Il Cat (Comité de Apoyo al Tibet), nel comunicato stampa che segue, informa che le audizioni dinanzi l’Audencia Nacional (Tribunale Spagnolo) di 7 testimoni (di cui alcune vittime stesse) delle atrocità del regime comunista cinese avranno luogo dal 21 aprile 2009 al 27 aprile 2009. Tutte le audizioni si svolgeranno presso il 1mo Tribunale dinanzi al giudice Santiago Pedraz ad eccezione di quella del 27 aprile che si svolgerà prima presso il 2ndo Tribunale e successivamente presso il 1mo Tribunale. Il 10 febbraio scorso, lo stesso giudice Pedraz, aveva fatto una richiesta ufficiale, attraverso appositi canali diplomatici e la Presidenza della Corte Nazionale spagnola, alle autorità giudiziarie indiane affinchè le stesse intervistino le vittime e i testimoni che vivono in India e non sono in grado di raggiungere Madrid.

Segue il comunicato in inglese

PRESS RELEASE BY THE COMITE DE APOYO AL TIBET (CAT)

PROOF AND TRUTH ABOUT TIBET MAKE THEIR WAY INTO THE SPANISH COURT (AUDIENCIA NACIONAL)
7 MORE TIBETAN WITNESSES AND VICTIMS TESTIFY Tuesday 21 – Monday 27 April 2009

The CAT (Comité de Apoyo al Tibet) and the co-plaintiffs, the Fundación Casa del Tibet and the private accusation, Thubten Wangchen, make knows the following :

FINAL TIMETABLE FOR DECLARATIIONS AT THE AUDIENCIA NACIONAL:

All declarations will be in Court nº 1 with Santiago Pedráz, except that on Friday, which Hill be in Court nº 2 and then in Court nº 1.

Tuesday 21st April - 10.30 hrs: Terri Marsh and K.G. (American international lawyer and Tibetan victim (unnamed for security reasons)

Wednesday 22nd April - 10.30 hrs : Kate Saunders, Jonathan Mirsky (international experts on Tibet and China)

Thursday 23rd April - 10.30 hrs: Tash Despa (Author of a terrifying documentary on the past and present of Tibetans inside Tibet)

Friday 24th April - 09.30 horas: Takna Jigme Sangpo (elderly Tibetan and legendary victim in Tibet, imprisoned and tortured for 37 years). They will declare first in Court nº 2 tbefore Ismael Moreno and then in Court nº 1 before Santiago Pedraz.

Saturday 25th April : No declarations

Sunday 26th April : No declarations

Monday 27th April - 10.30 hrs: Wei Jingsheng (Chinese victim and dissident, “the father of democracy in China”)That in his ruling of 10th February 2009, the judge Santiago Pedraz of Court Nº 1, accepted all the proceedings proposed, as relevant to the investigation, and:

That said judge has issued a rogatory commission through diplomatic channels and the Presidency of the Audiencia Nacional, duly legalized and annotated with the apostille, to the Indian judicial authorities, requesting them to personally interview the Tibetan victims and witnesses who live in India and are unable to come to Madrid.

And has issued a second rogatory commission to the People’s Republic of China “for the judicial inspection of the Tibetan monasteries and convents mentioned in the proceedings proposed, and requesting the Chinese authorities to authorize a Spanish judicial commission to visit that country to carry out said proceedings” all of which are fully justified and documented in the written reports submitted by the CAT to the judge.

That in the case under investigation in Court nº2 for genocide, crimes against humanity, torture and state terrorism, after consulting the state prosecutor and instituting proceedings (thereby showing that clear signs of criminality exist on the part of the accused), the judge Ismael Moreno has finally issued a rogatory commission to the People’s Republic of China so that each and every one of the accused answer the questions sent. (Court Proceedings of 7th October 2008 and 3rd February 2009).

BIOGRAPHIES OF THE WITNESSES AND VICTIMS:

K. G.

KG was born in the region of Aba in Tibet into a family of nomadic shepherds. Most of his family still reside in Tibet. KG left Tibet at the age of nineteen and now resides in the Brooklyn New York, USA, where he works as a bank teller. KG has remained in close touch with his family since his arrival in the United States. Like them, he belongs to the Tibetan Buddhist faith. According to his legal advocate, he exemplifies well the teachings of his religion.

TERRI MARSH

TERRI MARSH is the Executive Director for the U.S.A. of the Human Rights Law Foundation. In 1992, she received her J.D. from New York University School of Law where she was a Root Tilden Fellow. Dr. Marsh has been a member of the United States Supreme Court Bar, the Second and Seventh Circuit Court Bars, the federal bar of the District of Columbia and of Illinois, as well as a member of the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia. She has served as Consultant for the Center for Law and Social Policy and the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, and was Amnesty International Faculty Liaison at the University of Delaware. For ten years, Ms. Marsh was a juvenile and criminal defense attorney, during which time she served a two-year term as Director of the Youth Court of the Superior Court of D.C. and was an R.F.K. Memorial Foundation grant recipient. Dr. Marsh also holds a Ph.D. in Classics and an M.A. in
Greek and Latin and has taught at universities across the United States.

