News on China and the Olympic Games

COMMENTARY: HOW CHINA BREAKS UP REFUGEES' HOMESBy Kay Seok, North Korea researcher at Human Rights Watch"She went to the police station," the 6-year-old girl said in a barely audible voice. When asked if she knew what happened to her mother, she hung her head and stared at the floor. At the end of the interview, during which she said very little, I realized she was holding onto the hem of my jacket. I wondered if I reminded her of her mother.Read more at: http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2008/04/09/china18505.htm



April 11, 2008
Olympic Official Calls Protests a ‘Crisis’
By ANDREW JACOBS
BEIJING — China faced rare criticism of its human rights record from the head of the International Olympic Committee on Thursday, even as calls for a boycott of the opening ceremony of the Games grew louder in Europe and the United States.

The president of the Olympic committee, Jacques Rogge, called on the authorities in Beijing to respect their “moral engagement” to improve human rights in the months leading up to the Games and to provide the news media with greater access to the country. He also described the protests that have dogged the international Olympics torch relay as a “crisis” for the organization.

Though Mr. Rogge predicted the Games would still be a success, his comments were a sharp departure from previous statements in which he avoided any mention of politics. Beijing quickly rejected his remarks and said they amounted to meddling in its internal affairs.

Meanwhile, pressure increased on world leaders to signal their opposition to China’s policies in Tibet and its close relations with the government of Sudan by skipping the opening ceremony of the Games. The European Parliament urged leaders of its 27 member nations to consider a boycott of the ceremony unless China opens a dialogue with the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet.

In New York, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations informed China that he would not attend the ceremony, a spokeswoman said. An official in Mr. Ban’s office said that he had travel commitments in Europe and Latin America and that he was already scheduled to be in China in July, shortly before the Games.

China’s human rights policies and the Olympics have become a contentious issue in the race for president in the United States, where the three remaining candidates from both parties have called on President Bush, who has plans to attend the Olympics, to skip the opening event.

Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, said he would not attend the opening ceremony if he were president, echoing a statement by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton earlier this week. Senator Barack Obama suggested that Mr. Bush should wait to make a final decision, but leave a boycott “firmly on the table.”

Preparations for the Games were rocked last month when Tibetans staged violent protests against Chinese rule and security forces cracked down on monks and other supporters of the exiled Dalai Lama in parts of Western China. The clashes set off sympathy protests and calls around the world for the boycott. Demonstrators turned the 21-city torch relay into a public relations fiasco for Beijing and the Olympic committee.

The Dalai Lama, in Japan on Thursday, told reporters no one should try to silence the demonstrators protesting Chinese rule in Tibet, and he said, “We are not anti-Chinese.” He added, “Right from the beginning, we supported the Olympic Games.”

Top officials in China have claimed that the Tibetan protests and the international protests are part of a plot to disrupt the Olympics orchestrated by the Dalai Lama, who lives in India. They have called him a splittist and a terrorist whose goal is to separate Tibet from China.

On Thursday, officials also said they had uncovered a plot by Islamic terrorists in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region to disrupt the Games by kidnapping foreign journalists, athletes and spectators.

The police said they arrested 35 people and confiscated explosives and detonators belonging to a Uighur jihadist group based in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. In the past, officials have announced the discovery of such plots without providing much evidence. Last month, they claimed to have foiled a plan to hijack an airplane and blow up a bus.

While China has faced violent attacks from Muslim groups, unflinching social controls have prevented the emergence of a sustained terrorist threat in the country. Some analysts have suggested that widely publicized discoveries of weapons caches and terrorist plots are part of a larger effort to present domestic unrest as a form of international terrorism that the world should help China suppress.

Speaking before a two-day meeting of the Olympic committee’s executive board in Beijing, Mr. Rogge condemned protesters who have hounded torch bearers in several countries. He said that skirmishes during torch processions in Athens, London, Paris and San Francisco amounted to a crisis, but insisted that they would not derail the six-continent pageant leading up to the Games.

“There is no scenario of interrupting or bringing the torch back to Beijing,” he said.

Even so, he also called on China to honor its pledges to improve human rights and to give foreign journalists unfettered access to all parts of the country.

“We will do our best to have this be realized,” he said of a recent Chinese regulation that guarantees reporters the right to travel to all parts of the country, including Tibet.

Mr. Rogge said he met with Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China for an hour on Wednesday, but he would not reveal details of their conversation. Mr. Rogge has long avoided criticizing China, saying that pressing the government on Tibet and other issues was likely to backfire.

“China will close itself off from the rest of the world, which, don’t forget, it has done for some 2,000 years,” he said, somewhat exaggerating history, in an interview broadcast Wednesday in his native Belgium.

