Bribe-busting bureau formed
Feng Jianhua

RECENT years have seen the image of the Chinese Government tarnished by corrupt officials who have used their positions to amass wealth, aid mistresses and break the law. But a new agency, with the sole purpose of cracking corruption, could help to clean things up.
After a four-year feasibility study, the National Bureau for Corruption Prevention (NBCP) was launched on September 13 under the supervision of the State Council. The establishment of this high-profile bureau has lifted public hope for more effective anti-graft measures.
“The founding of the NBCP is a significant step in the government’s corruption prevention drive, which will help to form an anti-corruption network in society,” said Ma Wen, the organization’s head and also Minister of Supervision. She said the new agency will focus on monitoring the use of power and preventing its abuse.
New stage in anti-graft cause
The experience of other countries has taught that breaking corruption among government officials requires not only the prosecution of offenders but also an emphasis on education. China’s anti-corruption cause has followed this track. Since the beginning of the 1980s, China’s anti-corruption work has been focused on investigating corruption scandals that involve large amounts of money and punishing corrupt officials.
According to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party of China (CPC), a total of 78,980 Party members were punished for violating Party disciplines in 2006, of whom 3,530 were handed over to judicial organs for further investigation.
Although 78,980 Party members account for a small proportion of the total Party population of over 72 million, they have significantly damaged public interests, according to anti-corruption experts. Any delay in putting into place a corruption education and prevention scheme will result in increasing pressure on judicial departments caused by rising corruption cases and a swelling dissatisfaction among the public.
Wang Limin, Deputy Director of the Bureau against Graft and Bribery under the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, said as reforms progress, a worrisome new trend in anti-corruption efforts is that more officials are taking advantage of system loopholes to find a legal shroud for their corruption.
“If we only focus on investigating and punishing corruption crimes, it might work for a while, but we will never wipe out corruption as more cases will pop up. This scenario will harm the image of our Party and government and consume our resources for anti-corruption work,” said Yan Qunli, an official from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the CPC. He suggested that some preventive measures must to be taken to stop corruption occurring in the first place.
As a matter of fact, the Chinese Government started to shift the focus of anti-corruption work from punishment to prevention as early as 2000. Professor Ren Jianming of the School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, believes that the first significant strategy reflecting this change was an outline of corruption preventive measures launched in 2005. This became the first official document to give equal importance to punishment and prevention in fighting corruption.
Meanwhile, state leaders have emphasized on various occasions in recent years the importance of establishing comprehensive and all-around monitoring of power, which is “a key measure of preventing corruption.” A series of regulations have been promulgated, including the high-profile Regulations of Internal Supervision of the CPC published at the end of 2003. The CPC internal supervision regulations for the first time put the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, the Party’s top decision-making body, under regular supervision. The punishment of Chen Liangyu, a former member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Party chief of Shanghai, who was sacked for his involvement in a social security fund scandal, the highest ranking official charged with corruption in recent years, was attributed to this new level of supervision
“With the development of anti-corruption work from emphasizing crackdown campaigns toward establishing regular schemes, the need to found a new organization to prevent corruption has become pretty obvious,” said Yan.
Besides the requirement of domestic anti-corruption work, the conception of the NBCP was also part of China’s efforts to fulfill its commitments to joining the UN Convention Against Corruption. Article Six of the convention says that each state party shall, in accordance with the fundamental principles of its legal system, ensure the existence of a body or bodies of corruption prevention; the bodies should be granted necessary independence to ensure that they can carry out their functions effectively and free from any undue influence. The convention also demands that state parties should provide necessary material resources and specialized staff, as well as the training that such staff may require to carry out their functions.
According to Ren, the Chinese Government has actively worked to implement the UN Convention Against Corruption ever since China signed it in December 2003. The feasibility study for establishing the NBCP was conducted by a coordination agency consisting of officials from 25 government departments, said Ma at a press conference.
Non-coercive measures
In the UN Convention Against Corruption, the functions of anti-corruption bodies have been described as implementing the policies to fight corruption, coordinating and overseeing those policies and disseminating knowledge about the prevention of corruption. Briefing the media on how the NBCP will carry out its work, Ma said that it will conduct studies of comprehensive and strategic issues on corruption prevention, explore preventive measures, study the causes of corruption and create new anti-corruption systems.
Qu Wanxiang, Vice Director of the NBCP, said that his agency will also coordinate the prevention of corruption in companies, social welfare institutions, non-governmental organizations and other groups in civil society and conduct international cooperation on corruption prevention.
“We used to target corruption prevention only at government agencies. But the new NBCP will expand the supervision arena to cover companies and non-governmental organizations amid the swelling corruption that has gone beyond government organizations and taken an increasing economic toll,” said Qu.
Answering questions on the powers of the new bureau, Qu said the NBCP does not have coercive powers to interrogate or detain people. “These coercive powers, which cannot be abused, can only be used by a handful of organizations and must be granted by legislature,” said Qu. He said the next step for his agency is to promote the establishment of a personal wealth registration system of government officials.
Challenges ahead
Directly under the State Council, China’s cabinet, the NBCP is an administrative organ dedicated to fighting corruption. It faces serious challenges to coordinate corruption prevention work in government organizations and in civil society and cooperate with legislative and judicial organs in preventing corruption. The best scenario is that new laws and regulations will clarify the roles of different organizations in preventing corruption so that a network can be formed with no overlapping functions.
“This is a difficult barrier to overcome, and the new bureau still has a long way to go,” said an editorial in Beijing-based daily newspaper The Beijing News. According to anti-corruption experiences from other countries, building an independent anti-corruption team is the only way to maintain a clean team of civil servants. Professor Wang Guixiu from the Party School of the Central Committee of the CPC said it is the NBCP’s ability to work independently that holds the key to its success.
Achievements in Corruption Elimination Between November 1992 and June 2002, the Party discipline inspection commissions and government supervision authorities investigated more than 1.59 million corruption cases and as a result 259,00 officials were dismissed from the Party. Of the punished Party members and government officials, over 49,000 were county-level officials and more than 4,100 were prefecture-level officials.
In 2004, Party discipline inspection commissions and government supervision authorities investigated a total of 166,705 corruption cases and punished 170,850 officials, of whom 5,966 were county-level officials, 431 were prefecture-level officials and 16 were provincial or ministerial-level officials.
Between January and November of 2006, procuratorial authorities investigated 38,457 officials suspected of corruption and dereliction of duty involved in 32,369 cases, including 2,632 officials of county level or above.
Between August 2005 and September 2006, a total of 10,992 commercial bribery cases were investigated, involving a total sum of 3.286 billion yuan. Of all these cases, 23.1 percent or 2,537 involved civil servants, with 835 million yuan received in bribes. A total of 68 prefecture-level officials and 511 county-level officials were investigated for the cases.