KATE SAUNDERS

Communications Director of the International Campaign, is a writer and journalist who has specialized in monitoring the situation in Tibet for more than ten years. Her articles have been published in newspapers and magazines worldwide including the Washington Post, the Independent and the Sunday Times Magazine. Kate worked as a Senior News Analyst for Tibet Information Network prior to joining ICT, gathering news from the field in India and Kathmandu, briefing governments on human rights issues and providing information for the mainstream media on the situation in Tibet. Kate’s book, Eighteen Layers of Hell: Stories from the Chinese Gulag was published by Cassell in 1996.

JONATHAN MIRSKY

Jonathan Mirsky was born in New York in 1932 and educated at Columbia, Cambridge University, and the University of Pennsylvania. His Ph.D. is on the Tang dynasty.
He has taught Chinese and Vietnamese history, Comparative iterature, Chinese and Vietnamese history, Comparative Literature, and hinese at Cambridge University, the University of Pennsylvania, and artmouth College.
In 1974 he moved to England. From 1993 to 1998 he was East Asia ditor of The Times (London) based in Hong Kong. Previously he wrote for the Observer, The Economist, and The Independent. He is a regular writer for The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The International Herald Tribune, Literary Review,and The Spectator, and
contributes to other journals.
Dr Mirsky broadcasts frequently on radio and TV and was part of the BBC team in China during the Queen’s visit.
He has accompanied Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries to Peking, has interviewed the Dalai Lama, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping and Lee Teng-hui, and during long residence and travel in Asia visited Tibet six times.
Dr Mirsky has lectured to the the Royal National Defense College, the Institute for International Affairs, and at many universities.
In 1989 Dr Mirsky was named British newspapers’ International Reporter of the Year for his coverage of the Tiananmen uprising.
In 1999 he was a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard. In 2002 he was the I.F.Stone Fellow in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

TASH DESPA

Undercover in Tibet gana el Royal Television Society Award (www.truevisiontv.com)

El jurado declaró: “Una película verdaderamente grande sobre la actualidad y que arroja luz sobre el futuro. Filmado sólo meses antes de que el Tíbet estallara en disturbios tras las manifestaciones del 10 de marzo 2008, este programa de una valentía extraordinaria y realizado con gran riesgo personal y en unas condiciones muy duras, ilumina las tensiones y problemas del país con poderosos imágenes y testimonios.”
Para realizar esta película, el exiliado tibetano Tash Despa regresa a su patria, desde la cual huyó hace once años arriesgando su vida, para rodar en secreto con el director Jezza Neumann, galardonado y nominado para un Bafta (Dispatches Special: China’s Stolen Children). Arriesgándose a ser encarcelado y deportado, descubre entre otras cosas evidencia del ‘genocidio cultural’ descrito por el Dalai Lama. Descubre que el estilo de vida nómada está siendo destruido por la fuerza al quitarles a los tibetanos nativos sus tierras y ganado y realojarles en campamentos de hormigón.

Undercover in Tibet revela el régimen de terror que domina la vida diaria y hace imposible la libertad de expresión. Tash se encuentra con víctimas de arrestos arbitrarios, detenciones, torturas y ‘desapariciones’ y descubre evidencia de esterilizaciones forzadas realizadas a mujeres de etnia tibetana. Ve con sus propios ojos el impacto de la enorme presencia militar y policial en la región y el hambre y las privaciones que soportan tantos tibetanos, y oye avisos de los disturbios que están teniendo lugar ahora mismo en las provincias.

AKNA JIGME SANGPO fue condenado por primera vez en 1964, a la edad de 36 años, y recibió una condena de 41 años, y ha sido acusado de distintos crímenes, como “corromper las mentes de niños con ideas revolucionarias”. Tras cumplir su condena fue detenido por pegar carteles pidiendo la independencia en Lhasa, y fue encarcelado en la cárcel represiva de Drapchi, desde donde gritó “Tíbet Libre” cuando una delegación suiza visitó la cárcel. En 1998 protestó de nuevo, por lo que recibió una paliza y fue puesto en solitario a la edad de 72 años. Su auto de condena de 1983 ponía: “Incluso tras ser detenido, el acusado siguió difundiendo y apoyando opiniones reaccionarias; enarboló abiertamente eslóganes reaccionarios; cantó el himno nacional tibetano; y además siguió asegurando que lucharía por la independencia del Tíbet.”