The Chinese government reacted sharply to Mr. Rogge’s criticism. “I believe I.O.C. officials support the Beijing Olympics and adherence to the Olympic charter of not bringing in any irrelevant political factors,” said Jiang Yu, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman.

Olympic committee members have been taken aback by the scope and ferocity of the protests, which are marring what has traditionally been a festive event involving 20,000 torch bearers. Although the protests in San Francisco were not as disruptive as in London and Paris, the torch’s sole North American visit was a disappointment to thousands of spectators after the relay route was changed at the last minute.

The committee members who gathered at a hotel in central Beijing offered harsh words for demonstrators who used the relay to publicize issues ranging from Tibetan religious freedom to environmental concerns. Gunilla Lindberg, a vice president of the committee, likened some of the more aggressive protesters to terrorists and said they had emboldened committee members to keep the relay going.

“We will never give into violence,” Ms. Lindberg said. “These are not the friendly demonstrators for a free Tibet, but professional demonstrators, the ones who show up at G-8 conferences to be seen and fight.”

Denis Oswald, a committee member from Switzerland, said those who thought that interrupting the torch relay or the Games would push China to improve its human rights record were wrongheaded and naïve. He noted that it took Europe several centuries to become truly democratic and said that it was unwise to expect China to do the same in a few years.

“We have to give them time, and as long as they’re moving in the right direction we should be patient,” he said. He added that those who disrupt the relay “do not respect the freedom of people who want to enjoy it.”

In announcing the disruption of what they described as a pair of terrorist plots, Chinese officials from the Ministry of Public Security said they had arrested leaders of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.

The authorities said they had seized 19 explosive devices, almost nine pounds of explosive material, seven detonators, and “nine kinds of raw materials to be used for waging a holy war.” They said the group’s leader had urged his fellow plotters to use “poisonous meat,” “poisonous gas” and remotely controlled explosives.

Giselle Davies, a spokeswoman for the International Olympic Committee, said that the group was unaware of the plot and that it had learned about the arrests only from Chinese television. Still, she said the committee had full confidence that the police would guarantee security at the Games. “We trust very much the authorities will handle that with the right approach,” she said.

Despite the chaos along the torch relay route, Mr. Rogge said he expected the Olympics to proceed without a hitch. He cited the murder of 11 Israeli athletes in Munich in 1972 and boycotts in 1976, 1980 and 1984 as far more disruptive and said he hoped the public would soon focus on the essence of the Olympics: athletic competition and world unity.

“It is a crisis, there is no doubt about that, but the I.O.C. has weathered many bigger storms,” he said.

Asked if he had any regrets about the Games having been awarded to Beijing, Mr. Rogge said China’s bid was not only the best among competing nations, but that he thought it was especially compelling to hold the Games in a country with a fifth of the world’s population. “It is very easy with hindsight to criticize the decision,” he said. “It’s easy to say now that this was not a wise and sound decision.”

Warren Hoge and Sarah Wheaton contributed reporting from New York.




Turned Off by Torch Guards
Beijing Battles Accusations of Rough Tactics by 'Sacred Flame Protection Unit'

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, April 11, 2008; A12
BEIJING, April 10 -- As protesters besiege the Olympic torch on its global tour, a phalanx of tall, tough-looking young Chinese men in blue-and-white running gear have vigorously protected the flame -- too vigorously in the eyes of those who consider protest a constitutional right.

With their steely demeanor and strong-arm tactics, they have become a symbol of what is going wrong for Chinese authorities who had hoped to make the 2008 Beijing Games a worldwide celebration of China's friendly new face.

Sebastian Coe, chairman of the Olympic organizing committee for 2012 in London, called the men "thugs" and said they had pushed him around when the flame passed through the city Sunday. A spokeswoman for the Paris police, Marie Lajus, said the men had failed to coordinate with local authorities when they grabbed the torch and put out the flame during protests in the French capital Monday. One torchbearer described them as aggressive and robotic; another called them tense and irritable.

A San Francisco police spokesman, Sgt. Neville Gittens, said city authorities debated whether to allow the Chinese guards to participate in the ceremonies planned Wednesday for the torch's only stop in North America. In the end, the guards stayed, but the torch was secretly rerouted to avoid protesters.

Fleeing the public and accusations of thuggery were not what Beijing municipal and Olympic organizing committee authorities had in mind last August when they held a public ceremony to swear in the Beijing Olympic Games Sacred Flame Protection Unit. The special squad was made up of closely vetted volunteers from the special forces academy of the paramilitary People's Armed Police, state-controlled news media reported.

Resentment of the Chinese guards in London and Paris was heightened by apparent efforts to maintain secrecy about who they were. After the complaints in London, British police refused to be specific. Police in Paris said they were not really sure.

