China’s Arrest Of Australian Writer Is Called ‘Hostage Diplomacy’

BY ROBYN DIXON

LOS ANGELES TIMES

Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou arrives at a parole office in Vancouver on Thursday. (Darryl Dyck / Associated Press)

China confirmed Thursday it had arrested prominent Australian writer and blogger Yang Hengjun on suspicion of endangering national security, the identical accusation used in the recent detention of two Canadian citizens.

The arrest came after Australia criticized China for detaining the Canadians and heightened suspicions that Yang was taken into custody in retaliation for the arrest of the chief financial officer of Chinese tech giant Huawei.

Yang, a prominent novelist and former Chinese diplomat who gave up his nationality and moved to Australia, disappeared Friday after flying from New York — where he is a visiting scholar at Columbia University — to Guangzhou in southern China. He was detained before he could catch a connecting flight to Shanghai, where he was to meet up with his wife and child. He stopped posting on social media, and for four days his whereabouts were unknown.

Rory Medcalf, a former Australian diplomat now at the Australian National University in Canberra, described Yang’s arrest as “hostage diplomacy” and linked it to the arrests of the two Canadians — Michael Kovrig, an analyst with International Crisis Group, and Michael Spavor, a businessman who runs a travel company in China arranging trips to North Korea.

Those arrests came after Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of the company’s founder and one of China’s leading tech billionaires, was detained in Canada at the request of the U.S. and as the U.S.-China trade war was deepening.

Yang’s arrest now “drags Australia into China's hostage diplomacy,” Medcalf said in a tweet.

“I think … it’s a signal that we are now — not only Australia, but really all democracies, all middle powers — in for a period of sustained tension with China, where the safety of our nationals in China simply cannot be assured,” he said in an interview on Australian radio.

Relations between China and U.S. allies including Canada and Australia have grown poisonous since Meng’s arrest on charges that she committed fraud by misleading banks about Huawei’s business dealings in Iran.

She was ultimately released on bail but ordered to remain in Vancouver while the U.S. pursued extradition.

China said Meng’s arrest was politically motivated and ramped up pressure on Ottawa for her release. Then, with the incident still fresh, China arrested the two Canadian businessmen, drawing complaints that their detention was payback for Meng’s arrest.

Then a third Canadian, Robert Lloyd Schellenberg, had his 15-year jail sentence in China for drug trafficking converted this month to a death sentence.

As tensions build, both the U.S. and Canada have warned citizens to exercise a high degree of caution when traveling to China.

China’s rhetoric over Meng’s arrest has been more directly aimed at Canada than the U.S., as it strives to reach a trade deal with the Trump administration by March 1. Pressure for the deal has grown in China as its economy has slumped.

Yang, who writes spy thrillers and has been increasingly critical of China in his blogs, was detained in China in 2011 but released after two days.

Asked about his disappearance Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying confirmed the arrest but said she had no further information.

“The Australian citizen Yang Jun, due to being suspected of engaging in criminal acts that endangered China’s national security, was recently placed under coercive measures and is being investigated by the Beijing city State Security Bureau,” Hua told reporters.

Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne said Australia expected China to handle Yang’s case “transparently and fairly.” She also said there was no evidence linking his case with the Canadian arrests.

Tensions between China and the U.S. and its allies have worsened, with Washington pressing allies including Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand not to use Huawei technology in 5G networks, given the strategic nature of telecommunications networks. Australia, New Zealand and Japan have now blocked Huawei from their 5G networks, and Canada and Germany are considering following suit. The largest mobile providers in Britain and France also have barred Huawei equipment from their 5G networks.

Many analysts expect a prolonged power rivalry between Washington and Beijing, which would place U.S. allies who trade heavily with China — such as Australia — in an awkward position. China’s state-owned Global Times newspaper warned recently that China should exact a heavy price from U.S. allies who ignored China’s interests, for example by blocking Huawei technology.

“For those countries that seek to ingratiate themselves to the U.S. without regard to China's interests, China should firmly fight back,” exacting a heavy toll, the newspaper editorial said. It said Canada “crossed the line” with Meng’s arrest but warned that other U.S. allies could find themselves on the wrong side of China as well.

“Australia was the first to follow Washington in blocking Huawei devices,” the editorial continued. “Beijing needs to meticulously select counter-targets to really make them learn a lesson.”

