Yahoo suffers pangs of guilt, opens wallet

IN AN ATTEMPT to salve its dirty conscience for giving up names of "cyber dissidents" to China, Yahoo has now set up a fund to aid the very people it helped put behind bars in the first place.

The Yahoo Human Rights Fund is being managed by widely-known Chinese dissident, Harry Wu, who spent 19 years slaving away in Chinese labour camps for having the nerve to actually voice an opinion. Wu spoke to AFP about the fund but wouldn’t let on how much money the Yahoo board of directors have allocated to it.

The fund’s purpose is to help the families of jailed dissidents (especially those locked away for protesting China’s lack of human rights online), to pay their legal fees. The fund’s cash will also apparently go some way towards trying to educate people both inside and outside of China about the dire state of Chinese human rights.

Wu, who now lives in the U.S, told AFP "I'm not sure how much of an impact we will have, but we will try."

The guilt easing fund was created in November of 2007 after Yahoo reached a settlement with the families of jailed dissidents Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning (who were jailed because of the Internet company’s help to the authorities) to stop a lawsuit.

Shi was a business journalist who had been imprisoned since 2004 for "div ulging state secrets" which basically consisted of him posting a Chinese government order forbidding media organizations from marking the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising, online. Wang, was considered to be even more of a degenerate traitor for his pro democracy blogging and political essays posted online. He has been jailed since 2002, and Wang’s wife decided to sue Yahoo for complicity in his arrest.

Yahoo pathetically sniveled that it had crumbled and given in to Chinese demands, lest they be told that they were no longer allowed to operate in the country. So much for morals and solidarity then. The fund was the cheap way out for them, apparently.

The hypocrites at Yahoo seem to think that their new fund will take attention away from the fact that the Chinese version of their website, operated by China-based firm Alibaba, last week again collaborated with the Chinese government by posting pictures of 19 people wanted by authorities for protesting in the Tibetan capital Lhasa.

Hope the fund has enough cash to cover the legal fees. µ

L’Inq
AFP