VVT Pressrelease 9 oktober 2008 Europees Parlement Freedom of speech, freedom of the press and unlimited access to the total “information highway”, are among the fundamental elements of modern democracies. Freedom of speech and press are recognized by the United Nations as prerequisites for political, social, economic and cultural stability throughout the entire world. Accurate and unbiased information is surely not always “good news.” Friends of Tibet assert that when news is slanted or distorted to protect the reputations of political regimes, a vacuum is formed that hinders the flowering of individuals and leads to countless frustration within a society. We must see the press as the watch dog of a truly democratic society and freedom of the press as an inalienable human right. We must demand that, for both China and Tibet. China is of an entirely different opinion. The Chinese government wants to monopolize the press and has done so at any cost, including spying on internet users and illegally wire-tapping phone conversations. Reporters within China are regularly arrested, intimidated and in many respects thwarted in their attempts to accurately and openly report events. China jails more journalists than any other country in the world and ranks 157th on world lists regarding abuses against journalists. I quote Voltaire: "It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." In the interests of maintaining the appearance of a “harmonious civilization”, China continues to tighten the ropes constraining their journalists. As we speak, there is a “total media black-out” inforce in Tibet and her surrounding regions. NTD TV broadcasts were stopped 7 weeks before the beginning of the Olympic games. This station was the only independent Chinese TV station whose reporting earned a reputation for being uncensored and accurate. NTD TV was the only station of its calibre and was broadcast to millions of Chinese families. NTD TV regularly reported about the plight and situation of minorities in China, including reports about Tibetans, Uyguren, Falun Gong, and dissidents...We counted on them for accurate reporting following our many demonstrations on behalf of Tibet. Eutelsat, which was responsible for transmissions to China, attributed the abrupt end to NTD TV’s broadcasts to “technical” problems. We have come to know otherwise. The Friends of Tibet and The Office of Tibet unconditionally support NTD TV in their attempt to resume their broadcasts in China and we hereby ask the members of the European Commission as well as the Europarliament members to hold Eutelsat accountable and responsible for the resuming of broadcasts of NTD TV as soon as possible so that the Chinese people can again enjoy the objective programming that this channel provided. From one perspective, the Olympics were full of dancing and singing, very joyful. As the Olympics were playing, another, darker perspective was also at play: the unregulated milk production that was on the brink of poisoning infants with their "no-quality" food products. Are tragedies such as this the "one world" dream??? This time the victims were innocent children-- 4 infants dead and about 6,244 children sickened with kidney stones--today the children, tomorrow the rest of us. Everything was kept fearfully quiet, the truth suppressed. Slowly, drop by drop, the results of this terrible silence seeped up to the surface and to the attention of the international press. It would never have resulted in a tragedy of these proportions had NTD TV been able to freely exercise its journalistic integrity and to broadcast. The Friends of Tibet want to bring to your attention the fact that the Chinese government is responsible, as is Eutelsat, for the inhuman suffering that was perpetrated on many innocent and trusting Chinese children and their parents, precisely because the current government of China fears the open and honest dialogue that NTD TV has previously exemplified. conclusion, I quote the former ambassador, Marc Palmer : "Dictators should realize that they can’t hide behind the system and culture of a dictatorship forever. They must take responsibility for what they have done." A dictator’s world is like a pyramid. When they climb up, they only fear the one person above them. But once they reach the top, they become fearful of everyone below, including their own family and friends. terug naar boven