The adamant refusal of the Chinese Communist government to allow Liu Xiaobo to travel to Oslo to receive the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize is more than disgraceful—it is a flagrant violation by the Chinese regime of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN General Assembly, including China.
Liu Xiaobo is only the fourth laureate to be honored in absentia and prevented from going to Norway to accept the prize. The others are the German peace activist Carl von Ossietzky—imprisoned by the Nazis–the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, and the Burmese human rights champion Aung San Suu Kyi. Dr. Liu is only the second laureate since Ossietzky to be denied the right to even have a representative accept the prize on his behalf.
As Elena Bonner, the widow of Andrei Sakharov, points out in a letter to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Communist China in its treatment of Dr. Liu has therefore placed itself in the same category as Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the repressive government of Burma. (For a full text of Dr.Bonner’s letter go to victimsofcommunism.org or globalmuseumoncommunism.org).
Is the Chinese government so weak that it cannot allow even one man to propose the discussion of political and human rights reforms in China?
Is the Chinese government so contemptuous of human rights that it dismisses the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as irrelevant to its “great power” status?
Does the Chinese government think that it can forever satisfy the long suppressed desire of the Chinese people for basic human rights with so-called economic “liberalization”?
The Chinese communists would do well to remember what the East German communist boss boasted in February 1989—“The Berlin Wall will stand for another 50 or 100 years.” Nine months later, the Berlin Wall fell and East Germany was no longer communist