Posted on 10/13/2001 5:21:29 PM PDT by Sunshine55
HONG KONG (UPI) -- Travel agents in Hong Kong and Beijing said China has banned nationals from 19 countries from buying air tickets for its state-owned airlines in a step-up in security following the terrorist attacks on Washington, D.C., and New York City in September. "We were told not to sell tickets to Muslim passengers mainly for routes going to North America. European routes were later added," said one travel agent in Beijing.
"I cannot sell tickets to people from the Middle East who want to fly Chinese airlines to the United States," said another travel agent.
A memo was sent to major ticketing agencies, possibly throughout the world, instructing them not to issue tickets to people from a list of countries, according to the South China Morning Post on Saturday. The notice also said that passengers from named countries who already had tickets should be contacted and told they could not fly with the airlines. The memo suggested that under certain circumstances the ruling could be waived.
The memo said, "Tickets shall not be issued to people from these 20 countries again. Tickets already issued should be canceled and fully refunded, or processed only after receiving confirmation from the local embassy or consulate. People from these countries shall be strictly controlled. But be flexible, they are being told, and consult the local embassy or consulate to discuss how stringent the edict should be."
The countries listed are Afghanistan, Egypt, Israel, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Yemen, Sudan, Kuwait, Libya, and Algeria. It added people of Palestinian or Pakistani origin with "unusual background" should also be denied tickets.
The decision to ban certain nationals from China's airlines came from rulings by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Civil Aviation Department, said the notice.
China's state-run airlines carry a majority of the passengers traveling to the mainland. China Southern Airlines, China Eastern Airlines and Air China also fly most of the internal routes in China.
"I think that awareness of the nature of discrimination on the basis of race is very weak in China, "said Sophia Woodman, Research Director in Hong Kong with Human Rights in China. "This kind of blanket ban is clearly not the way to prevent terrorism and is discriminatory."
Earlier this week officials with Pakistan's consulate in Hong Kong lodged a complaint with local authorities and with China's Foreign Ministry in Beijing after numbers of Pakistani nationals in this former British colony were denied visas for the mainland.
"The numbers who have been refused are in the hundreds," said Naila Maqsood, the Vice Consul-General of Pakistan's consulate in Hong Kong. "These are all people who reside in Hong Kong and have Hong Kong ID cards. They have not been given any specific reason for refusal."
Many of those who applied for visas to the mainland have traveled there on business numerous times and have never been refused entry before, she said. There are about 25,000 Pakistani nationals living in Hong Kong and many are businesspeople whose jobs require them to travel to mainland China.
"To punish an entire nation, or the members of a faith, for the sins of a few is cruel and unjust," railed an editorial in the South China Morning Post on Saturday.
"In a particularly ham-fisted gesture they [China] appear to have singled out Pakistanis, implying they are persona non grata, regardless of what travel document they hold. This is an extreme over-reaction, which can only backfire."
"My own apprehension is that they don't want any Pakistani nationals in China before President Bush arrives in Shanghai at the end of October," said Maqsood.
President George Bush is expected to attend an informal economic leaders meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in Shanghai from Oct. 17 to 21. Analysts in Hong Kong and Beijing have questioned whether the U.S. president will stick to his schedule and attend the meeting while Operation Enduring Freedom is in progress.
Diplomatic sources in Hong Kong who declined to be identified said people from Middle Eastern countries were facing the same problems as the Pakistanis in obtaining visas for mainland China. They said they believed China was increasing security before the APEC meeting and Bush's arrival. (Kirk Troy in Beijing contributed to this story.) Copyright 2001 by United Press International. All rights reserved.
We know this needs to be done here & NOW!!
It saddens me that we don't have the balls to do it and to hell with the PC groupies and the PC Media!
We're "politically correct" is why. We don't require the Muslims to be politically correct, they can make statements about all Americans, all Jews, they can bring their hate speech-filled Koran and spew hate speeches from their mosques. They can profile us and kill us but we're supposed to let them have total access to everything in our country.
Liberals thrive on victims.
Gee ... how soon until we get to be TRULY totalitarian?
Do you really want to know?
Can anyone on FR imagine the U.S. granting visas to Japanese or German national during WWII? (After most of them were just innocent people)
What is so odd about it? It does not take any intellegence to see why this is a prudent move. What is odd is that we have not taken the same precautions.
I understood that citizens (or "nationals") of any of these nations were summarily precluded from flying Chinese airlines.
A strange gesture of support, IMHO, from the same nation who's pumped our military and our nation full of Red Heroin, organized and trained marxists terrorists and revolutionaries to our south in Cuba and Latin America, supplied domestic terrorists (a/k/a criminals) with covert weapons, usurped our sovereign territory in Panama, stolen our technological and military secrets, successfully interfered in our elections and shown no compunction whatsoever to apologize for engaging our EP-3E in a maneuver that could have killed everyone on the plane they held hostage instead as if they were at war with us or sumpin.
If we can't control our own borders and customs, that's our problem.
This is just a bunch of hooey to make it look as though China's on our side, that -- like us -- China's "worried" about the selfsame terrorist cells its groomed worldwide and ... worst of all ... China's got a Better Way.
I think the last thing we need to be doing is taking a page from China on the "means necessary" to effect Order out of the chaos China itself has initiated and in which it revels where we are concerned.
Yes it is! -- and -- Yes it is!
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