For two years, two Canadians have been languishing in prisons in China, victims of a hostage-taking by the Chinese dictatorship. They are called Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.
Posted on December 14, 2020 at 5:00 a.m.
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I say they are hostages because there is no other term to qualify their arbitrary arrest under the pretext of espionage, days after Canada apprehended a leader of the Chinese telecoms giant, Huawei.
Canada has international treaty obligations with another democracy, the United States. The Americans suspect Meng Wanzhou of facilitating breaches of US sanctions against Iran. They asked Canada to apprehend him in Vancouver. Canada did so under this international treaty.
PHOTO DARRYL DYCK, ARCHIVES THE CANADIAN PRESS
A person holds up a poster that reads “Free the two Michael’s,” detained in China since December 2018, during a demonstration in support of the democratic movement in Hong Kong last August.
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China’s reaction, similar to that of an angry mafia: it arrested the two Michael.
On the one hand, Meng Wanzhou is under house arrest in his $ 13 million palace in Vancouver, while his battalion of Canadian lawyers vigorously defends his rights to prevent extradition to the United States.
On the other hand, the two Michael are awakened in the night to be “questioned” about their imaginary crimes, pawns in the totalitarian absurdity of the Chinese Communist Party. When they sleep, the lights are on. Canadian diplomats in China have only irregular access to the two Canadian hostages.
The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is there, splendid of injustice, in the contrast of the treatment of Mme Meng et de MM. Spavor and Kovrig.
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You know Guy Saint-Jacques, he’s the former Canadian ambassador to China. He often intervenes in the media to explain this fascinating and complex country, ruled by an increasingly radical state in its stifling of freedom and human rights.
Mr. Saint-Jacques has taken every opportunity to talk about the two Michael’s for two years. He denounces the arbitrary nature of their detention, worrying that the dictatorship is less and less reluctant to act “like a rogue state”.
As Christmas approached, after speaking with a former British diplomat by the name of Charles Parton, Mr Saint-Jacques came up with the idea of launching a Christmas card campaign for the two Michael’s imprisoned in China.
The idea is simple: send these Christmas cards to… the Chinese Ambassador in Ottawa.
PHOTO MARTIN TREMBLAY, THE PRESS
Guy Saint-Jacques, former Canadian Ambassador to China
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I have already sent mine to Mr. Cong Peiwu, with a personal note for the ambassador: it is time for this to stop, it is time to release the two Michael.
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Guy Saint-Jacques
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Guy Saint-Jacques agrees that this is a symbolic gesture.
“But since the arrest of the two Michael’s,” Guy Saint-Jacques told me, “only one thing has shaken China: international collaboration. They were surprised when other countries expressed their disagreement with these arrests, such as those in the European Union. This adds to other problems for the Chinese, such as their behavior in the China Sea, the Uyghurs, the management of the pandemic at the beginning of the year and Hong Kong. The letter campaign to the Chinese ambassador constitutes a little additional pressure… ”
Christmas cards for the two Michael’s, as well as a note for Ambassador Peiwu, can be sent to the following address: 515 Saint-Patrick Street, Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 5 h3
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The Chinese dictatorship hates criticism. This is why it imprisons the Chinese who dare to criticize the state. But China is increasingly targeting its critics abroad, with increasing vigor.
Western sports teams, for example, have disappeared from Chinese screens and transactional sites because a player or a leader dared to criticize China. The huge Chinese market is used as a lever to silence any criticism, in a display of astounding paranoid reluctance.
> Read “ The Erasure of Arsenal’s Mesut Özil » (in english only)
From those who do business in China, the dictatorship demands at best complicit silence and at worst demonstrations of support for its abuses: it threatened to expel the London bank HSBC because it had not supported its putsch in Hong Kong, a putsch that stifled democracy in this territory which has a special status, on the fringes of the dictatorship …
> Read “ In Hong Kong, China Threatens Businesses and Workers » (in english only)
I pass on more discreet mood swings from China, like those about debates on Canadian university campuses …
> (Re) read “Uighur minority: China wanted to block a conference at Concordia”
The NGO Human Rights Watch recently expressed concern over what it describes as a “global threat from China to human rights”, in these words: “Unless they are countered, Beijing’s behavior portends a dystopian future. in which no individual will be beyond the reach of Chinese censors, and an international human rights system so weakened that it will be unable to control government repressions. ”
> Read the report by Human Rights Watch on China’s Global Threat to Human Rights
That a dictatorship the size of China tries to measure the limits of its power, it is undoubtedly in the logic of a nascent superpower.
But that democracies welcome this growing intimidation with all the vigor of a bath mat is frankly worrying for years to come.
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I asked former Ambassador Guy Saint-Jacques why the cause of the two Michael was so important to him.
First, he explained to me, there is a personal connection with Michael Kovrig: they worked together at the Canadian Embassy in Beijing. But there are also the conditions of detention in China.
“I worked on the release of two Canadians, Kevin and Julia Garratt, when I was in China,” says Saint-Jacques. Kevin told me about the conditions of detention: it’s scary. You sleep and the light is on, you are questioned at all hours of the day and night, you are made to sit in uncomfortable positions to make you confess anything, to make you crack… It is inhuman. ”
Inhuman: it is the only word that befits a dictatorship, in particular that made in China.
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