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Chirac under attack over arms embargo comments

A human rights group yesterday condemned French President Jacques Chirac for his comments on the arms embargo placed on China by the European Union over the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, saying they dishonored those fighting for justice over the massacre.

Chirac, who wants the EU to lift the embargo sparked by China's crackdown of pro-democracy campaigners in Beijing 15 years ago, said this week that the sanctions were the product of "another time."

"We will try to get the EU to lift as soon as possible an embargo which is of another time and which does not correspond any more to the reality of the situation," Chirac said in the interview.

But the comments by the French leader, who arrived in China on Friday for an official visit, provoked a stinging response from Human Rights in China (HRIC) in a statement yesterday.

"President Chirac's remarks conveniently ignore China's obligations under international human rights law," HRIC said in the statement, noting that China had signed and vowed to ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

"Crimes against humanity such as those committed by the Nazis in World War II, under apartheid in South Africa and during the genocide in Rwanda, are not diminished or erased by the mere passage of years or even decades.

"Likewise the bloody suppression of unarmed civilians in Beijing in 1989 cannot be considered a matter of `another time' after 15 short years," the New York-based rights group added.

Meanwhile media freedom group Reporters Sans Frontieres used Chirac's visit to China to condemn yesterday a French company's sale of equipment to Beijing used to block foreign radio broadcasts.

Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters Without Borders) said French defense electronics group Thales had provided the Chinese government with antennae that were being used to scramble broadcasts from foreign radio stations.

"It is regrettable that a French company is involved in setting up a `great wall of sound' that violates the right of free access to information for hundreds of millions of people," the group said in a statement.

The antennae were being used to jam programs from stations such as Norway-based Voice of Tibet, the BBC World Service, Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, it said.

Thales had set up such an antenna in the city of Kashgar in northwestern Xinjiang region, where the Chinese government says there is a separatist movement.

There are understood to be around a dozen further such installations, including on Hainan Island, near the eastern city of Nanjing and Urumqi, also in Xinjiang, it said.

The statement said a Thales representative in China told the media group that "there was nothing in the contracts signed with the Chinese that specified the use of the equipment", sold to Chinese authorities in 2001 and 2002.

The French government should draw the attention of its companies to the dangers of selling certain equipment to the Chinese authorities, it said.

"It would be a shame if French firms became auxiliaries of the Chinese Communist Party as in the case of Italian Iveco vehicles, converted in China into mobile execution chambers," it said.

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