(The Daily Mail-Beijing Review Articles Exchange Item)

How India’s war on Naxalism is being lost
Praful Bidwai

IS India losing the fight against the violent Naxalite movement, which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently described as “the greatest internal security threat”? That is indeed happening. Since 2005, more people have been killed in Naxal-related violence than in Kashmir or the Northeast. Naxalism has spread to more than 150 of India’s 600 districts. Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand are the worst-affected states. Since January 2006, Chhattisgarh has recorded over 500 deaths in Naxal-related violence. Yet, Chhattisgarh demonstrates how Naxalism should not be fought-by unleashing repression against unarmed civilians and violating their liberties, and by instigating bandits who target Naxalites, even while perpetuating gruesome injustices, especially against the disadvantaged Adivasis (tribals) who form a majority in the worst-affected districts.
This conclusion was reinforced during my visit to Chhattisgarh last fortnight with Mukul Sharma, director of Amnesty International-India. We went there to express solidarity with Dr Binayak Sen, health activist, and general secretary of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties-Chhattisgarh, detained since May 14 under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 2004, and Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, 2005 (PSA). Besides capital Raipur, we toured parts of Dhamtari district, where Sen’s organisation, Rupantar, has run a clinic for 10 years. Upon talking to more than 20 people in villages, we failed to find any evidence that Sen incited the public to extremism. Sen has been doing exemplary voluntary work in the Gandhian mould in providing primary healthcare to people in an area where no medical personnel exist, often not even a chemist within a 30-kilometre distance. The public is forced to depend on quacks, and corrupt but apathetic, and usually missing, government employees. Rupantar’s clinic in Bagrumnala village offers impressive services at nominal cost, including rapid testing for the deadly Falciparum strain of the malaria parasite, which has saved scores of lives. The clinic largely depends on “barefoot doctors”, who advise the public on nutrition and preventive medicine too. The clinic caters to villages in a 40 square-km radius. Its work is irreplaceable.
Everyone we talked to expressed gratitude towards Sen for empowering disadvantaged people, and his efforts to make them aware of their rights-for instance, to water and housing, besides healthcare. All of them see Sen as noble and selfless. No one spoke of even the remotest sign of his instigating people to extremism. However, it’s not an aberration that Sen was detained under the nasty PSA, which criminalises even peaceful activity by declaring it “a danger or menace to public order... and tranquility”, because it might interfere with or “tends to interfere with the maintenance of public order...” and encourage “disobedience to established law...” This extremely harsh preventive detention law makes nonsense of civil disobedience, a cornerstone of India’s Freedom Struggle. It should have no place in a democracy. Yet, the state government has filed a 750-page charge sheet against Sen, including offences like sedition and “waging war against the state”!
There’s a purpose behind this-to intimidate all civil rights defenders through a horrible example. This is probably the first time in India that a civil liberties defender has been explicitly and exclusively targeted, and that too, from a politically unaffiliated organisation like the PUCL, which has defended people of all persuasions against state excesses. Sen was victimised precisely because he formed a bridge between the human rights and other civil society movements, and empowered disadvantaged people. The state government, whose very existence is premised upon the rapacious exploitation of Adivasis and Chhattisgarh’s staggering natural wealth-and whose primary function is to subserve Big Business, forest contractors and traders, cannot tolerate such individuals. If this sounds like an exaggeration, consider this: One of India’s most creative trade unionists, Shankar Guha Niyogi, who ignited a mass social, cultural and economic awakening in Chhattisgarh, was assassinated at the behest of powerful, politically well-connected industrialists in 1991. Those who planned the murder roam scot-free. Chhattisgarh has among India’s worst indices of wealth and income inequality. Its cities, including Raipur, are booming with ostentatious affluence and glittering shopping-malls. At the other extreme are tribal districts like Dantewada, marked by starvation deaths and severe scarcity of health facilities and drinking water. The tribal literacy rate here is less than one-third the national average-30 per cent for men and 13 per cent for women. Of 1,220 villages, 214 lack primary schools. Worse, 1,161 villages have no medical facility. Primary health centres exist in only 34 villages. The worst off is Bijapur, the district’s most violent tehsil, where Naxalites gunned down 55 policemen in March.

