“Most of you don’t know what freedom is,” said former Chinese labor-camp prisoner Harry Wu, a South Bay resident who moved to the United States in 1985. “You can give lip service to what it means…and say that it is priceless. But perhaps if you lost that freedom for a couple of years, you would really begin to appreciate how priceless it actually is.”
Wu, imprisoned at 21 and freed at 42, was among a veritable who’s who of dissidents that participated in a panel last week titled “Confronting Genocide in Today’s World.” The others were Jose Ramos Horta, the minister of foreign affairs for the embattled provisional government of East Timor; Dith Pran, a native of Cambodia profiled in “The Killing Fields”; and Ventul Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist lama and director of the Tibetan Association of Northern California’s Center for Tibetan Culture.
More than 500 people attended the event, which was the final program in the six-week “Silent Voices Speak” exhibit and series at the Herbst International Exhibition Hall in San Francisco’s Presidio.
Wu compared the circumstances surrounding his confinement to the plight of European Jews during the Nazi regime, saying that his family was discriminated against because they were members of the land-owning bourgeoisie, which was automatically suspect in communist China during the 1950s and ’60s.
Wu — who was imprisoned again in 1995 and then released because of his status as a U.S. citizen — also spoke out against the Chinese government and was branded a “radical revolutionary.”
“The communist government used thought reform — not gas chambers,” said Wu. “One target was the death of the individual and the other target was the death of the spirit. Starvation was our constant companion, from dawn to dusk, and we often ate anything we could, including rats and snakes.”
Several speakers noted that oppressive regimes routinely seem to scapegoat minority groups. One of the most controversial moments of the evening occurred when “Silent Voices Speak” organizer Lani Silver addressed peace issues in the Mideast, as a handful of pro-Palestinian demonstrators congregated outside the exhibit, decrying the absence of Palestinians from the panel.
Delivering a plea for understanding, Silver read from a text prepared by the “Silent Voices Speak” committee.
“We must acknowledge that Palestinians are now fighting their war of independence, and we don’t like to hear that,” Silver said to the hushed audience.
“Their basic rights are compromised every day. In addition, the Palestinian citizens of Israel, which constitute almost 20 percent of the total population, have endured systematic discrimination, and that must end. But we must also recognize the profound sense of fear and unease within Israel, that Israelis must fear for their lives merely because they are Israelis. This state of affairs cannot endure.”
Discussing the situation in East Timor, Horta also drew World War II analogies in his condemnation of Indonesian brutality, which has been particularly rampant since East Timor declared independence in 1999.
“The annihilation of East Timor was planned out — everywhere you looked there were scenes of mass destruction. The capital of East Timor looked like the old black-and-white photos of Hiroshima and Dresden,” said Horta, adding that the minority East Timorese population was subjected to a systematic campaign of rape and torture by the Indonesians.
Horta expressed hope that the days of monolithic powers were over, calling the advent of the electronic media a boon for democracy and a huge step forward for individual rights.
Pran also painted a bleak picture of life in his native country. Now a photojournalist for the New York Times, he recalled the communist Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror against the Cambodian people 30 years ago.
“The situation was much worse than depicted in the movie,” said Pran. “People were left to die in the middle of operations, with IV’s ripped out of their arms. Monks were forced at gunpoint to abandon monasteries.
“I lost a father, three brothers, and a sister, and I couldn’t show emotion for their loss, because when you showed emotion, they’d come for you,” said Pran, who compared the situation to that of the Holocaust.
Commenting on the residual effects of the war, Pran noted that all the active land mines buried in Cambodian soil have given the country the ignominious distinction of having the greatest number of amputees in the world.
After Ventul Rinpoche commented on the current state of affairs between China and Tibet, Wu closed out the evening with a call to action.
In response to a question of why he continued to wage war against the Chinese labor camps, Wu said the answer was simple. “When you’ve been to hell, you never forget it, and you put all of your strength into destroying it.”