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 Chinese AIDS Activist Disappears |
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温故知新
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作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
Chinese AIDS Activist Disappears
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
[B] EIJING, Aug. 28 — China's most prominent AIDS activist has disappeared, apparently detained by China's security services, human rights groups and relatives said.
Wan Yanhai, a former Chinese health official who was fired after he took up the causes of gay rights and AIDS in the mid-1990's, has been involved in various small but influential projects in the last few years, including a web site about H.I.V. and the creation of small support groups for patients.
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He has also been instrumental in exposing a devastating AIDS epidemic in central China, whose epicenter is in Henan Province, where as many as a million people may be infected through tainted blood sales. A Chinese passport holder, he divides his time between China and the United States, where he wife is a student.
His disappearance and probable arrest comes at a time when China is at a crossroads in its handling of a growing H.I.V. problem. His troubles demonstrate China's deep official ambivalence about becoming more open about AIDS, a shift that virtually all experts agree is necessary to reverse the crisis.
China is about to submit an proposal to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, asking to receive millions of dollars to be used for AIDS control and prevention in some of the epidemic areas that Dr. Wan first exposed.
Dr. Wan has not been heard from since late last week and attempts to contact him by phone and e-mail have all been fruitless, said his wife, Su Zhaosheng, by phone from Los Angeles.
"I have been unable to reach him and he never mentioned to our relatives in Beijing that he was going away on business," Ms. Su said. "We usually talk every night. This has never happened before."
This summer Dr. Wan and his small band of volunteers in China has come under increasing surveillance as his projects have become more ambitious — helping groups of farmers organize petitions demanding treatment, for example.
Lately he has often been followed by plainclothes police officers. People who have had even brief contact with him have sometimes later been questioned by representatives of China's State Security apparatus.
Earlier this summer, his group, the AIDS Action Project, was forced to vacate their small office at a Beijing academic institute.
Those familiar with his Web site speculate that he may have given the authorities an excuse to take further action last week by posting an internal document prepared by health authorities in Henan Province, which included some statistics about the H.I.V. epidemic there.
Although the document contained little new information, some experts who have been concerned with the H.I.V. issue speculate that authorities might contend that it was a "state secret," and try to arrest Dr. Wan under China's vague "State Secrets Law."
If Dr. Wan has been taken in under State Secrets charges, he can be held for a relatively long period without explanation and he loses much the judicial protection guaranteed under China's Criminal Procedure Code, such as the right to a lawyer.
One worry is that he could be turned over to the authorities in Henan Province, where supporters say that it is unlikely he could get a fair a trial. Through his work, Dr. Wan has earned the admiration of foreigners and the enmity of Chinese officials. Last year Dr Wan accepted a prestigious health award from the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, on behalf of Dr. Gao Yaojie, a retired Chinese doctor who works with rural AIDS patients, after Chinese officials refused her a passport to travel to the United States.
A small softspoken man who generally works behind the scenes, Dr. Wan nonetheless had absorbed some of the confrontational style of American AIDS activists during several fellowships in the United States.
At a regional AIDS meeting in Kuala Lumpur two years ago, Dr. Wan rose from the audience to heckle and confront China's vice minister of health, who was then on the podium.
More recently, he has been involved in creating support and counseling groups for people with AIDS in rural China. In one recent petition, a group of AIDS sufferers from Sui County in Henan, one of the areas where Dr. Wan's groups worked, wrote to the Chinese Ministry of Health demanding affordable medicines.
作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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