The editorial went on to say: “China is the largest trading partner of both Australia and New Zealand and the second-largest of Canada, thus the country has enough means to counter them.”

Summer Lopez, PEN America director of freedom of expression, said Yang’s disappearance was “a terrifying sign of the Chinese government’s willingness to disappear writers who criticize them, regardless of nationality.” She said it appeared Yang was being held because of his past criticisms of China.

“Yang’s seizure is yet another indicator,” she said, “that the Chinese government’s repression of free expression extends not only to its own citizens but to citizens of other countries.”

This Former African President Stands Out — And Not Just Because He Once Crashed An Air Force Plane

BY ROBYN, DIXON,
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA

Ian Khama rides a bicycle while campaigning as incumbent for the Botswana presidency in October 2014. On Saturday, he retired after a decade in the post. (Marco Longari / AFP/Getty Images)

BOTSWANA (LOS ANGELES TIMES)--He is the English-born son of a king, a fighter pilot, a teetotaling bachelor — and all that made him an unorthodox African president.

But Ian Khama stands out most for his final act as president of Botswana: stepping down.

At his home village of Serowe Tuesday, residents begged him to stay on another 50 years — usually the cue in Africa that a constitutional change is about to be muscled through Parliament so a leader can rule for life.

But Khama, 65, insisted on leaving office Saturday. His departure, which followed a decade of stable and largely uncontroversial rule, underscored a message he has oft repeated: Africa needs democracy.

Botswana, a nation of 2.2 million people, is the longest-running multiparty democracy on a continent whose leaders often cling to power into their 80s or 90s and rarely go without a fight.

In Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni has been in office since 1986. In Rwanda, President Paul Kagame recently won a third term, after the two-term limit was ditched. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe hung on for nearly four decades until last year when the military forced him out. All claimed that their citizens would not let them leave office.

Khama’s exit preserves the legacy of his father, Seretse Khama, who struggled for his country’s independence from Britain and became the first president in 1966, ushering in more than 50 years of multiparty democracy.

The Mo Ibrahim Foundation, set up by the Sudanese British billionaire to measure and reward good governance in Africa, ranks Botswana the third most democratic country in Africa, behind Mauritius and the Seychelles.

Khama has frequently castigated his African counterparts, breaking the unspoken rule that you never publicly urge another president to quit, no matter how much violence there is or how many rigged elections.

He criticized Zimbabwe’s election in 2013 and called on Mugabe to step down in 2016 and again in November after the military took control there. He called on Joseph Kabila, president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, to hold elections that were due in 2016, and he slammed Burundian leader Pierre Nkurunziza, who plunged his country into turmoil in 2015 by ignoring a two-term limit and trampling the opposition on his way to his third term.

Khama has also stood up for the International Criminal Court and its efforts to prosecute other African leaders accused of crimes against humanity. Notably, he called on other African nations to enforce the court’s arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir and to stand with the Sudanese people against his oppressive rule.

He hasn’t been afraid to criticize mightier powers either, recently accusing President Donald Trump of encouraging wildlife poaching by overturning the ban on the import of hunting trophies to the U.S. He told the BBC he was not just concerned about wildlife, but Trump’s “attitude towards the whole planet.”

Khama seems to care more for the facts than flattery. When an online hoax news story circulated that Khama had been named “World’s Best President” in 2016, his office was quick to shoot down the story.

Not that Khama has no critics. His biggest blind spot as president was the treatment of the indigenous population, the Kalahari Bushmen, also known as the Basarwa or San people.

Forced out of their ancestral homeland in the diamond-rich Kalahari game reserve before Khama became president, the Bushmen won successive court appeals, giving them the right to return. But those who do are often arrested, beaten by police and denied hunting permits, according to Survival International, an advocacy group for indigenous people.

Khama, dismissive of the Bushmen’s semi-nomadic culture, has said the government’s job is to protect the park and preserve its wildlife. He claimed the Bushmen began using horses and guns to hunt, and in 2014 he told the Guardian newspaper that allowing them to live a “backward” way of life in the park jeopardized their children’s chances of gaining an education and joining the mainstream.

The U.S. State Department’s human rights report on Botswana last year criticized the country for violence, particularly sexual violence against women and children; discrimination against the Basarwa people; and child labor, mainly in agriculture and herding.

