Beijing hits back after Olympics snub

CHINA expressed regret yesterday over US film-maker Steven Spielberg’s decision to cut ties with the Beijing Olympics, saying it was unacceptable to link politics to the sporting extravaganza.

Responding to what has become a public relations disaster ahead of the Games, authorities also defended China’s involvement with Sudan, which led to Spielberg pulling out as an artistic adviser over the Darfur crisis.

“We feel regret about his remarks,” a foreign ministry spokesman said, after Spielberg called for China to do more to resolve the problems in Darfur.

“Some people are attempting to link the Darfur issue with Chinese government policies in Sudan, even with the organisation of the Olympics,” he said, without mentioning the US director by name.

“If they don’t know the Chinese policy, I can understand. But if they have got some objectives, especially political objectives, we cannot accept that.”

Spielberg’s statement coincided with a letter to President Hu Jintao from Nobel Prize winners and Olympic athletes critical of Beijing’s record on Darfur.

Signatories to the letter included Archbishop Desmond Tutu and other Nobel laureates as well as Olympic athletes, writers, actors and political figures from around the world.

“As the primary economic, military and political partner of the government of Sudan, and as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, China has both the opportunity and the responsibility to contribute to a just peace in Darfur,” said the letter.

“Ongoing failure to rise to this responsibility amounts, in our view, to support for a government that continues to carry out atrocities against its own people.”

The United Nations estimates 200,000 people have died in Darfur as a result of war, famine and disease since 2003, when a civil conflict erupted pitting government-backed Arab militias against non-Arab ethnic groups.

China is a major economic partner and supplier of arms to Sudan.