WEI JINGSHENG

WEI Jingsheng is the best-known Chinese human rights and democracy advocator and is the leader for the opposition against the Chinese Communist dictatorship. He was sentenced to jail twice20for a total of more than 18 years due to his democracy activities, including a ground breaking and well publicized essay he wrote in 1978: “the Fifth Modernization”. He is the author of “Courage to Stand Alone — letters from Prison and Other Writings”, which compiles his articles written initially on toilet papers in jail.

Wei Jingsheng is a winner of numerous human rights awards, including the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Human Rights Award in 1996, the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, the National Endowment for Democracy Award in 1997, the Olof Palme Memorial Prize in 1994, and a special Human Rights Leader Award by Pacific-Asian Human Rights Foundation of the Chinese community. Wei Jingsheng has been nominated many times for Nobel Peace Prize since 1993. He was praised in numerous places with varies titles, such as “Father of Chinese Democracy” and “Nelson Mandela of China”. Thousands of entries about him can be found on the Internet in many languages, not just in English and Chinese.

Wei Jingsheng was born in Beijing, China in 1950, into a high ranked military official family. His given name is very common and is an indication of the pride of his parents; a pride shared by many in the days immediately following the creation of the People’s Republic - “Jing” means “capital” and “Sheng” means “birth.” He is the eldest of four children. His parents were longtime Chinese Communist Party cadres. He was brought up in the prestigious Party schools, and was exposed to and thus well knowledge of the internal dramas of the Beijing party and military upper class elite.

At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the sixteen-year-old Wei left Beijing to explore the country for himself. He traveled throughout north and northwest China. Seeing firsthand the true effects that communism had on the Chinese people. It was during this time that he first began to formulate his opinions on the Chinese Communist Party and the future of the Chinese people. By the time the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, Wei had been “sent down” to the countryside in his ancestral hometown in Anhui Province and also served in the People’s liberation Army. The ten formative years he spent gaining a better understanding of the Chinese people’s situation left an indelible mark on his thinking.

After moving bac k to Beijing, Wei took a job as an electrician at the Beijing Zoo. In 1978, a series of workers, intellectuals, and artists posted their thoughts and _expression on a piece of wall in Beijing. The place, and the period, became known as The Democracy Wall. At this time, Wei wrote an essay entitled “The Fifth Modernization” which stated that without democracy, China could not truly modernize. His essay caused a sensation- not only because it openly assaulted the “people’s democratic dictatorship” propaganda of the Communists, but also because the author dared to sign the essay with both his real name and address. Wei joined a few friends in=2 0publishing an underground magazine called “Exploration”. In its last edition, Wei wrote another article, “Democracy or a New Dictatorship?” which identified Deng Xiaoping, then Communist leader of China, as the new dictator. Three days later, Wei Jingsheng was arrested.

In 1979, Wei was tried, convicted of “counter-revolution” and sentenced to 15 years. He spoke in his own defense, and a copy of his statement was smuggled out of the courtroom and distributed in China and to the foreign press. He was first on death row for eight months, and then in solitary confinement for nearly five years. He was kept in two other forced labor camps under strict supervision from both guards and prison handlers until 1993 when he was released. Within six m onths he was arrested a second time. He was tried again, convicted of “counter-revolution” and sentenced to another 14 years. In 1997, after a total of 18 years in prison, Wei was taken from his cell and placed on a plane bound for the United States. He maintains that he was not freed, but that his exile is further punishment.

Currently residing in Washington DC area, Wei Jingsheng has not been silenced by his forced exile. There are numerous reports of his work outside of China for the Chinese cause. Many of his articles are published in major newspapers including English, more in Chinese. Every week, he gives speeches and commentaries through various radio and TV stations, especially to the Chinese audience via Radio Free Asia, Voice=2 0of America, and BBC, etc. His close ties to many congressional members and legislators, as well as governmental officials of many democratic countries, enable him to represent the Chinese democratic force and use his influence to push for human rights and democracy in China.

In 1998, he founded the Overseas Chinese Democracy Coalition (OCDC) that is an umbrella organization for many Oversea Chinese democracy groups. The OCDC has many members over dozens of countries. He has been serving as its chairman since then. He is also the president for the Wei Jingsheng Foundation, which is a non-profit organization registered in New York. In September 2006, he co-founded Asia Democracy Alliance with other organizations of Taiwan, Tibet, Mongolia, Vietnam, etc. in the US Congress. He was elected to lead the Alliance and currently serving as its first president.

CAT: Comité de Apoyo al Tíbet

Costa Rica 11 (1, A26)
28016 Madrid Spain
Contact Georgina: Tel. (0034) 91 350 2414

www.tibetcat.com