Voice seeking answers for parents about school collapse in China is silenced

BEIJING: Three weeks after the earthquake in Sichuan Province, five bereaved fathers whose children died in collapsed schools sought help from a local human rights activist named Huang Qi.

The fathers visited Huang at the Tianwang Human Rights Center, an informal advocacy organization in the provincial capital of Chengdu, where he worked and lived. They told him how the four-story Dongqi Middle School had crumbled in an instant, burying their children alive.

Huang soon posted an article on his center's Web site, 64tianwang.com, describing their demands. They wanted compensation, an investigation into the schools' construction and for those responsible for the building's collapse to be held accountable — if there indeed was negligence.

A week later, plainclothes officers intercepted Huang on the street outside his home and stuffed him into a car. The police have informed his wife and mother that they are holding him on suspicion of illegally possessing state secrets.

"They've been using this method for a long time," said Zhang Jianping, a contributor to the Web site who has known Huang since 2005. Nobody knows the grounds for his arrest, but many people have the same idea. Zhang said, "It may be because the schools collapsed, and so many children died."

In the days after the earthquake, the authorities allowed reporters and volunteers to travel freely in the disaster zone. Some commentators even saw the dawning of a Chinese glasnost. In an interview with National Public Radio that aired in May, Huang said he believed that the human rights situation in China had greatly improved.

"He actually thought things were heading in the right direction," said John Kamm, who is pressing for Huang's release and is the executive director of the Dui Hua Foundation, which has helped free prominent Chinese political prisoners. "That's one of the tragedies of his detention."

A volunteer at the Tianwang center, Pu Fei, 27, was detained minutes after Huang. He said that the officers who interrogated him demanded that he hand over the password needed to post information on their Web site. They also wanted to know whom Huang had met and where he had gone in the disaster zone. Pu was detained in a hotel for two weeks and then released.

Pu and other volunteers said the authorities might have singled out Huang because he disseminated information about parents whose children had died in collapsed schools — a group whose protests began to snowball into something like a movement in early June.

There is no official figure on how many children died in schools during the powerful May 12 earthquake. Seven thousand schoolrooms collapsed, according to Chinese government estimates. Thousands of students may have died, if not more, leaving behind bereft parents looking for answers.

During the brief period of openness in late May and early June, parents marched with photos of their children and gathered at the wreckage of schools to hold memorial services. They held sit-ins outside government buildings. In one town, the top Communist Party leader got down on his knees and begged parents to stop a march, but they refused.

But with the Olympic Games in Beijing approaching, the issue increasingly looked like a time bomb for the authorities, and they scurried to defuse it. The Propaganda Department banned coverage of destroyed schools in the domestic press. Paramilitary police officers blocked foreign reporters from demonstrations. Activists who tried to gather and publish information about school construction were detained.

On June 2, The Sichuan Economic Daily published an article saying that substandard construction methods contributed to the deaths of 82 students at a middle school in Yinghua Township. Afterward, an editor at the paper said, two reporters and an editor who worked on that article were fired.

Two fathers of children killed in schools said in separate interviews that officials had told them public gatherings and petitioning the government were no longer permitted. Zeng Hongling, a local crusader who wrote three articles lashing out at the government's earthquake response, was detained on suspicion of inciting subversion, according to the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, a group based in Hong Kong.

Huang, who was detained on June 10, has not yet been formally charged with any crime. But if he is convicted on the murky charge of holding state secrets, it will not be his first time being jailed for a political crime.

In 1998, he and his wife, Zeng Li, founded the Tianwang Center for Missing Persons, an organization that focused on cases of human trafficking. Its name later changed to Tianwang Human Rights Center as its mission expanded.

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