—Khaleej Times


The Empire’s illegal wars
Fidel Castro Ruz

WHEN the United States and its NATO allies started the war on Kosovo, Cuba immediately defined her position on the front page of the newspaper Granma, on March 26, 1999.  This was done in a Declaration of her Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the title of “Cuba’s appeal to end NATO’s unjustified aggression against Yugoslavia.”
I take essential paragraphs from that Declaration: “After a number of painful and highly manipulated political occurrences, extended armed confrontations and complex, hardly transparent negotiations around the issue of Kosovo, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization finally launched its announced and brutal air attack against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, whose peoples fought most heroically in Europe against the Nazi hordes during World War II.”This action, conceived of as a ‘punishment of the Yugoslavian government’, is conducted on the margin of the UN Security Council. “The war launched by NATO rekindles humanity’s justified fears about the establishment of an offensive unipolar system, governed by a warmongering empire acting as a world gendarme and capable of dragging its political and military allies along to the most insane actions. Something similar happened at the beginning and in the first half of this century with the creation of militaristic blocs that brought destruction, death and misery to Europe, dividing and weakening it, while the United States strengthened their economic, political and military power. “It is worthwhile wondering whether the use and abuse of force could solve the world problems and defend the human rights of the innocent persons who today are dying under the missiles and bombs falling on a small country which is part of that cultured and civilized Europe.
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Cuba strongly condemns this aggression on Yugoslavia by NATO forces led by the United States.”At this moment of suffering and pain for the Yugoslavian peoples, Cuba calls on the international community to mobilize its efforts to bring an immediate end to this unjustified aggression, to avoid new and even more deplorable losses of innocent lives and to allow this nation to again take up the peaceful path of negotiations to solve its internal problems, a matter which depends solely and exclusively on the sovereign will and free determination of the Yugoslavian peoples. “The ridiculous attempt at imposing solutions by force is incompatible with any civilized rationale and with the essential principles of international law.   [...]  To continue along this path, the consequences may be unpredictable for Europe and for all of humanity.” Because of these occurrences, I had sent a message to President Milosevic the day before, through the Yugoslavian ambassador in Havana and our ambassador in Belgrade.
“I beg you to communicate the following to President Milosevic: “After carefully analyzing everything that is happening and the origins of the present dangerous conflict, we are of the view that an enormous crime is being committed against the Serbian people. At the same time, the aggressors are committing a huge error, which they won’t be able to sustain if the Serbian people are capable of resisting, as they did in their heroic struggle against the Nazi hordes.  “Unless the terribly brutal and unjustifiable attacks in the very heart of Europe cease, world reaction will be even greater and swifter than that triggered by the war in Vietnam.
“This time as never before in recent history, powerful forces and world interests are aware that such behavior in international relations is not acceptable.”Even though I have no personal relationship with him, I have meditated extensively on the problems of today’s world. I think that I have a sense of history, a concept of tactics and strategy in the struggle of a small country against a great superpower and I feel a deep hatred towards injustice, and so I take it upon myself to transmit to him an idea in just three words:
“Resist, resist, resist.