World Tibet Network News Thursday, June 18, 1998

by Stephen Collinson

HONG KONG, June 17 (AFP) - Thousands of people have been killed, jailed or tortured in rights abuses in Asia and the region's financial crisis could further erode freedoms, Amnesty International warned Wednesday in its annual report.

"In the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human

Rights, challenges to the universality and indivisibility of human

rights were prevalent throughout the Asia-Pacific region," the report said.

Amnesty condemned the government of former Indonesian leader Suharto and also highlighted Stalinist North Korea, China, Cambodia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar.

"Economically disadvantaged groups, migrant labourers and ethnic minority groups all faced the consequences of political and economic instability."

The London-based rights watchdog catalogued thousands of cases of torture, detention without trial and massacres of civilians in war zones in the report for 1997.

"For all their talk of Asian values, governments continued to oppress minority groups," said the report, which details abuses in 141 countries worlwide.

Amnesty slated the Suharto government in Indonesia which fell last month when Suharto resigned after 32 years in power.

"The Suharto government left a legacy of hundreds of prisoners of conscience and political prisoners convicted after unfair trials, legislation allowing for imprisonment of peaceful critics, a weak and dependent judiciary and a military able to act above the law," it said.

"Governments who in the dying days of Suharto's presidency were

urging fundamental policical change in the country should follow through on its implication."

The "human rights catastrophe" deepened in Stalinist North Korea, where an estimated several thousand children are dying every month because of famine," Amnesty said, accusing the authorities of refusing to cooperate in efforts to assess the full scale of the disaster.

China was accused of cruelly repressing ethnic minorities seeking independence or religious freedom, particularly in the mainly Moslem Xinjiang region and Tibet.

However, Beijing was praised for abolishing the death penalty for juveniles and freeing celebrated dissident Wei Jingsheng.

Ethnic minorities were also targeted in Malaysia where the government forcibly deported more than 500 Indonesians to their home province of Aceh, the report said.

"The deaths of eight Indonesians and injuries suffered by many others raised serious questions about the level of force used during the operation," the report said.

"The government also used the repressive Internal Security Act

against religous activists amd threatened to use it against currency speculators."

Myanmar's brutal military government was guilty of "extra judicial killings, forcible relocations and torture of ethnic minorities," it said.

The Taliban, which subjects most of Afghanistan to its hardline

interpretation of Islam, reportedly detained thousands of people on grounds of ethnicity or "un-Islamic" behavior and suppressed freedoms for women, Amnesty said.

Despite the death of reviled Cambodian dictator Pol Pot in April, "perpetrators of human rights abuses still escape the courts with impunity and ordinary people are still not free from fear," the report said.

It urged the United Nations to push ahead with proposals to try those suspected of complicity in the 1970s "Killing Fields," genocide and other crimes.

Serious rights abuses, including rape and torture, occurred in

Pakistan and Sri Lanka, South Korea, India, Australia, Thailand, the Philippines and Taiwan were also criticised, the report said.

People were reportedly tortured or ill treated by security forces in at least 22 countries, death sentences without trial were carried out in 11 countries and detention without trial was found in 18.