ST. LOUIS (AP) — Democrat Barack Obama took issue Monday with President Bush's decision to attend the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games, saying he would go to Beijing only if he saw progress between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama. "In the absence of some sense of progress, in the absence of some sense from the Dalai Lama that there was progress, I would not have gone," the presidential candidate told reporters at a news conference.
Obama previously has called on the Republican president to boycott the ceremonies.
Bush said last week that he will attend opening ceremonies for the games in Beijing next month. Some world leaders plan to boycott the event because of China's human rights record and its handling of unrest in Tibet.
Chinese officials met last week with two envoys sent to Beijing by the Dalai Lama from his exile base in India.
A statement issued Saturday from the Tibetan side said another meeting would be held in October, but said it wished the Chinese leadership had taken "more tangible" steps during the talks. The Chinese side failed to agree to issue a joint statement committing the two sides to talks, it said
Obama said he "would liked to have seen some more aggressive efforts to encourage progress and talks between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama.
"It strikes me that although some meetings have been taking place, that we were not aggressive in encouraging the Chinese government to make serious concessions there," he said.
Bush on Sunday defended his decision, saying that to skip the opening ceremonies would be an "affront" to the Chinese people.
Obama's Republican rival, John McCain, said in April that if he were president, he would only attend the opening ceremonies if China improves its record on human rights and other issues. ... Read more
Recent events -- in Darfur, in Tibet, in Burma, and within China -- force an inevitable debate about the appropriate political and moral response to China’s hosting of the Summer 2008 Games, and in particular whether some form of boycott is warranted. Unfortunately, if predictably, there has been a good deal more heat than light generated by this debate, which too often reflects clashing axioms rather than informed argument. Since my own expertise lies in understanding Sudan, and in particular the ongoing genocide in Darfur, I’ll necessarily focus on this part of the debate. But few working on Sudan are unaware of the controversies associated with Chinese economic policy and human rights standards elsewhere in Africa. My own view is that there is a morally intolerable contradiction between Beijing’s hosting of the 2008 Games, the preeminent international event in sports, and its deep complicity in the ultimate international crime, genocide in Darfur. I believe we cannot have sporting “business as usual” while China continues to be instrumental in supporting the brutal Khartoum regime in its obstruction of a UN-authorized peace support operation, designed to protect millions of vulnerable Darfuri civilians and the thousands of humanitarian workers upon whom they increasingly depend for survival.
Slippery Slope
Of course “slippery slope” arguments abound in the debate about any form of Olympic boycott. Many center on the foreign policy of the United States, instancing the war in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay. How can we in the United States boycott games in China, the argument goes, when the United States has also committed terrible atrocities. These are indeed deep disgraces to the US, as well as a terrible squandering of moral and political capital of precisely the sort needed in confronting the Khartoum regime. So, I would understand decisions of conscience, by athletes and governments, that put such important issues in the balance the next time the United States hosts the Games. Still, whatever the force of “slippery slope” arguments -- “no country is without sin, therefore no political or moral response targeting the Olympic host country can be justified” -- we must confront the unsurpassably grim precedent of allowing Nazi Germany to host the Games in Berlin in 1936.
Was it right to attend these Games and the propaganda extravaganza that accompanied them? Should governments, alone or together, have done more to rebuke this brazen display of fascist arrogance? However impressive Jesse Owens’ achievements were, did they counter-balance the implicit international ratification of Hitler’s dictatorship and its racist, militaristic policies? Did the International Olympic Committee do enough to speak out against the conspicuously impending horrors of Nazism? In retrospect the answers are clearly no; at the time, however, there was already far too much evidence that should have precluded attendance under the circumstances readily apparent.
For those inclined to forgive the International Olympic Committee its decision to award the Games to Germany (the IOC decision was made before Hitler assumed the Chancellorship in 1933), we should recall that the IOC would subsequently award the 1940 Winter Olympics to Hitler’s Germany (though the 1939 invasion of Poland seems to have been too much even for the IOC).