Olympic officials in Beijing, meanwhile, said the guards were specially trained student volunteers but did not say from which school. China's Internet censors also removed long-standing online reports of the August swearing-in ceremony.

At the time, the reports said the volunteer policemen were chosen for their height, proportion and good physical condition. The reports also said the young men had received special training in five foreign languages -- learning words such as "back" and "forward" -- and were taught good manners, as well as how to drive cars and motorcycles in convoys along crowd-lined streets.

Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, said in Beijing on Thursday that surrounding the torch with private security agents has become "standard practice" in pre-Olympic relays. He did not differentiate between private security and China's People's Armed Police, which has been used extensively in recent weeks to put down protests in Tibet and other Tibetan-inhabited areas -- the conflict that inspired most of those demonstrating abroad as the torch passed.

China's civilian and military authorities have joint command over the People's Armed Police, nearly 700,000 men and women assigned to protect foreign embassies in Beijing along with suppressing riots, controlling the border and fighting fires. But their standard police tactics for China, where state authority is enforced with an iron hand, were bound to not play well during the Olympic torch's stops in London, Paris and San Francisco.

"China's Thugs," said a headline in London's Evening Standard newspaper. "Flame farce with Chinese heavies, jogging police and riotous demos," the Daily Mail said.

Against that background, Michael Phelan, the police chief in Canberra, Australia, told reporters that the Chinese squad would have no role when the flame stops in the Australian capital April 24, despite reports of planned protests.

Other stops where the flame's guards appear likely to be tested are April 17 in New Delhi, where India's large community of Tibetan exiles will have access; April 26 in Nagano, Japan, a country with a tradition of open demonstrations; and May 2 in Hong Kong, where residents are used to challenging Beijing. The torch will be in Buenos Aires on Friday.

Within mainland China, authorities have vowed to go ahead with a relay leg in Tibet, including an ascent of Mount Everest, despite the violence last month in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, and plans for protests by Tibet independence campaigners. But Olympic organizers have refused to be pinned down on dates for the climb.

The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games has not told foreign correspondents whether they will be able to cover the Tibet leg. As things stand, foreign journalists have been barred from entering the region, where People's Armed Police have been deployed in large numbers.

The impression left by the Olympic torch guards in London and Paris illustrated the gap between Chinese authorities' idea of crowd control and those of societies with guarantees of free speech and assembly. When the torch arrived in Beijing on March 31, the Tiananmen Square welcoming ceremony was untroubled -- mostly because People's Armed Police had closed the venue to anyone without a pass.

In addition, the senior Communist Party officials responsible for China's Olympic preparations have little experience of foreign societies and their values. The two top Olympic officials -- Xi Jinping of the Politburo's Standing Committee and Liu Qi, the Beijing party secretary -- rose through party ranks in provincial assignments.

Kang Xiaoguang, a sociology researcher at Beijing's Renmin University, said Chinese authorities appear determined to prevent protests, by foreigners as well as Chinese, during both the domestic torch relay and the athletic events in August. Some might argue that the Chinese government would gain by tolerating demonstrators, but that is not the way officials in Beijing think, Kang said.

Moreover, the official mood appears to have hardened since the rioting in Tibet. Since the violence, in which 22 people were killed, Chinese authorities have harshly condemned foreign news media and supporters of Tibet.

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) seemed to encourage demonstrators in San Francisco, for instance, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, accused her of lacking "morality and conscience." Jiang added, "It is clear that kind of person has ulterior motives to disturb and sabotage the Olympic torch relay in San Francisco and elsewhere over and over."

Correspondents Mary Jordan in London and John Ward Anderson in Paris contributed to this report.


Bush Under More Pressure to Skip at Least the Olympic Opening in Beijing
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 11, 2008; A12
CRAWFORD, Tex., April 10 -- President Bush says the Summer Games in Beijing are about sports, not politics, but much of the rest of the world seems to think otherwise.

As torch-bearing runners dodge protesters and play hide-and-seek in cities around the world, Bush faces growing pressure, including from some conservatives, to bow out of the opening ceremonies in August to protest China's crackdown on Tibet and other human rights abuses.

Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, said Thursday that Bush should consider boycotting the opening ceremonies "unless they change some things pretty quickly." McCain's two Democratic rivals, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.) have made similar statements in recent days, with Clinton expressing a slightly more categorical opposition to Bush's attendance.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who is due to visit Bush in Washington next week, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have already said they will not be at the opening. But White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said that Bush will do more good by attending the Games and by keeping a good relationship with China's leader.

Bush, who arrived here Thursday for a long weekend at the presidential ranch, has been noncommittal on attending the opening ceremony but previously showed little patience for a boycott.

