From Berlin ’36 to Beijing ’08, the Olympic torch is passed to tyrants
Who — apart from the climate change brigade — would have minded if the President, the Taoiseach and a planeload of ministers flew over to take in the spectacle for themselves?
But the Toronto Games were not to be. Beset by mounting drug scandals in sport, the former head of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) swung the games in Beijing’s direction. Popularly depicted as grasping freeloaders, IOC members yearn to be regarded as world statesmen dispensing the multinationals’ billions on just one city every four years.
The IOC’s hope was that its role in creating a wonderful legacy for the new China would be rewarded by an upswing in the public regard with which the committee is held. Instead, while the recent elections in Taiwan show us what China without communism looks like, Tibet shows us something else entirely.
Tibet’s government-in-exile believes about 150 Tibetans have been killed and hundreds arrested in China’s latest brutal crackdown. The fury, arson, vandalism and bloodshed seen in Lhasa erupted in spite of frequent calls for restraint. They were in part a consequence of China’s refusal to engage in meaningful talks with credible Tibetan representatives.
Those poor, protesting monks think the Olympics shine a spotlight on Beijing and that the international community might at last be forced to act. They probably somewhat overestimated our collective bravery.
Actually, by Chinese standards, the latest crackdown is mild. It is estimated that the Chinese murdered a million Tibetans and destroyed 6,000 monasteries back in the 1950s. It would take too long to catalogue the extent of the repression inflicted each year since by a succession of Chinese communist party leaders.
But scores of dead Tibetans later, do you hear even the slightest hint of contrition from IOC representatives for their moronic decision back in 2001? Not a bit of it. If you were being kind, you could argue the IOC was duped. The head of the Chinese Olympic Committee, Tu Wingde, promised in 2001 that the award of the games would “help economic development and social progress in all areas, including human rights”. Well, he was half right.
But in this new, improved China there are still no independent trade unions and clergy are still arrested. Hundreds of human rights activists continue to be bundled into the back of police vans to disappear forever.
Journalists are censored and detained; lawyers roughed up by police thugs. Minorities are persecuted, their leaders executed. Just the kind of place for a fortnight-long celebration of the brotherhood of man, surely?
It’s not as though the IOC’s ventures into validating certain regimes haven’t spectacularly backfired before. The 1936 games went to Nazi Germany. As we all know, having lapped up the world’s applause, Hitler took it upon himself to live out the Olympic mission by turning the world into one big team.
The IOC looked foolish then and it looks foolish now. Having been sold a pup, IOC members have sounded increasingly shrill in recent weeks — Pat Hickey, the head of the Irish Olympic Committee, included. “When people talk of Olympic boycotts the last people they consider are the athletes… To exploit them for a hollow political gesture is a betrayal of the very rights that the protesters are proclaiming,” he says. And the gold medal for cynicism goes to…
We’ve heard of human rights, civil rights, political rights, social and economic rights and even children’s rights but “athletes’ rights” are a novelty.
Since when was sport so important anyway? What are these diffuse ideals the Olympics embody if the host country is not required to live up to the most basic norm, ie, don’t machinegun your citizens in the street?
The IOC is very clear: the Olympic charter is not about making any kind of protest about the right to (Tibetan) life. What kind of political neutrality is it that can’t take a position on crimes against humanity? The most important part of the IOC’s job is to turn and look the other way while our less reputable friends get their hands dirty. After all, it is much more important to protect “innocent athletes” than “innocent civilians.”
That’s all very well, but boycotts don’t work, the IOC insists. Actually, that particular cliché doesn’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny. If boycotts don’t work, why did the IOC follow the worldwide sporting boycotts of white South Africa and Rhodesia? If Nelson Mandela insists the sporting boycott made a deep impression on the apartheid regime, who are the IOC to say otherwise? Equally, while the boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980 hardly led directly to communism’s fall nine years later, it was a grave blow to Soviet morale. The threat of withholding the Olympics from Seoul in 1988 also worked its magic during South Korea’s transition from authoritarian to democratic rule.
The truth is the IOC gave China the Olympics and has got absolutely nothing in return — because it never asked for anything. All we ever hear is “the games must go on”. And let’s not forget that communist China isn’t above boycotts itself. It did so in 1956 over Taiwan and again in 1980 over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
NO DOUBT China views its own boycotts as much more than political stunts, but China wanting it both ways isn’t new. Tibet is a superstitious medieval pit — but an integral part of the motherland. The “Dalai clique” represent no one — but Tibet’s spiritual leader is the cause of any and all unrest. The Olympics have nothing to do with politics — but we’ll trail the torch through disputed territory anyway (on the top of a tank, presumably). Etcetera, etcetera.
In November 2006, Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern said the Olympics “will equally place the spotlight on issues of rights and freedoms. Demonstrating positive developments in these areas, alongside its remarkable economic achievements, would do more, I believe, than anything else to consolidate China’s position and moral authority on the global stage.”
The spotlight has been shone. We have seen for ourselves. The question is: what is the Government going to do about it? Ahern now says he hopes China will resolve things in Tibet in a “democratic way”. That’s about as likely as Amy Winehouse taking up holy orders.
The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the plucky Poles and Czechs — who know a thing or two about dictatorships — have shown the way. If the athletes want to exercise their ‘right’ to go to a sports festival, fine. But Europe’s politicians have no business filling the VIP seats in the bird’s nest stadium.
