{"id":10387,"date":"2012-04-24T18:14:51","date_gmt":"2012-04-24T18:14:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/?p=10387"},"modified":"2012-04-24T18:14:51","modified_gmt":"2012-04-24T18:14:51","slug":"george-karimi-an-armenian-living-in-sweden-who-had-the-misfortune-to-be-arrested-in-china-on-charges-he-has-always-denied","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/?p=10387","title":{"rendered":"George Karimi, an Armenian living in Sweden, who had the misfortune to be arrested in China on charges he has always denied"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last autumn Society Matters carried a post<\/a>on the predicament of George Karimi, an Armenian living in Sweden, who had the misfortune to be arrested in China on charges he has always denied, and who was subsequently transferred to Storboda, a Swedish jail.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the post Armenian scholar, Professor Hovhanness Pilikian, urged the Swedish Government to consider releasing George (pictured), who is suffering from ill health caused by his Chinese imprisonment, on humanitarian grounds.\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0 Letters were also sent to every Swedish MP, and to the current Swedish Prime Minister, Mr Fredrik Reinfeldt.\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the letter to the Prime Minister, Professor Pilikian quoted the Society Matters post, and the response, at last, has been the switch to improved conditions for George. Society Matters can reveal that George has been transferred to an open prison where he is now receiving the appropriate medical treatment. George is now in Asptuna Anstalten facility near Stockholm, a far more liberal regime than Storboda.<\/p>\n

Garo Hakopian, the distinguished Armenian Poet, Swedish Armenian Community Leader, Founder and Chairman of the Assembly of Armenians in Europe,\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0 wrote to the editor of Society Matters:<\/p>\n

“In the name of the Assembly of the European Armenians, I wish to thank the Society Matters Blog, albeit belatedly, for the enormous positive effect the publication of Professor Pilikian’s article produced in the official government circles of Sweden.\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0 It directly caused the amelioration of the prison conditions of our political prisoner, Mr George Karimi, who was unjustly incarcerated by the Chinese authorities in Beijing, entirely on trumped up charges, and is now serving as a Swedish citizen, the rest of his prison sentence in Sweden.<\/p>\n

“Alas our battle must continue until the totally innocent Mr Karimi is released to his young wife and two children.<\/p>\n

“Mr. Karimi has been an exemplary prisoner — he is entitled to his reward for good, nay, excellent and impeccable behaviour.\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0 He has still much to contribute to a peaceful humanitarian society, the kind that exists in Sweden.”<\/p>\n

Dick Skellington\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0<\/em>23 April 2012<\/p>\n

The views expressed in this post, as all posts on the Society blog, are the views of the author, not the Open University.<\/em><\/p>\n

How an Armenian in China ended up a political prisoner in a Swedish prison<\/h1>\n

Armenian scholar <\/em>Professor Hovhanness Pilikian on how the Chinese Government’s treatment of one innocent Armenian reveals much about their poor record on human rights.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/div>\n

George Karimi(an) is a child of the nation that had the misfortune of being an inconvenient obstacle in historical Anatolian Armenia (in today\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7s Turkey) to the imperialist plans of the German Kaiser who plagued the globe with the First World War, and the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians, with the help of the Ottoman Young Turks.
\n\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0
\nGeorge (pictured)\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0 went to Beijing in 2003 with rosy-pink glasses on, excited by the Chinese Communist Party’s noble plans to improve the life of the ordinary Chinese citizens, following the great leader Deng Xiaoping’s dictum that ‘Wealth creation is good’.\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0George believed in decent capitalism, the type the Chinese Government is pursuing today.\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0Little could George guess that he was to become the victim of the totally corrupted faction of the government which the Chinese Communist Party itself is trying to eliminate.
\n\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0
\nGeorge K was suddenly and inexplicably arrested, precisely as\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0Mr. K\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0was in Kafka’s novel The Trial; but in George’s case,\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0on trumped-up charges\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0of financial mismanagement, by now a stereotype used by corrupt factions in the Chinese government to cover up the bigger rotten capitalist fish and sharks of the Communist Party.
\n\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0
\nGeorge was put on a\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0show\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0trial with\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0his accuser, an Indian friend called Milap, already safely packaged out of the country back to India, from where he later\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0withdrew\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0his charges completely, confirming that he had\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0incriminated himself and George under torture.\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0Incredibly, George K was still\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0rubber-stamped automatically\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0as “Guilty” and condemned to life imprisonment.
\n\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0
\nThe father of ancient Armenian history, Movsess Khorenatsi (5th\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0century AD) wrote of a Chinese nobleman who escaped the horrendous civil wars in China to find safe haven in ancient Armenia and became the progenitor of the Mamikonian aristocratic family dedicated to the military protection of the Armenian Kingdom.\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0Fifteen centuries later, George went to\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0China\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0in the 21st\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0century, to find imprisonment.
\n\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0
\nAs a Swedish citizen, George sought the protection of his own civil state, which, because of its long socialist tradition of defending human rights, stepped in and negotiated a secret settlement with the Chinese Government to transfer George into the more humane conditions of a jail in\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0Sweden,\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0to complete his unjust and unfair trumped-up sentence.
\n\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0
\nUnfortunately recent Swedish governments seem keen on pleasing official America by denying the country’s best humanist socialist traditions,\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0 the envy of the whole world. Now trying to modernize and globalize within the US free market paradigm, and in terror of the future power of Chinese capitalism, Sweden is victimizing its own citizen George Karimi merely to indulge the corrupt faction of the Chinese Government.
\n\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0
\nThe Swedish Government must not betray the humanitarian tradition of its good men, like\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0Edvard Vilhelm Si\u0569\u0085\u0549\u0080\u0098blom, a Swedish missionary who was brave enough to lead an international protest movement in 1897 against one of the most powerful and murderous monarchs of Europe, King Leopold II of Belgium,\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0who had killed over 10 million\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0(some put the figure at 30 million) Africans.
\n\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0
\nThe Swedish Government, instead of shaming itself by\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0keeping a political prisoner, could encourage the good among the factions of the Chinese government by reminding them that their great modernizer and wealth-creator,\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0Deng Xiaoping, was himself purged twice during the Cultural Revolution, and\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0his totally innocent son Deng Pufang\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0was\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0tortured\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0by the mad Red Guards and\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0forced out of a window in a 4-storey building, escaping miraculously from certain death, though\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0a paraplegic today.The good Communists of China must refrain from such murderous acts.\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0
\n\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0
\nThe Swedish Government\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0must immediately free George, innocent like Deng Pufang, as George’s health is neglected and deteriorating.He simply cannot survive another five years of unfair, unjust and inhuman\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0incarceration.\u0569\u0082\u0539\u00a0<\/p>\n

Faithful to its own humanitarian socialist principles, the Swedish Government must encourage the good Communists of the Chinese Government to see justice done and not side with rampantly evil market forces destroying human decencies.<\/p>\n

Hovhanness Pilikian <\/em>20 September 2011<\/p>\n

A longer version of this article can be seen here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last autumn Society Matters carried a poston the predicament of George Karimi, an Armenian living in Sweden, who had the misfortune to be arrested in China on charges he has always denied, and who was […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10390,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kadence_starter_templates_imported_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10387"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10387\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}