"I'm going to the Olympics. I view the Olympics as a sporting event," Bush said in February. "You got the Dalai Lama crowd, you've got global warming folks, you've got Darfur. And I just -- I am not going to go and use the Olympics as an opportunity to express my opinions to the Chinese people in a public way, because I do it all the time with the president."

Olympic boycotts have a long and mixed history, starting with failed attempts to protest the Games held in Nazi-controlled Berlin in 1936. The first large boycott came when the United States and 64 other nations refused to attend the 1980 Games in Moscow after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the Soviets and their Eastern Bloc satellites reciprocated in 1984 by sitting out the Games in Los Angeles.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser at the time of the Moscow boycott, recalls that the decision was reached "with surprising unanimity and fairly quickly." But Brzezinski, who advises Obama on foreign policy, said the situation then was far different.

"The decision in 1980 was made in response to a grave threat to world peace in the context of the Cold War," Brzezinski wrote in an e-mail. "In contrast the tragic and deplorable events in Tibet" could still be ameliorated by the Chinese, and Bush could decide later about attending the opening.

Jerry Fowler, president of the Save Darfur Coalition, said that as China faces more global condemnation, "they may start to do what they can to stem this criticism." But Victor D. Cha, a Georgetown University professor who served as Bush's Asian affairs director, said the Chinese government will use any boycott to rally support within China, as it has with the Tibetan uprising and the torch protests.

"I think everyone took a lesson from the Cold War and the 1980 and '84 Games that boycotts achieve little politically while they trash the dreams of athletes," Cha said.

David Shambaugh, director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University, also said a boycott would not affect China's policy toward Tibet, but it would be "a definite loss of face and prestige for the Chinese leadership and nation" that Bush or other leaders could use as "a signal to their own publics."

The idea of limiting a protest to the opening ceremony appears novel, particularly since world leaders have rarely attended them. Historian Allen Guttmann, author of "The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games," said "it's not been the custom" for sitting presidents to attend opening ceremonies overseas.

Staff writer Rachel Dry and staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.

Pageantry and ProtestThe Olympic torch relay sends an unexpected message.
Thursday, April 10, 2008; A22
THE MOUNTING protests surrounding the Olympic torch relay have prompted speculation that the International Olympic Committee, ever protective of the feelings of the Chinese government, will call off the 21-nation pageant. Committee President Jacques Rogge was quoted yesterday as calling the reports "a misunderstanding," and we hope that's right. In fact the torch spectacle, which convulsed San Francisco yesterday, unexpectedly has become an excellent vehicle for promoting understanding -- both in China and outside it.
For months, Beijing's communist rulers have been brushing off Olympics-related protests by the likes of Steven Spielberg and telling their own people that any criticism was the work of Western extremists or "splittists" such as the Dalai Lama. Yet as thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets of Athens, Istanbul, London, Paris and San Francisco, the Chinese are seeing for themselves how public opinion around the world has been repulsed by their government's cynical and amoral foreign policy in places such as Sudan and Burma and by its repression of the Tibetan minority.
Yes, much of the Chinese reaction is nationalistic, and it may bolster the regime in the short term. But some light is getting through, as well. "I'm surprised about what the protesters did, but there's no smoke without fire," one Beijing student told The Post's Jill Drew. "I think our government didn't handle the Tibet issue as perfectly as we imagined."
Western audiences are also getting a taste of the real nature of China's government, whose response to the protests has mixed shrill and surrealistic rhetoric with the muscular shoves of the security goons in blue track suits who have been following the torch. Premier Wen Jiabao, who met Mr. Rogge yesterday, grandiosely proclaimed that "the Olympic flame, which belongs to all mankind, will never be extinguished." That's funny, because the torch was put out at least twice in Paris by Mr. Wen's security team, who sequestered it on a bus and abruptly changed its route to avoid demonstrators.
That, too, will sound familiar in China, where dissidents and human rights activists have been jailed or blanketed by other goon squads as the Games approach. As described by The Post's Edward Cody, Shanghai lawyer Zheng Enchong lives with a team of security guards outside his apartment door, videotaping his movements, shadowing his visitors and occasionally beating him or preventing him from attending church.
Apologists for China claim that the Olympics are not the place for political protests. That's nonsense. The Games have always had a political dimension, especially when emerging powers have used them to announce their arrival on the world stage: Japan in 1964, South Korea in 1988 -- or Nazi Germany in 1936. The torch relay was invented by Adolf Hitler, who routed it through countries he would soon invade before overseeing a final leg featuring a blond, blue-eyed runner ushering the flame into Berlin's Olympic stadium. We count it as progress of a sort that 72 years later, a police state can't celebrate itself that way without drawing a few Bronx cheers.