But the report was equally notable for where it found nothing to criticize: Prison and detention met international standards; there were no reports of unlawful killings by security forces; the armed forces were under government control; elections were free and fair; and officials who committed offenses were prosecuted.

Botswana’s judiciary and media are independent, but detractors accuse Khama of intolerance of criticism and say his government harasses journalists. Khama accuses the media of publishing lies.

The governing Botswana Democratic Party has ruled since independence, partly because opposition parties are disunited, a problem that afflicts many countries in Africa. Even so, Khama is proud of his country’s system of government.

“We have the strongest democracy in Africa and should guard it jealously,” he said in a farewell speech to Parliament.

Khama is the first-born son of his father, who was king of the Bamangwato people. Seretse Khama married an English office clerk and wartime ambulance driver named Ruth Williams in 1948 — a love story chronicled in the 2016 movie “A United Kingdom.” At the time, Botswana was one of the world’s poorest countries, but its economy boomed after diamonds were discovered in 1967.

Born in the English city of Surrey, Ian Khama inherited the title of kgosi, or king. He trained as a fighter pilot at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in Britain and became head of Botswana’s armed forces before he entered politics, effectively renouncing the role of king even as some Bamangwato people still see him that way.

He served as vice president from 1998 to 2008 under Festus Mogae, who stood down at the end of his two terms. As head of the governing party, Khama succeeded Mogae and was then elected in 2009 to a full term.

(EDITORS: BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)
As president, he piloted the state helicopter when making domestic visits and sometimes gave children airplane joyrides. In 2006, as vice president, he took over the controls of an air force plane when it developed problems and crash-landed it in Francistown, a staff member told Botswana media at the time.

An outdoors enthusiast, Khama likes riding ATVs and power-chuting, which involves a parachute and a three-wheeled go-cart. He often volunteered as a server in soup kitchens and dropped by hospitals to visit the sick. Under Khama, the government made strides in reducing poverty and providing low income housing.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM)

As a bachelor, Khama is unusual in Africa, where traditional values often hold sway. Often questioned about his single status, he claimed to be too busy to find a wife and worried about not having control over his happiness in marriage, though he once said he is looking for a tall, slim beauty to marry. He is lean and fit, but apparently is a loner who retires early at night.

During a recent farewell tour of the nation, Khama was showered with gifts, including a tractor, a herd of cows, hundreds of chickens and several cars. He told people he never really wanted to be president and now had other things to do.

Vice President Mokgweetsi Masisi was sworn in as president Sunday.

©2018 Los Angeles Times

Visit the Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Nigerian President Disdains His Country's Best Hospital For Medical Care In Britain. But What Ails Him?

Nigeria's public hospitals are crowded and decrepit. Here, victims of a bomb attack in Maiduguri in 2015 await treatment in a public hospital. (Jossy Ola / Associated Press)

An extended medical trip for Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, the latest in a long line of leaders in Africa to travel overseas for medical treatment, has prompted a rash of online fake news stories proclaiming “Buhari is dead.”

Buhari, 74, who is in London for medical tests, posted photographs of himself meeting Nigerian officials in London to prove he was alive. He looked much thinner, but wasn’t bedridden and was able to stand. He tweeted that he was “grateful to Nigerians, Christians and Muslims alike, for their prayers and kind wishes for my health.”

But what was wrong with him, if anything? He didn’t say.

Nor did any Nigerian officials, as critics clamored that Nigerians had a right to know his condition. The president is awaiting results of tests, according to officials

His month-long trip continues a controversial tradition in Nigeria and elsewhere on the continent: presidents disdaining their own health services in favor of overseas medical trips often shrouded in secrecy.

Officials originally announced the trip was a short vacation that would include “routine medical tests.” The trip has been extended by almost two weeks, but no details on Buhari’s health or the nature of the tests have been released.

It is Buhari’s second extended trip to London for medical treatment, after he spent two weeks there last June. The June trip was to treat an ear infection, according to officials. At the time, critics questioned why Buhari couldn’t have been treated for such a simple ailment at the special presidential hospital State House Clinic Abuja, reputed to be the best hospital in the country.


The government upgraded the hospital in 2016 at a cost of $16 million, more than the total capital budget for Nigeria's 16 federal teaching hospitals. The hospital provides care for the president, vice president, their families and staff.

