Should Beijing Keep Sending Refugees To Gas Chambers While Hosting The 2008 Olympics?
Summer Olympics, held every 4 years, are the biggest parties in the world. Athletes train for years for a few minutes of glory, so we want them to do well. Countries settle their rivalries on grass fields instead of battlefields, so we root for our own with healthy abandon. Olympics are just fun and games... or are they?
For countries emerging from disgraceful periods in their history, the Olympics (www.olympics.org) also constitute the world's seal of approval. Awarding the 1964 Olympics to Japan and the 1972 Olympics to Germany, both barred from the 1948 Olympics for their aggression in the Second World War, served this role, while the 1988 Seoul Olympics was a tip of our hat to South Korea for having turned the page on military dictatorships.
Eighteen years ago, the world watched Chinese army tanks massacre thousands of unarmed civilians in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Has China turned the page on such gross human rights violations to deserve the world's seal of approval today?
The Communist Government of China thinks so and is spending an unprecedented $40 billion on gleaming new stadiums and other building projects to make us concur. But the page that needs to be turned concerns human rights, not building permits.
2008 Olympics Beijing.org unveils the China behind the $40 billion Olympic facade - the China that still sends refugees to perish in concentration camps with gas chambers, pregnant women carrying mixed-race babies to forced abortions and infanticide, that condones sexual trafficking at home and genocide abroad, and that denies freedoms of religion and press.
2008 Olympics Beijing.org isn't an initiative of radical activists, but of average citizens of the world concerned that instead of improving its human rights record as promised to receive the right to host the 2008 Olympics, China is reverting to its old habit of crushing the victims of its human rights violations to make them simply disappear.
For now, 2008 Olympics Beijing.org isn't calling for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics. We want both Beijing Olympics and China's human rights protection to be upheld. But if China will not uphold the latter as it promised, we will call for the 2008 Olympics to be moved to a country that honors the goal of Olympics enshrined in the Olympic Charter: "The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity."