I’ve just received the good news that my friend Brian Conley, and most of the other independent media makers and the activists they were documenting, have been released and are heading home.
The so-called “Beijing 6″ were ultimately sentenced, through an extrajudicial proceeding (they did not get to go to court), to 10 days of detainment. As some of us guessed, it turned out to be shorter, with the end of the Olympics.
I received a message via Facebook that one of Brian’s colleagues, Jeffrey Rae, called his father to say he and others were being put aboard an Air China flight to Los Angeles.
I haven’t had the time to summarize and annotate my thoughts on the media coverage of the detainments. I’ve been trying to help make some connections between Brian’s family and the media, and hold down the day job as well.
I suppose the short version of such thoughts would be this:
The articles I’ve seen in the New York Times, Agence France Presse, the Associated Press, and elsewhere have not given much space to the broader context of the Students for a Free Tibet actions, or other protests, and have not bothered to acknowledge the different roles of some of those detained. Not all were participants in the protest. Brian, Jeffrey Rae, and others are asserted to have had a purely documentary role (and my personal knowledge inclines me to believe this). No evidence has been presented to the contrary and yet they’re all implied to be people who knowingly broke the law (however unjust it may be). That may be true for some of them, but some were not even breaking the law as best we can tell.
While what these detainees have suffered is far less than what Chinese dissidents have suffered, the “Beijing 6″ and a couple others have received special treatment with respect to the precedent set in handling previous alleged disruptions during the Olympics.
The former has only been glazed over throughout the Olympic coverage and the latter only mentioned in passing in a couple of reports so far. The facts are lightly reported and the context only exists for those of us who read voraciously and cull as much we can. The papers and the wires have done the public no favors in understanding this situation.
Eowyn, Brian’s wife, shared this thought with many of us overnight:
I’ve spent a lot of today pondering a question that came to me sometime last night — If this is how the Chinese government treats US citizens when the eyes of the world are focused on China, what do they do to Tibetan and Chinese activists, who have no real rights, when no one is watching? I can’t even imagine.
Update: This evening I heard of a report on NPR yesterday, and heard another for myself today that actually distinguished the two different groups of detainees related to the Students for a Free Tibet incident — using the terms “activists” and “citizen journalists.” An improvement in accuracy.