He was otherwise thoroughly questioned in January, but the newly found material apparently calls for an explanation.
The Tibet Commission is investigating police handling of a series of official Chinese visits. It must find out why the police have several times made sure that critical protesters were not visible to the guests.
One question in particular arises: Was it the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that, behind the scenes, led the police to take actions that violated the citizens’ right to express themselves and demonstrate?
Last week, emails from the waste container were displayed on screens in the courtroom where the commission is conducting its interrogations.
A former high-ranking official was close to crying – declaring she was shocked to see what she had written.
The new material shows that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was involved in hiding protesters at the COP15 climate conference in 2009.
Among the officials, unrest had arisen. There was a prospect that Prime Minister Wen Jiabao could see critical demonstrators, and that got center manager Sus Ulbรฆk to the keys on the morning of December 8:
“… we usually agree with the police that FG and the Tibetans are in places where the Chinese delegation does not come. This can either be done by the procession always driving another way, or by the demonstrations being moved,” she wrote.
In other words, the Prime Minister should not see critics of the Falun Gong movement or Tibetan activists. And this was obviously something the ministry used to agree on with law enforcement.
During the interrogation last week, Sus Ulbรฆk could not explain her email.
– It’s completely out of hemp. Why am I writing this at all, she asked out into the room.
The then head of the ministry’s Asia office was Martin Bille Hermann. That morning, he wrote to center manager Ulbรฆk that they certainly did not want an intended central location for the demonstrators – and continued:
“The question is, what happens if we ask the police to move the demo. We run the risk of a sudden power outage, don’t we?”
The words in the email do not seem to quite align with what Martin Bille Hermann explained to the commission in January:
“The Asia Office has not had a position on how demonstrations were conducted or how they were handled,” he said at the time.
In addition, the Tibet Commission has also decided to convene both the former director and head of department Friis Arne Petersen and the former deputy head of the ministry’s protocol Annette Lassen for a new round of questions in June. In addition, two PET employees are to be questioned again.
The Tibet Commission states that the newly found mails originate from discarded magnetic tapes that had been lying in a waste container for several years for destruction. Other magnetic tapes had been lying in other containers in the ministry’s basement, but these have been destroyed.
In November 2018, the Commission was informed of the existence of the magnetic tapes. The site has followed “a complicated process of restoring mailboxes for relevant employees”, the commission states.
Whether more relevant material will emerge is not known. “The process is still ongoing,” it reads.
Source: The Nordic Page