From the horse's mouth, this is extracted from Worldbank Website [News section]:
US ASKS CHINA FOR RESEARCHER; ACTIVIST ACCUSES CHINA, WORLD BANK.
American officials have told their Chinese counterparts in Washington and Beijing that they want to transport home a detained U.S. citizen the moment US doctors determine that it is safe for him to travel, according to two official sources, the Washington Post (p.A13) reports. Meanwhile, US Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) wrote to World Bank President James Wolfensohn requesting that he intervene. World Bank spokesman Peter Stephens said the World Bank has engaged in high-level contacts in China on behalf of the two men.
The circumstances surrounding Meston's fall from a building remain murky, says the Post. China told US officials on Thursday that Meston jumped while attempting to escape, and China's state media restated that explanation today. But U.S. officials were hoping to determine whether Meston could have been the victim of abuse. A State Department official refused to comment today on the cause of the fall, the story says.
Meanwhile, an Australian researcher arrested along with Meston who was deported from China said yesterday the Bank should bear "particular responsibility" for the harassment suffered by him and a US colleague, reports the Financial Times (p.4). Gabriel Lafitte, an academic and human rights activist, said that he and [his US colleague] Daja Meston had heeded public statements from the World Bank and Chinese authorities encouraging people to investigate the proposed project, which envisages the resettlement of 58,000 Chinese into areas that activists say are Tibetan ancestral lands.
Meston had broken his spine after a fall from a window of the building where he was being kept for interrogation under 24-hour police custody in Xining, the capital of the northwestern province of Qinghai, Lafitte said. "Meston's fall was not an accident. That is inconceivable. There were police in the rooms the whole time," said Lafitte. "I think he was driven to it by the calculated cruelty of the interrogation process." Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, yesterday said Meston had sustained his injuries jumping from a
building while trying to escape, the story notes.
Lafitte said he confessed, in an effort to secure his release, to an illegal visit, conducting illegal interviews, and entering a forbidden area. Chinese authorities said that because Lafitte and Meston were on tourist visas, they should not have been conducting interviews. But Lafitte now denies his visit was illegal, citing public statements from the Chinese government and the World Bank welcoming scrutiny of the proposed project sites.
World Bank spokesman Peter Stephens said that while the Bank encouraged people to visit the areas, it did not issue visas or arrange itineraries.
The Boston Globe (p.A1) also reports on the incident, saying that although the Chinese government's plan has received initial approval from the World Bank, whose financial support is required, millions of dollars in low-interest loans are being withheld while the Bank investigates social concerns raised by critics. The debate evokes do-good rhetoric on both sides, the story continues. China insists its Western Poverty Alleviation Project is an honest attempt to help the poor, while opponents counter that the plan fits into China's unattractive history of forced migrations, and oppression of minorities.
Also in the Los Angeles Times (p.13), Pamela Logan of the LA-based NGO Kham Aid Foundation writes that the foreign press has tended to act like a mouthpiece of the Tibetan government-in-exile, an organization whose overriding concern is, understandably, to regain their lost nation. The US public has been conditioned to believe that the Chinese are utterly opposed to any sort of Tibetan cultural or economic advancement. Accurate reporting would show this is simply not the case, says Logan.
Major newspapers also report.
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