Buhari’s absence comes as the nation faces a dire economic crisis and soaring inflation, a looming famine in parts of northeastern Nigeria and continuing attacks from the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram. Eleven people died in a suicide attack on a convoy of vehicles preparing to depart Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, late Thursday.

His decision to consult doctors in London instead of Nigeria has angered many Nigerians, particularly after he promised last year to crack down on “medical tourism” – or foreign medical trips by Nigerian officials. The Nigerian Medical Assn. has estimated wealthy Nigerians spend around $1 billion a year on trips abroad for medical treatment.

After Buhari’s London trip for treatment for the ear infection, the association said local specialists would have been capable of treating the problem.

”The best-funded clinic in Nigeria does not suffice to treat the president’s ear infection. Nor does the president have enough confidence in the same clinic to do his ‘routine checkups’ there. Imagine, then, the fate of Nigerians who have no choice, but must seek treatment at the ill-equipped, wretchedly funded hospitals in our country. Are these Nigerians not simply woebegone, bereft of hope?” wrote novelist and political columnist Okey Ndibe on the news website Sahara Reporters.

In Madagascar, mothers weep and send their children to bed without water to drink

Those who travel overseas for health treatment are often wealthy government officials. Several former officials on trial over a series of multi-million dollar fraud cases have sought court permission in recent months to travel abroad for medical treatment.

Last September, Nigeria’s former first lady, Patience Jonathan, wrote to the nation’s corruption investigation unit, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, to say she needed $15 million to pay foreign medical bills. Her money is in accounts owned by associates, frozen by the commission in a corruption investigation.

Nigeria’s public health facilities are run-down and overcrowded. The country spends just 3.7% of its gross domestic product on health, compared with more than 17% in the U.S., according to the World Health Organization, while vast amounts are siphoned off by corrupt government officials. Nigeria has only four doctors per 10,000 people.


Nigerians are particularly sensitive about presidential overseas visits for medical care, after a former president, Umaru Yar’Adua, disappeared for months for medical treatment in Saudi Arabia in 2009 and 2010, leaving a power vacuum before dying suddenly in office. Officials close to Yar’Adua had persistently denied to the public – and other members of the government – that his health was failing.

Many other African leaders have died suddenly in foreign hospitals, while government officials back home insisted they were healthy. Ethiopia’s prime minister, Meles Zenawi, died in a Belgian hospital in 2012 and the president of Guinea Bissau, Malam Bacai Sanha, died in a Paris military hospital the same year. Zambia’s President Michael Sata died in a British hospital in 2010, while his predecessor, Levy Mwanawasa, died in a Paris hospital in 2008. Gabonese President Omar Bongo Ondimba died in a Spanish hospital in 2009, after more than four decades in power.

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, 92, frequently flies to Singapore for visits described by officials as “routine eye checks.” Hospitals in Zimbabwe have been in a prolonged downward spiral, lacking medicines and basic supplies because of Zimbabwe’s economic crisis.


Nigerian Senate leader Bukola Saraki, one of three officials who met Buhari in London, tweeted Thursday that Buhari was “healthy, witty & himself,” adding there was no power vacuum and “no cause for alarm.”

But the lack of detailed information about Buhari’s health tests and possible ailment fueled concerns in Nigeria.

During his absence in London, Buhari spoke by phone to President Trump, who offered to sell military aircraft to Nigeria to assist in the country’s struggle with Boko Haram.

Nigerian officials said Trump had invited Buhari to Washington, D.C., and that the American president told his counterpart to “keep up the great work.” The White House made no mention of any invitation.

Some Nigerians argue that if Buhari could speak to Trump by phone, he should be able to address Nigerians.

Buhari’s spokesman, Femi Adesina, on Thursday brushed off questions as to why officials hadn’t posted videos of Buhari to prove that he was in good health, instead of still photographs.

“The fact that the president is receiving visitors, the fact that he has spoken with the American president and the fact that he has asked us to tell the world that he’s fine, I think that’s just enough,” Adesina said in a Nigerian television interview. He said the president would return soon, but gave no date.

“I wish I could give you a definite date, I really wish, but then we just have to hang on to what the president has told us.”

South African photographer believes theft was hate crime

By Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — It was a most unusual burglary. Thieves got in through the bathroom window and walked past the flat-screen TV, DVD player, expensive camera and a couple of brand-new cellphones. Instead, they took 20 external hard drives and some digital camera memory cards.

