The shame games

Sports fans eagerly await the opportunity to watch the world’s greatest athletes compete in the Olympic Games. However, this year’s summer games have been fraught with controversy ever since the International Olympic Committee decided to award them to China, a nation with a record of brutality and violence. While the Olympic torch made its way around the world, thousands of protesters displayed their disgust that fundamental human rights issues are subservient to the spectacle of global sport. As you watch the last few days of the games, consider the following profile of China from Amnesty International’s “Report 2008 -- State of the World’s Human Rights.”

* The torture of detainees and prisoners remains prevalent, with millions of people having no access to justice.

* Death sentences and executions are imposed for 68 offenses, including many nonviolent property crimes. Amnesty International estimates that in 2007 at least 470 people were executed and another 1,860 sentenced to death “although the true figures were believed to be much higher.”

* The trafficking of women and girls (especially from North Korea) is widespread.

* According to a report from southwest China, dozens of women were subject to forced abortions by local officials, some “in the ninth month of pregnancy.”

-- Abacapress.com/Cameleon/David Mareuil: Tibet supporters demonstrate in Nagano City, Japan, April 26 as the Olympic torch passes through.* Thousands of individuals remain in detention centers and prisons for practicing their religion outside of state-sponsored channels. “Falun Gong practitioners, Uighur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, and underground Christian groups were among those most harshly persecuted.” Approximately 100 Falun Gong devotees reportedly died in detention “as a result of torture, denial of food or medical treatment, and other forms of ill-treatment.”

* In September 2007, the military regime in Burma crushed democracy protests spearheaded by that nation’s Buddhist monks. At least 70 monks were killed, hundreds beaten and imprisoned, and many more reported missing. China is a major supporter of the Burmese government and, along with Russia, its chief source of weapons.

* Columnist Nicolas Kristof of The New York Times notes, “China is now underwriting its second genocide in three decades. The first was in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the second is in Darfur, Sudan. Chinese oil purchases have financed Sudan’s pillage of Darfur. ... When women are raped and mutilated in Darfur, the gun barrels pointed at their heads are Made in China.” The world’s most populous nation also supplies Sudan with tanks, fighter planes, bombers, helicopters, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, implements of war used against the people of Darfur. Beijing also protects Sudan in the United Nations Security Council and is largely responsible for preventing multinational intervention in the killing fields of Darfur. In return, China receives about 60 percent of Sudan’s oil output to help fuel its fast-growing economy.

* The Dalai Lama recently stated that Tibetans have had to live in a constant state of fear under Chinese repression since the 1951 takeover of his country. To commemorate the failed Tibetan uprising of 1959, Tibetans took to the streets on March 10 of this year. According to the international organization Free Tibet, more than 200 people were killed, “many by police and military shooting point blank at unarmed protesters.” Thousands were arrested and tortured, including women and children. As part of the Chinese government’s “patriotic education” strategy, Buddhist monks and nuns along with ordinary citizens had to denounce the Dalai Lama or risk arrest for failing to do so.

Legions of Olympic supporters steadfastly defend the Beijing games, arguing that sport is sport, politics are politics and never the twain shall meet. “Fair enough,” notes Hungarian social critic Csaba Gomba. “No one can claim that the high jump is a political act. However ... the Olympic Games themselves, the preparation for them, the financing, their symbolic omnipresence are all the product of fierce competition among nation states. ... To classify an interpersonal, and, more important, intergovernmental relationship of this nature as free of politics borders on thoughtless ignorance to say the least.”

Politics on the part of athletes, nations and the International Olympic Committee have a long Olympic history dating back to the beginning of the modern games. In 1906, Irishman Peter O’Connor, who ran track for Great Britain but did not want be viewed as an English competitor, climbed an Olympic flagpole and waved an Irish flag. In 1920, Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary and Turkey were banned from the games by the International Olympic Committee because of their role in World War I. In 1948, World War II villains Germany and Japan were banned. Following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, the United States along with 60 other countries boycotted the 1980 Moscow Games. Four years later, the USSR organized its own boycott of the Los Angeles Summer Games.

Diehard advocates of the Chinese Olympics contend the Beijing games will improve that nation’s human rights situation and hasten political change. This line of thinking is patently absurd. Does anyone really believe a regime that murdered peaceful demonstrators in Tibet five months before the summer games with the whole world watching is going to be any less ruthless after the summer Olympics?

Speaking of a July 29 report titled “The Olympic Countdown: Broken Promises,” Roseann Rife, Asia-Pacific deputy director at Amnesty International, stated, “By continuing to persecute and punish those who speak out for human rights, the Chinese authorities have lost sight of the promises they made when they were granted the games seven years ago.” The report notes that rather than reducing human rights abuses in the months prior to the Beijing games, Chinese authorities stepped up “the repression of dissident voices in their effort to present an image of ‘stability’ and ‘harmony’ to the outside world.”

Twenty-eight years after the boycott of the Moscow Olympics, the international community had no stomach for stonewalling the 2008 summer games, essentially telling economically powerful China that hosting the Olympics was more important than curtailing state-sponsored brutality.

Persecution, torture, murder by the Chinese government be damned. Let the games continue!

George Bryjak is a retired professor of sociology who lives in Bloomington, N.Y.

National Catholic Reporter August 25, 2008