The UN Human Rights High Commissioner, Mrs Mary Robinson, yesterday raised with Chinese authorities the case of a dissident's wife who was dragged screaming from a hotel where she was waiting to give her a letter.
It was precisely the type of incident which Chinese authorities had anticipated might be sparked by the first-ever visit by the UN Human Rights Commissioner to China, but when it happened officials over-reacted and gave international television an old-style image of strong-arm tactics.
Mrs Robinson later told reporters: "Obviously, I was very concerned when I heard about the incident." She had spoken about it with officials and was told the woman had been freed.
Mrs Chu Hailan positioned herself at the main entrance of the Hilton Hotel five minutes before Mrs Robinson was due to arrive to deliver a speech on democracy at 9 a.m. She is the wife of a jailed labour activist, Liu Nianchun, and has been battling tirelessly for his release since he was sentenced to three years in prison a year ago.
Mrs Chu was recognised by hotel security guards, two of whom approached and started to pull her into the carpeted lobby. Ms Mary Kay Magistad, a reporter for the US National Public Radio, who witnessed the incident, said several men in suits gathered round the woman, and others tried to hold back two television crews. Mrs Chu was dragged past the lobby banks and out through a back door.
Shortly after she was freed, Mrs Chu told Reuters by telephone that three plainclothes security men had punched and kicked her and pulled her hair during detention in the hotel's security room.
"It's too barbaric," she said. "One of them stepped on my stomach and it felt like my intestines were being squeezed out."
She said she was then taken to a police precinct near her home before being freed at dusk and was on her way to a hospital. The police seized the letter for Mrs Robinson in which she asked for help in securing the release of her husband who is said to be ill.
A Chinese official was quoted on the official news agency, Xinhua, as saying: "Security guards removed a woman from the entrance of the Hilton Hotel because she was disturbing order at the hotel."
Ms Magistad said that Mrs Chu was standing peacefully and only started screaming when she was pulled away by six Hilton security guards and plain clothes security men.
Mrs Robinson, who arrived five minutes later, said in a speech marking the release of the United Nations' annual report on Human Development that democracy was the bedrock for human rights and economic growth. "We should never forget that respect for human rights requires social justice as an essential prerequisite for sustainable development," she said. "The right to development expresses a fundamental value predicated upon respect for all human rights, whether civil, cultural, economic, political or social, together as an integrated whole. None of these can be fully realised without democratic governance and the rule of law."
Communist China is under pressure from the West to introduce democracy and is experimenting with village elections. Mrs Robinson left Beijing yesterday for two days in Tibet, before going to Shanghai and then back to Beijing to meet the Chinese Prime Minister, Mr Jiang Zemin, on Monday. She said she had raised "a number of concerns" with her Chinese hosts. However, she has had limited success in engaging in serious dialogue. Many of her meetings have been taken up by Chinese officials sitting in armchairs and reading long prepared texts, translated phrase by phrase.
The Minister for Ethnic Minorities, Mr Li Dezhu, read his script for 35 minutes before Mrs Robinson could ask a question, and the Justice Minister, Mr Gao Changli, also spoke at mind-numbing length. "The visit is going well, it's not easy and I hope that there are not unreal expectations of what can be done on a visit of this kind," Mrs Robinson said.
The UN Human Rights Commissioner is being accompanied to Tibet by a sole journalist, Mr Charlie Bird of RTE. Chinese authorities had originally given permission to The Irish Times to go on the trip to the normally-closed autonomous region but Mrs Robinson insisted that two Irish reporters would "send the wrong message" and she would only agree to The Irish Times accompanying her if an international pool could be arranged.
Human rights in Tibet have long been a concern of Mrs Robinson. As a member of the Seanad in 1989 she tabled a motion criticising the Chinese government for human rights violations in Tibet and she read to members a letter she had received from the Dalai Lama expressing his appreciation of the motion.
Mrs Robinson withdrew the motion on February 1st, 1989, because the government said it had no direct reports on human rights violations, and its defeat would send the wrong message.
The UN delegation will not visit any prisons for fear that inmates could be tortured later if they spoke too freely, according to close contacts of Mrs Robinson.