It didn't make sense to Zanele Muholi, an art photographer and activist, the victim of the April theft.

Unless …Something cold shifted inside her. Could this be another hate crime against lesbians?

The stolen hard drives, all hidden in different locations around her apartment, were the archive of five years of Muholi's extraordinary work photographing marginalized lesbians in many African countries.

"Seemingly they spent some time searching," Muholi says in a phone interview. "It seemed to be targeted. The content is a major part of my life."

Muholi, a lesbian whose work has been called "immoral" by a government minister, is convinced the theft was designed to suppress her "visual activism," as she calls it.

The 39-year-old is the only black South African artist selected to exhibit her work at the recent Documenta festival in Kassel, Germany, an exhibition featuring hundreds of international artists that is put on every five years. (The other South African chosen was prominent artist William Kentridge.)

Her work on lesbianism and womanhood confronts traditional patriarchal notions of African masculinity and is often perceived as threatening to men in the townships where her subjects live.

Muholi's five years of lost work is a unique record of the lives of black lesbians forced to live underground, in fear of being attacked for being "unnatural" or "un-African," stoned, beaten, even burned. Her photographs celebrate the love and life of black lesbians — and mourn the dead. Muholi documented the funeral of Noxolo Nogwaza, a lesbian raped and killed last year in Kwa-Thema, a township outside Johannesburg.

There's an epidemic of rapes of lesbians in South Africa, disturbingly dubbed "corrective rape," because a victim is told it is to teach her to be a "real woman." Beatings of lesbians, gays and transgender people are commonplace.

The attacks are a blight on South Africa's Constitution, a document that enshrines the right to same-sex marriage, but whose protection for people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender is opposed by African traditionalists and fundamental Christians.

Richard Lee of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, an African nongovernmental organization promoting democracy, human rights and good governance, compares the loss of Muholi's work to the theft of a Picasso in Europe.

"There should have been a huge outcry by now. Government ministers and artists and academics and journalists should be shouting from their pulpits, because a unique part of South Africa's cultural heritage was stolen…," Lee writes on the organization's blog. "No one else has taken photos like this. No one else has documented this community with so much understanding and so much force and so much beauty."

After the robbery, Muholi's state is akin to mourning.

If you ask her how she is, she responds, heavily, "It's another day." She lies awake at night, and this or that beautiful image captured during her travels around Africa spins into her head.

"There were pivotal moments that I shared with people. I can't go back to those spaces.

"I am so shocked and traumatized and hurting."

But under the grief, the knowledge that someone has been in her apartment also leaves its trace of fear, given the violent homophobia common in South Africa.

"I don't feel comfortable in my apartment. I might be in danger. You never know when your time will come." Known for her courage, Muholi almost cringes, because she feels as if that's been stolen too. "I used to be brave. Now, I'm weak and I am scared."

Muholi's work has always been intensely political and confrontational. Even the white T-shirt she sometimes wears showing two black women kissing is enough to enrage many South Africans.

She says her motive in photographing lesbians is to give faces and voices to the disempowered communities in Africa, and support victims of hate crimes.

"We have to support them, because you never know, I might be next," she says. Among the stolen images were photographs taken at the funerals of lesbians gang-raped and slain because of their sexual orientation, or who killed themselves in despair.

In 2010, South Africa's then-minister for arts and culture, Lulu Xingwana, who was supposed to speak at an exhibition featuring Muholi's work, walked out, calling the images of black lesbians embracing "immoral, offensive and going against nation-building." Xingwana has since been promoted by the overtly traditionalist president, Jacob Zuma, to minister for women, children and people with disabilities.

Since the Xingwana walkout, South Africa's artistic freedom has come under pressure from politicians more than once, with the ANC calling for a debate on the limits of artistic freedom. In recent weeks, South Africa was convulsed by its fiercest debate on artistic freedom, after a male artist depicted Zuma (a polygamist with more than 20 children) with genitals exposed in a painting called "The Spear."

Supporters have set up a campaign to replace Muholi's equipment. But even if they did manage to raise the money, it wouldn't bring back the lost photographs. And even if she could retrace her steps in the different African countries, she wouldn't find the same images.

"Even if somebody sent me back there," she says, "I would not be able to capture those moments."