What is often lost in present debates and newspaper editorials is that the primary call is for a boycott not of the Beijing Games as a whole, but of the opening ceremonies. The world’s Olympic athletes would not be denied the chance to compete for medals and the honor of their sport. Yet even if the distinction is recognized, attempts to defend such a targeted boycott are just as often met with the thoughtless mantra of “don’t politicize the Games.” This of course ignores just how deeply political these Games have become. They are China’s post-Tiananmen coming-out party, an effort by Beijing to take what it believes is its rightful place on the geopolitical stage. They are in this sense, in their larger ambitions, aptly compared to the 1936 Olympics and Hitler’s attempt to demonstrate Aryan supremacy. To be sure, the crimes of Nazi Germany, which lay primarily in the future, were themselves genocide on an unprecedented scale, while China’s present actions represent deep complicity in Khartoum’s savagely genocidal counter-insurgency war in Darfur. But this difference cannot obscure the profoundly political nature of the two Olympiads or the shared triumphalism meant to overwhelm criticism of abhorrent domestic and international policies.
Darfur
How, then, to assess international advocacy efforts to hold China accountable in its unique role as Olympic host? In particular, how can we speak fully and reasonably about the moral claims Darfur makes upon us in the context of China’s role in Sudan? Again, I leave aside comparable questions about China’s appalling domestic human rights record, its half century of conquest and repression in Tibet, and its support for such regimes as the Burmese junta and the despotic Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.
Darfur’s claims are of the highest order. The genocidal ambitions that have produced such staggering human suffering and destruction in this tortured region must compel the deepest moral consideration. Approximately half a million people have died from violence and war-related disease and malnutrition since the start of major conflict in 2003. More than 2.6 million people have been forced from their homes, most losing everything as their villages have been destroyed on a clearly ethnic basis. Khartoum’s deliberate, widespread, and systematic targeting of the non-Arab or African tribal populations in Darfur is a matter beyond reasonable dispute, even if a peculiar intellectual diffidence prevents certain organizations and institutions from inferring that such destruction meets all the terms specified by the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The overwhelming majority of displaced people are now in camps, often without adequate food or clean water or security. Some 250,000 have been turned into refugees in neighboring Chad, where Darfur’s genocidal violence has continued to bleed with evermore destabilizing consequences. Even as the UN’s World Food Program has just announced that it will soon have to cut food rations by half, 4.4 million people in Darfur need humanitarian assistance.
China and Sudan
China has played a key role in sustaining the Darfur genocide and the enormous risk to regional security in the center of Africa. Beijing has over the past decade been the Khartoum’s primary supplier of weapons and weapons technology. Many weapons of Chinese manufacture continue to find their way into Darfur despite a UN arms embargo on the region. Amnesty International has reported compellingly over the past year on the deadly flow of Chinese weapons, including military aircraft, into Darfur.
China has dominated the oil development consortia, mainly in southern Sudan, and done so in a way deeply destructive of southern civilian lives and livelihoods. As China’s thirst for crude oil grows by more than 10 percent a year, Sudan has emerged as its primary source of offshore oil production. More than two-thirds of Sudan’s oil is imported by China, which shows no signs of caring for the human costs of oil extraction.
China has provided as much as $15 billion in capital and commercial investments to the Khartoum-dominated economy in Sudan. It has insulated the Sudanese regime from its profligate ways -- massive external debt would be crippling without Chinese investment – and helped consolidate the regime’s stranglehold on national wealth and power.
Most consequentially, China has continuously blocked effective UN action on Darfur, threatening to veto Security Council resolutions, weakening others, and all the while refusing to countenance any form of sanctions in the event of Khartoum’s non-compliance with UN demands or agreements signed by the regime. Insecurity, which poses the greatest threat to civilians and humanitarians in Darfur, derives directly from the arrogant defiance that Beijing has for years encouraged in Khartoum’s génocidaires. Informed UN officials and Western diplomats make clear that China is the primary obstacle to generating serious diplomatic pressure on the regime to end its obstructionist ways. Nine months after passage of the Security Council resolution authorizing 26,000 civilian police and troops, with a robust mandate to protect civilians and humanitarians, only an ill-equipped third of the force is in place, most left over from the hopelessly inadequate African Union force in Darfur. The impending rainy season will soon make additional deployments logistically almost impossible. All the while security continues to deteriorate, threatening to force a large-scale withdrawal of humanitarian operations and wholesale human destruction
Denying Beijing
China’s complicity in all of this is too clear, too destructive, too deeply contravening not only of the spirit and charter of the Olympics but of all respect for international law. Denying Beijing the reward of its desired audience for the Games’ opening ceremonies, holding the Chinese regime relentlessly accountable for those actions enabling of genocide, makes both moral and political sense.
