TOKYO (AP) – China’s crackdown on Tibet, the Dalai Lama’s prestige in exile and his remedy for ethnic minorities sparked violent protests ahead of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
I may do it again.
China is the 2022 Winter Olympics with boycott rumors and calls to relocate the Beijing games for alleged human rights violations.
The request submitted to International Olympic President Thomas Bach on Wednesday through a coalition of human rights teams representing Tibet, Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang region, Hong Kong and others. In a letter, the organization asked the IOC to “reverse its mistake by awarding Beijing the honor of hosting the Winter Olympics in 2022. “
The letter said the 2008 Olympics fell short of China’s human rights record and that it has since built an “Orwellian surveillance network” in Tibet and imprisoned more than a million. Uighurs, predominantly Muslim ethnic group. It indicated a litany of other alleged Hong Kong abuses of the Inner Mongolia region, as well as intimidation from Taiwan.
China has continuously denied the tariffs and has accused other countries of meddling in its internal affairs. First of all, he denied the lifestyle of the camps for Uighurs, then he said they were centers for vocational education to combat terrorism.
“Through education and vocational training, Xinjiang has taken preventive measures against terrorism and de-radicalization, contained once common terrorist activities, and the most productive is the right to life, fitness and security. For the progress of all ethnic groups, “Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying said last week:” In more than 4 years, there has not been a single terrorist attack in Xinjiang. “
The International Olympic Committee has argued that the 2008 Olympics will reshape China and improve its human rights record. Instead, they are compared to Hitler’s Olympics in Berlin in 1936; an authoritarian state that uses games as a stage.
An editorial in the Washington Post this month warned that China will lose the Olympics. “The world will have to wonder if China, which is slowly strangling an entire people, has the ethical price to host the 2022 Winter Olympics,” he said. “We don’t believe it. “
Times are precarious for the Swiss-founded IOC. Its finances, and those of two hundred National Olympic Committees and dozens of Olympic Games-related sports federations, have been shaken by the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics to 2021 due to COVID-19.
Bach warned two months ago that he opposed boycotts, but said he was not referring in particular to Beijing. The Swiss-based organization generates 73% of its source of income from the sale of television rights and 18% from sponsors and has noticed that its source of income stagnates through the Tokyo stagnation.
Following the abandonment of European cities such as Oslo and Stockholm, the IOC had two bidders for 2022: Beijing and Almaty, in Kazakhstan. Beijing won by 4 votes, bringing the Winter Olympics to a country without culture, but a giant untapped market.
Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr. , the IOC member who oversees Beijing 2022, declined to answer questions from the Palestinian Authority about reported human rights violations in Xinjiang and referred to the IOC’s comments.
“Awarding the Olympic Games to a National Olympic Committee does not mean that the IOC has the political structure, social cases or human rights criteria in the country,” the IOC said in an email to the Associated Press.
The IOC said it had “received ‘guarantees’ on China’s human rights issues, adding that it remains” impartial on all world political issues. “
The IOC included human rights needs in the host city contract for the 2024 Paris Olympics, but it did come with those rules, the United Nations Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights, for Beijing. Paris is the first Olympic Games to involve standards, long demanded by human rights groups.
“NGOs, celebrities and other militant teams will exert great pressure on China as the boycott games, etc. , approach,” Victor Cha, former White House adviser on Asia, said in a statement. email to AP. “I, the IOC would be very reluctant to take 2022 out of Beijing. “
China is the 2022 Asian Games in Hangzhou, reaching even more athletes than the Summer Olympics.
Athletes have shown their strength by supporting the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States and beyond. German footballer Mesut Ozil, a Muslim of Turkish origin, spoke out against China and coined the phrase: “Muslim lives matter. ” He criticized the fact that Muslim-majority countries like Indonesia and Malaysia have remained silent.
Murray Hiebert, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said countries do not need to jeopardize their economic relations with China, adding the infrastructure investments they get.
“Indonesia was very critical of Myanmar when it deported some 750,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees to Bangladesh in 2017 and early 2018, but officials said little about the Uyghur scene in China,” he said.
The IOC is working to revise a rule that prohibits political demonstrations at the medal table of the Olympic Games.
Casey Wasserman, who heads the organizing committee for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics, said he wrote to Bach and asked him to reform the rule. “I do not believe that anti-racist speech is political speech,” he said this month.
Mary Harvey, executive director of the Swiss Center for Sport and Human Rights, said athletes protesting racism and inequality in the United States have the same rights in Beijing or Tokyo.
But Lee Jones, who studies Asian politics at Queen Mary University of London, said athletes should speak up. The Winter Olympics are much smaller than the Summer Games, with few Muslim athletes participating.
“Most athletes seem to need to separate gambling and politics, unless they are involved, as in game activism in the United States,” he wrote in an email.
Jones said, however, that filing complaints about China’s human rights record through foreign governments, especially the United States and some European countries, makes the scenario potentially worse for China than it was in 2008, when the crusade broke out. carried out largely through Tibetan militant groups.
US presidential candidate Joe Biden’s crusade supported the use of the term “genocide” to refer to China’s movements in Xinjiang.
He said the boycotts are to replace China’s behavior, but that China can simply act if it sees its reputation damaged, especially in Muslim-dominated countries.
“China has reacted furiously to any suggestion that it is mistreating even the Uighur population, letting genocide take place, so it risks reacting very negatively if other governments start to carry out a boycott campaign. “Jones said.
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