The ****trait of a Bloody Nosed "Olympic Host" -- For the west, many
tough calls on China
International Herald Tribune
For the west, many tough calls on China
By Steven Erlanger
Sunday, April 13, 2008
PARIS: As the Dalai Lama begins a contentious two-week visit to the
United States and the Olympic torch continues its tortuous journey
across six continents toward Beijing, the 2008 Games, already tarnished,
have become a political as well as an athletic spectacle, with vying
theories of human rights and how best to promote them.
Groups devoted to causes as diverse as press freedom, Falun Gong, Tibet
and autonomy for Uighur Muslims in China's far west have used the Games
as leverage to highlight issues that had been relegated to advocacy chat
rooms during most of China's long economic boom.
Aggressive street demonstrations in London, Paris and the United States,
and mounting calls for President George W. Bush and other world leaders
to skip the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in August as a show of
protest against China's internal policies, have produced a nationalist
backlash in China. There, both the leader****p and ordinary people resent
what many see as a plot to disrupt the Games and damage China's image as
a rising power, which the Olympics once seemed likely to burnish.
Politics has not intruded on the Games to this extent since Soviet bloc
countries boycotted the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles in retaliation for
a United States-led boycott of the Moscow Games in 1980, after the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The post-Los Angeles consensus that the world's foremost s****ting event
should remain exclusively a celebration of athletic excellence appears
to have frayed. How political the Games will become, and whether
international pressure on China will improve or worsen its policies on
Tibet, Darfur and other delicate issues, has become a major worry for
diplomats, athletes and commercial sponsors of the Olympics.
Eberhard Sandschneider, a China expert at the German Council on Foreign
Relations in Berlin, said that the protests around the Games had created
an uncomfortable moral dilemma for Western democracies even as Chinese
leaders dug in their heels.
"The country is economically so attractive and by now so powerful that
any measures we take will be met with painful countermeasures," he said.
"The Olympics are im****tant to the Chinese, but not as im****tant as
Tibet. Sovereignty and stability will always outweigh public relations."
The French foreign minister, the human rights advocate Bernard Kouchner,
finds himself torn , unable and unwilling to criticize the protesters,
but understanding that loud street protests may make Chinese change more
difficult. "We can't reduce foreign policy to human rights," he said,
telling the newspaper Le Figaro that France wanted to "facilitate"
renewed dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Beijing. But the protests
"make a solution more complicated," he said.
The most obvious pressure is on Western political leaders to engage in a
symbolic boycott of the opening ceremony on Aug. 8. Prime Minister
Gordon Brown of Britain and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, have
said they will not accept invitations to attend the opening of the
Games. Even the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, a Korean,
made it clear on Thursday that his schedule would not permit him to
attend the opening ceremony.
President George W. Bush, who plans to attend the Games, has said that
he considers the Olympics nonpolitical but has not specified whether he
intends to participate in the opening ceremony. Many members of Congress
have urged him to skip it, and all three presidential contenders have
suggested or urged that he reconsider attending.
President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who first suggested boycotting the
opening ceremony to promote a renewed dialogue between China and the
Dalai Lama, has himself not finally decided, trying to use his decision
as leverage on Beijing. After denying stiff conditions for his
attendance set by Rama Yade, his human rights minister, including the
end of all violence in Tibet, Sarkozy said he would decide whether to go
only after seeing if the dialogue was renewed.
Speaking after the Paris protests, Sarkozy said: "It was sad to see the
flame and the athletes booed, and I can understand that the Chinese have
a problem." But "for the Olympics to go ahead in a peaceful fa****on,
dialogue needs to resume," he said.
The European news media and public opinion appear to sup****t a tough
stand. In Germany, the cover of this week's Der Spiegel magazine is the
five Olympic rings retooled in barbed wire, with a picture of Chinese
leaders underneath. The article focuses on the heavy-handed treatment of
dissent, opening with the wife and baby daughter of a jailed dissident,
Hu Jia.
