Times Reporter in China Is Forced to Leave Over Visa Issue

Chris Buckley, a 45-year-old Australian who has worked as a correspondent in China since 2000, rejoined The Times in September after working for Reuters. The Times applied for Mr. Buckley to be accredited to replace a correspondent who was reassigned, but the authorities did not act before Dec. 31, despite numerous requests. That forced Mr. Buckley, his partner and their daughter to fly to Hong Kong on Monday.

Normally, requests to transfer visas are processed in a matter of weeks or a couple of months.

The Times is also waiting for its new Beijing bureau chief, Philip P. Pan, to be accredited. Mr. Pan applied in March, but his visa has not been processed.

The visa troubles come amid government pressure on the foreign news media over investigations into the finances of senior Chinese leaders, a delicate subject. Corruption is widely reported in China, but top leaders are considered off limits.

On the day that The Times published a long investigation into the riches of the family of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, both its English-language Web site and its new Chinese-language site were blocked within China, and they remain so.

In June, the authorities blocked the English-language site of Bloomberg News after it published a detailed investigation into the family riches of China’s new top leader, Xi Jinping. Chinese financial institutions say they have been instructed by officials not to buy Bloomberg’s computer terminals, a lucrative source of income for the company.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to comment on Mr. Buckley’s forced departure. Ministry officials have not said if they are linking Mr. Buckley’s visa renewal or Mr. Pan’s press accreditation to the newspaper’s coverage of China. In a statement, The Times urged the authorities to process Mr. Buckley’s visa as quickly as possible so that he and his family could return to Beijing.

“I hope the Chinese authorities will issue him a new visa as soon as possible and allow Chris and his family to return to Beijing,” Jill Abramson, the executive editor of The Times, said in the statement. “I also hope that Phil Pan, whose application for journalist credentials has been pending for months, will also be issued a visa to serve as our bureau chief in Beijing.”

The Times has six other accredited correspondents in China, and their visas were renewed for 2013 in a timely manner. David Barboza, the Shanghai bureau chief, who wrote the articles about Mr. Wen’s family, was among those whose visas were renewed.

Ikea Admits Use of Forced Labor in the 1980s

A report by auditors at Ernst & Young concluded that Ikea, a Swedish company, knowingly benefited from forced labor in the former East Germany to manufacture some of its products in the 1980s. Ikea had commissioned the report in May as a result of accusations that both political and criminal prisoners were involved in making components of Ikea furniture and that some Ikea employees knew about it.

“Even though Ikea Group took steps to secure that prisoners were not used in production, it is now clear that these measures were not effective enough,” the company said in a statement on Friday.

The use of political prisoners as forced labor, even decades ago, is a publicity disaster for a company that with its familiar blue and yellow logo seems at times like a cultural ambassador for Sweden. Inexpensive Ikea furnishings have filled countless student apartments and the homes of millions of young families around the world.

Accusations against Ikea started to appear about a year ago in news media reports in Germany and Sweden. Ikea’s admission has given new impetus to efforts by victims’ groups to receive compensation for work they were forced to perform under the Communist government in East Germany, an issue that has long been overshadowed here by the large and deadly slave-labor program under the Nazis.

“There’s little recognition,” said Hugo Diederich, the chairman of the Association of Victims of Stalinism, himself a former forced laborer, after a news conference here a short walk from the former Checkpoint Charlie border crossing, in a building that stands along the path of the Berlin Wall.

Ikea is not the only company that has been linked to forced labor in the former East Germany by purchasing goods from suppliers there, though the actual number may never be known.

Mr. Diederich said that after an attempt to escape from East Germany, he was forced to make steel pipes for the firms Klöckner & Company and Mannesmann.

At least two well-known mail-order companies in the former West Germany, Neckermann and Quelle, which have since run into financial trouble, have also been accused of using forced labor.

Christian Sachse, a Berlin historian, said forced labor permeated institutions across East Germany, and that it would take “years of research to properly understand the field.”

Mr. Diederich said that more needs to be done for the victims, many of whom today live under worse circumstances than their former tormentors. “This will raise the pressure enormously on politicians to act,” he added.

Ikea’s announcement received a mixed response. There was praise that the company had made an effort to uncover unpleasant facts about its past, but also criticism that it had not been transparent enough with the results. Rather than releasing the entire report, the company made only a four-page summary available, citing privacy concerns.

But Steffen Alisch, a researcher on prisons in the former East Germany at the Free University in Berlin, said, “They have to make the entire report available, and they have to do it quickly.”

The fact that Ikea retained Ernst & Young for the inquiry instead of using independent academic experts also raised questions. “Ernst & Young has no experience with research into dictatorships and is clearly not objective,” said Ronald Lässig, chairman of the East German victims’ group DDR-Opfer-Hilfe. “What Ikea did today was little more than an event for show.”

Investigators examined 20,000 pages of internal Ikea records, as well as 80,000 pages of documents from federal and state archives. They interviewed about 90 people, including current and former Ikea workers and witnesses from East Germany.

A political prisoner in Naumburg, about an hour’s drive from Leipzig, told investigators that he was sent to VEB Metallwaren Naumburg, one of East Germany’s state-owned enterprises. He was put to work placing metal pegs in chair legs and furniture rollers, and remembered seeing boxes with the Ikea logo.

A purchaser for the company said that “the use of prison labor was not an official Ikea strategy, but that there was an awareness within the company about the issue.”

“The G.D.R. did not differentiate between political and criminal prisoners,” Ernst & Young wrote, referring to East Germany, adding that “during this time period, many innocent individuals were sent to prison.” Ikea repeatedly raised concerns about the possible use of forced labor at the time but no action was taken, the report said.

Jochen Staadt, a professor at the Free University of Berlin, said it was well known at the time that East Germany was using prisoners to work in factories but that West Germany encouraged the production of goods in the East because it allowed the East to reduce its debt. At the same time, companies liked to move production to East Germany because costs were lower.

Professor Staadt said companies like Ikea would still have paid for the work in East Germany but that the pay never reached the workers. “It was pocketed by the G.D.R.,” he said.

Ikea employees did visit the production sites in East Germany, but rules governing such visits were strict, that way reducing the effectiveness of site inspections. Any visit had to be registered and approved in advance and could take place only in selected parts of the plants, and a representative of the East German government had to be there.

Ikea said Friday it was sorry about the episodes and pledged to donate money to research on forced labor in the former East Germany.

“We deeply regret that this could happen,” Jeanette Skjelmose, sustainability manager at Ikea, said in a statement.

Rainer Wagner, chairman of the victims’ group UOKG, said at the news conference here that “a broad public clarification” was necessary, not just from Ikea but from “all the firms” that used forced labor. But Mr. Wagner also thanked Ikea for its “pioneering role” in helping to bring greater public attention to the subject.

Nicholas Kulish reported from Berlin, and Julia Werdigier from London. Chris Cottrell contributed reporting from Berlin.