced sterilisation operation without anaesthetic.

She could not afford the fine, equivalent to £70, and was one of six in her village who went through the ordeal.

"I was forcibly taken away against my will. I was feeling sick and giddy and couldn't look up," she said.

"Apparently they cut the fallopian tubes and stitched them up. It was agonisingly painful. They didn't use anaesthetic. They just smeared something on my stomach and carried out the sterilisation.

"Apart from aspirin for the pain, there were no other drugs. I was so frightened, I can't even remember how I felt. Some people were even physically damaged by the operation. They have limps and have to drag their hips."

Unconfirmed reports also suggest mobile sterilisation units are inserting a new type of contraceptive coil into village women that cannot be removed by them.

Every year, some 3,000 Tibetans brave death to flee across the Himalayas and into exile in Nepal.

The land they leave behind is saturated with secret police creating a climate of terror and mistrust – a land where merely protesting will invite arrest and severe punishment, found Mr Neumann.

The director spent his time undercover accompanied by a Tibetan refugee, Tash Despa, who now lives in London.

"There are spies everywhere," said Mr Neumann. "There are the uniformed police and army, the secret police in their suits and dark glasses and then a spy network of Chinese and Tibetans. It's like the Stasi in East Germany.

"It's got to the point where brothers don't trust their sisters and mothers don't trust their children."

According to the Tibetan Government in exile, cases of arbitrary arrest and detention have increased threefold in a year.

But Mr Neumann – nominated for five Bafta awards for China's Stolen Children, a film investigating the black market in babies created by the notorious "one child policy" – said the whole Tibetan culture was under attack.

New dams have flooded entire villages, driving farmers off ancestral lands. Monks are vulnerable because of the Dalai Lama's role as a religious and political leader in exile.

And nomads have been forcibly resettled into concrete camps without schools, clinics or bus services. Their livestock has been confiscated.

"Life here is incredibly hard," said a woman in one camp.

"People are suffering from hunger and hardship. They have no jobs and they have no land. The only way they can fill their empty stomachs is by stealing. We live in terror.

"We don't even have basic human rights, not even freedom of speech. Everybody is so depressed. They look awful. Their faces have become pale. Their eyes are sunken. Everyone is afraid of speaking the truth."

Mr Neumann is particularly anxious about the plight of the recent protesters.

"I haven't met anyone who had been arrested who wasn't tortured," he said.

"God only knows what will happen to them if they burnt down a Chinese shop or threw a rock at an official's car or threw a shoe at a policeman."

And East Turkistan in UNESCO's listing too, why not?

On February 29, 2012, the World Uyghur Congress, a host of MEPs, the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization and the Belgian Uyghur Association will convene a conference on the devastating effects of China’s nuclear testing at Lop Nur. The conference, ’50 Years After Test 596: China’s Nuclear Programme in East Turkestan and Its Impact Today’, presents a range of experts to testify on an issue that has unjustly received scant attention and been contained by the silence I experienced in Kashgar. One of the experts is Uyghur doctor Enver Tohti, who at great personal risk helped to raise awareness of the issue’s urgency in the documentary Death on the Silk Road.

Between 1964 and 1996, the People’s Republic of China conducted 46 nuclear tests in East Turkestan, the homeland of millions of Uyghurs. These were the largest series of nuclear tests in the world ever to be conducted in an inhabited area. Some of the bombs were 300 times more powerful than the one exploded in Hiroshima.

23 of the tests conducted by the government of the People’s Republic of China were atmospheric, with nuclear fall out reaching as far as Europe. In addition, research indicates that radiation from the 23 tests conducted underground has reached countries as far away as Japan.

The effect the 46 tests have had on the Uyghur people and their land remains largely undocumented. What is known is that rates of cancer in the region are higher than in the rest of China and cases of leukemia, malignant lymphoma and lung cancer are all elevated. Approximately 8 out of 10 children in the villages near to the four nuclear testing sites at Lop Nur are born with cleft palates, and congenital deformities such as enlarged stomachs are common. Besides the tragic human consequences, environmental concerns over contamination of water, air and land in inhabited areas loom large. Compounding the state of affairs are allegations by former Soviet scientist Ken Alibek that a grave accident occurred at a biological weapons plant near Lop Nur in the 1980s.

In the face of contrary evidence, the Chinese government has denied the existence of far-reaching and ill effects arising from its 46 nuclear tests at Lop Nur. It has routinely denied access to independent researchers investigating the effects of the tests, while at the same time suppressing any internal documents that point to the existence of a human and environmental tragedy. The conference in Brussels is a huge step in ending the silence.

http://weblog.uhrp.org/of-sandstorms-and-nuclear-tests/

/r/worldnews Thread Link - dw.com