A cartoon in the French newspaper Le Monde showed a citizen "training
for the Olympics" by facing his armchair away from the television set,
and the leftist newspaper Liberation is selling a T-****rt for protesters.
Leading advocacy groups appear unlikely to let the pressure die down
before the Games. Sup****ters of greater autonomy for Tibetans have seen
their cause catapulted into the headlines around the world, with an
outpouring of sup****t for the exiled Dalai Lama and widespread calls,
including from Bush and most European leaders, for Beijing to engage him
in a meaningful dialogue.
Tsering Jampa, executive director for Europe of the International
Campaign for Tibet, said the Olympic Games were the best hope Tibetans
and human rights campaigners ever had to extract concessions from Beijing.
"This is China's coming-out party," she said. "European governments
should use this op****tunity to really push the issues of human rights
and Tibet. If heads of states are saying that they may not go to the
opening ceremony, that helps."
Martha Bixby, executive director of Team Darfur, a coalition of athletes
seeking to highlight Beijing's sup****t for Sudan, which Wa****ngton has
accused of genocide in Darfur, said critics must prod changes in Chinese
policy.
Activist groups must ensure "that it's not just superficial change to
make things look better, that it's actually something that's going to
make a difference," she said.
But the reaction in Beijing does not suggest much inclination to
capitulate to demands from activists. Officials there continue to label
the Dalai Lama a "splitist" bent on sabotaging the Olympics, and they
have shown no signs of softening their approach to managing Tibet or
renewing a dialogue with the exiled spiritual leader.
On the contrary, Chinese are blaming foreigners for the tensions.
Sarkozy's decision to leave the door open to a partial boycott of the
Games prompted a populist appeal in China to boycott French goods,
circulated on the Internet. Chinese users also circulated a photograph
of a protester, in a cap with Tibetan colors, trying to grab the torch
from a Chinese woman in a wheelchair, who was praised in Beijing for
protecting the flame.
China's fierce pride also covers a deeper defensiveness, a sense that
China's rise has made it the target for the hypocritical anger of a
wounded West, especially the United States and Europe, that resents such
a successful new rival for global trade and influence.
The reaction suggests that the governing Communist Party will probably
respond if protests and boycott threats continue to escalate. "If any
country takes actions that are seen as harming the dignity of the
Chinese people, it will have to act," predicted **** Yinhong, professor
of international relations at People's University in Beijing.
**** said any boycott would not influence China's overall foreign policy.
But he predicted Beijing may take a harder line in trade talks with
European partners, especially France. "People are very unhappy with the
French president," he added.
By contrast, China would be able to save some face if European leaders
simply declined to attend the opening ceremony without linking their
absence to Tibet , the tack chosen by Brown. Then, **** predicted, "China
will remain quiet and say, 'Our invitation remains open.' "
While the Olympics have often been used for political purposes ,
famously by Hitler in 1936, when Jesse Owens made such a mark, and even
in 1968 in Mexico, when American athletes used a black-power salute to
highlight discrimination at home , this controversy is also underscoring
a sharp disconnect in perception between China and the West. Even as the
Chinese security team protecting the torch has drawn pungent criticism
in Europe, its members are ****trayed as heroes in the Chinese news media
for guarding the Olympic flame and, by extension, protecting the
apolitical Olympic spirit.
The procession of the flame, now being limited and rethought in places
including Indonesia, has been a rallying spot for other complaints about
Chinese interests and practices.
A good example is the Kenyan Nobel Peace laureate and environmentalist
Wangari Maathai, who pulled out of this weekend's leg of the relay in
Tanzania in protest. "I am troubled that these Olympics, rather than
being a unifying movement, have become most divisive," she said. Still,
she called on China to help defuse tensions in Darfur, Tibet and Myanmar.
"In all of these issues," she said, "China can make a difference, and
that is what the world is urging them to do."
International Herald Tribune Copyright
2008 The International Herald Tribune
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