Torture of African Students Alleged : Chinese Police Accused of Stripping Youths Held 5 Days

Chinese police stripped a number of African students and tortured them with electric batons outside the dining hall of a guest house where they had been held for five days, according to allegations made Monday by some of the students.

“We have heard that they were made to walk almost naked in the cold as police poked them with electric batons,” Gobo Bio Mamah, a diplomat from Benin, told a Western reporter in discussing the Saturday incident. “It appears to be torture.”

Mamah, speaking in Beijing, told another reporter that African students had given him the names of two students from Benin allegedly mistreated in that way, one named Ludovic and the other named Nejnenou.

‘Can’t Sacrifice Students’

“These are very serious allegations of torture,” Mamah said. “I am very concerned. I want an explanation. I want an investigation. We cannot sacrifice our students in the name of (international) friendship. If this goes on, our students will not come to China. Even in South Africa, this would be criminal.”

The group has been at the guest house since shortly after a Christmas Eve incident between African students and Hehai University gatekeepers escalated into a clash.

Daouda Diakite, 24, a computer science major from Mali at Nanjing University, said that male students were tortured on their genitals and faces with electric batons after Chinese police forced about 130 foreign students outside of the guest house. The alleged action occurred shortly after the students had sat down to lunch Saturday.

“They were taking clothes off so the (electric) clubs could touch your body--mostly sex (the genitals) for men, or your face,” Diakite said. “There is no underwear. They just put it on your body.”

Diakite said there was so much confusion he could not estimate how many people were treated this way, but he believed that it may have been 30 or more. He himself was not stripped, he said.

“I succeeded to protect myself,” Diakite said. “By all physical means I fought, and fortunately for me there were friends around me.”

Diakite said that before the students were forced outside, they battled police who had surrounded the dining hall.

“We did not have anything to protect ourselves, only plates,” he said. “At first, although they had guns, we fought them away by throwing plates at them. But the cafeteria was surrounded like a battlefield.”

Students from at least three campuses made similar allegations Monday, either to reporters or to Mamah. Diakite was not one of the students who made the allegations heard by Mamah, according to both Diakite and Mamah.

Mamah also said that Chinese authorities informed his embassy that Ludovic had already been sentenced to 15 days in jail in connection with the Christmas Eve clash.

Mamah also lashed out at the treatment often suffered by Africans in China.

“Chinese have no consideration for Africans,” Mamah said. “We are inferior and treated as such. . . . Our students are ready to go home rather than be treated as dirty beasts.”

There are about 1,500 African students in China, who constitute about one-quarter of all foreign students here, according to Chinese figures. Many come for long stays of five years or more, during which they must first master Chinese and then a technical subject. Nearly all are men.

Source of Tension

Their relations with Chinese women are sometimes a source of tension with Chinese authorities and students. “The Chinese cannot accept an African with a Chinese lady,” Mamah said.

Liang Ruiju, president of Hehai University, told reporters Saturday that the root cause of the Christmas weekend conflict on his campus was that African students were bringing Chinese women, including some prostitutes, into their dormitories and having sex.

The university was determined to put a stop to this behavior by building a wall blocking access to the foreign students’ dormitory, he said. Chinese guests would then have to register, and foreign students would meet with them in a reception room, he said.

African students opposed the attempt to build the wall and tore it down when it was partly constructed, according both to Liang and to foreign students.

The Christmas Eve incident--in which African students clashed with university gatekeepers, and Chinese students then threw rocks at the foreign students’ dormitory--was entirely the responsibility of a small number of African students, Liang said.

Liang said the Christmas Eve incident, in which 11 Chinese and two Africans were officially reported injured, was a premeditated attack by African students in reprisal for the university’s attempt to control access to their building.

Mamah called Liang’s account “a tissue of lies.” He also said he was told that Jiangsu province public security authorities in Nanjing were the only people who could provide further information about Ludovic.

“This is unacceptable,” Mamah said. “How is it that authorities in the capital of China cannot comment about the actions of a province?”

About 50 African students from Hehai University were apparently still being held Monday at the isolated guest house outside Nanjing.

About 30 students from Nanjing Polytechnical University, who were among a group that spent Saturday night at a different hotel nearer to the city, had still not returned to their campus Monday evening. Authorities refused to comment, however, about their location.

At Hehai University, meanwhile, workers were building an iron fence around the foreign students’ dormitory, a Nepalese student said.

Another diplomat in Beijing, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that a delegation of African diplomats is scheduled to meet with the Chinese Foreign Ministry today to discuss the incident.