Tokyo – 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 Beijing Olympics.
Beijing will host the 2022 Winter Olympics, and there are already rumors of boycotts and calls to move the games due to alleged human rights violations.
A coalition of human rights teams sent the request to the president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, before the assembly of the agency’s board of directors in Switzerland on Wednesday. In a letter, the organization asked the IAO to “reverse its mistake by granting Beijing the honor of 2022. “Winter Olympics. “
The letter said that the 2008 Olympic Games had not met China’s human rights record and had since built “an Orwellian surveillance network” in Tibet and imprisoned more than one million Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group, in the Xinjiang region.
He indicated a litany of other alleged Hong Kong abuses of the Inner Mongolia region, such as intimidation of Taiwan.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian accused the teams of trying to politicize the sport, which he said is contrary to the spirit of the Olympic Charter.
China has denied the human rights violations. At first, he said that the camps for Uighurs did not exist, then he said that they were vocational education centers to combat terrorism.
“Through education and vocational training, Xinjiang has taken preventive measures against terrorism and deradicalization, containing the terrorist activities that were once common and the right to life, fitness and development of all ethnic groups,” said another spokesman Hua Chunying last week. “In the last 4 years, there has been no terrorist attack on singles in Xinjiang. “
The IIC argued that the 2008 Olympic Games would reshape China and improve its human rights record. Instead, they are compared to the 1936 Hitler Olympics in Berlin; an authoritarian state that uses games as a stage.
Times are precarious for the Switzerland-based IOC: its finances, and those of the two hundred national Olympic committees and dozens of sports federations related to the Olympic Games, have been shaken by the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics until 2021 due to to COVID-19. .
Bach warned two months ago that he opposed boycotts, but said he did not refer in particular to Beijing. The Swiss-based organization generates 73% of its revenue from the sale of television rights and 18% of sponsors and has noticed that its revenue is stare due to Tokyo’s delay. .
After the abandonment of European cities such as Oslo and Stockholm, the IAO had two bidders by 2022: Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan. Beijing won by 4 votes, taking the Winter Olympics to a country without culture, but an untapped giant market.
Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr. , the IIC member overseeing the Beijing Games, refused to answer The Associated Press’s questions about human rights violations reported in Xinjiang and referred to IAO comments.
“Attributing the Olympic Games to a national Olympic committee does not mean that the IOC has the political structure, social cases or human rights criteria of the country,” the IOC said in an email to the AP.
The IOC said it had “received assurances that the principles of the Olympic Charter will be respectable in the context of the Games. ” He added that he will have to remain “neutral in all world political affairs. “
The IIC has included human rights needs in the host city contract for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, but has included those rules, the United Nations Guidelines on Business and Human Rights, for Beijing. Paris is the first Olympic Games to include the long-demanded criteria for human rights groups.
“NGOs, celebrities and other activist teams will put great pressure on China in the run-up to games calling for a boycott, etc. ,” Victor Cha, a White House ex-treasurer on Asia, said in an email to the AP. “I, the IAO would be very reluctant to withdraw 2022 from Beijing. “
China are the 2022 Asian Games in Hangzhou, which involve even more athletes than the Summer Olympics.
Athletes have shown strength by supporting Black Lives Matter occasions in the United States and elsewhere. German footballer Mesut Ozil, a Muslim of Turkish descent, spoke out against China and coined the word “Muslim Lives Matter”. most countries like Indonesia and Malaysia have been silent.
Murray Hiebert, a senior spouse at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said those countries must jeopardize their economic relations with China, adding the infrastructure investments they get.
“Indonesia has been highly critical of Myanmar when it deported some 750,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees to Bangladesh in 2017 and early 2018, but officials have said little about the Uighur scenario in China,” he said.
The IIC strives to revise a rule prohibiting political occasions in the Olympic Medallion.
Casey Wasserman, who heads the organizing committee for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, said he wrote to Bach and asked him to reform the rule: “I don’t think an anti-racist speech is a 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 in 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 the game and politics, unless they are involved, as in the activism of games in the United States,” he wrote in an email.
Jones said, however, that the growing complaint of China’s human rights record through foreign governments, adding to the United States and some European countries, makes the scenario potentially more serious for China than in 2008, when the crusade was largely run by Tibetan militants. Groups.
U. S. presidential candidate Joe Biden’s crusade supported the use of the term “genocide” for China’s movements in Xinjiang.
He said boycotts are to replace China’s behavior, but that China can simply act if it sees its reputation damaged, especially in Muslim-ruled countries.
“China has reacted furiously to any suggestion that it is abusing even the Uighur population, severing genocide,” Jones said, “so it risks reacting very negatively if other governments start a boycott campaign. “