Though not nearly successful enough, the highlighting of China’s role in the Darfur genocide has already produced a number of unprecedented actions, including Beijing’s appointment of a special envoy for Darfur, voting for (rather than abstaining from) the resolution authorizing a Darfur protection force, and publicly declaring that Khartoum should show “more flexibility” in allowing for UN deployment.
This is not enough. But it is more than enough to demonstrate the efficacy of the current campaign to highlight China’s intolerable role in sustaining the Darfur genocide. The threat to boycott the opening ceremonies of the Games is at once morally compelling and politically efficacious. In the context of complicity in genocide, the crude mantra of “don’t politicize the games” becomes an even cruder moral acquiescence.
Eric Reeves is author of A Long Day's Dying: Critical Moments in the Darfur Genocide and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org). ... Read more
BEIJING (AP) — China hoped 2008 would be a yearlong celebration, a time to bask in the spotlight of the upcoming Beijing Olympics. Instead, the Year of the Rat has also brought a wave of troubles — both natural and man-made — that are putting a heavy strain on the communist leadership.
The 7.9 magnitude earthquake that struck Sichuan province Monday, killing thousands, is only the latest. China has long experience with large-scale disasters — from coal mine explosions to chemical spills to floods that displace tens of thousands.
The central government prides itself on its ability to quickly react, usually with deployments from China's huge military corps. The ruling party's mandate in part rests on being able to deliver aid in emergencies.
But China's capacity to control disasters and how they play out in the media is being stretched this year. Its leaders are grappling with the fallout from multiple problems in the information-hungry Internet age when they had expected to focus only on the Olympics.
"The Olympics are an important symbol of China's effort to ... get on the same gauge with the rest of the world. So they have attached a lot of importance to them," said Roger Des Forges, a China historian at University at Buffalo, State University of New York.
"But for most Chinese people, they are secondary to the quality of life that they are trying to achieve. So these questions of disasters are uppermost in people's minds, watching how the government is going to deal with them," he said.
China was quick to show its public response to Monday's quake. Just hours after it struck, Premier Wen Jiabao flew into Sichuan Province to oversee the emergency relief effort. Speaking from Dujiangyan City, where a high school collapsed, burying some 900 students, Wen acknowledged on national TV the task will be "especially challenging."
This year, China's problems began just before February's Lunar New Year, when the worst snowstorms in five decades hit the densely populated southern and central region. They left scores dead, knocked out power across cities, and stranded hundreds of thousands during the country's single busiest travel period.
Meanwhile, its leaders also battled decade-high levels of inflation and struggled to improve the nation's image as a global manufacturer following last year's tainted drugs and food scandal and defective toy exports.
In March, huge anti-government riots erupted in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, sparking sympathy protests in Tibetan areas across western China. The violent protests were the biggest challenge to Chinese rule in the Himalayan region in nearly two decades.
The subsequent government crackdown brought sharp international criticism of Beijing's human rights record and its rule over Tibet. China has said that 22 people were killed, while Tibetan groups have said that many times that number died in the violence.
Thousands of troops were deployed across a wide swath of the country to tamp down unrest and restore order. But their massive presence continued to draw an unwelcome spotlight on China's harsh rule in Tibet.
The negative attention spilled over to the Olympic flame's around-the-world tour. Meant to be a feel-good kickoff event to the Beijing Games, the relay turned into chaos as pro-Tibet protesters mounted demonstrations from the very start of the ceremonial lighting in Greece, and at stops including London, Paris, and San Francisco.
The bad news kept coming. In May was China's worst train accident in a decade, leaving 72 dead and more than 400 injured when a high-speed passenger train jumped its tracks and slammed into another in rural Shandong province. Excessive speed was determined to be the cause, and five railway officials were promptly fired.
This month also brought a sharp rise in the number of reported cases of hand, foot, and mouth disease, a normally non-deadly viral infection that has killed 39 children this year and infected nearly 30,000 others.
Only last week's feat by a team of Tibetan and Han Chinese mountaineers in bringing the Olympic flame up Mount Everest gave China the positive publicity it craved, three months to the day before the start of the games.
Beijing's leaders had carefully chosen Aug. 8 as the opening day for the 2008 games (8-8-08), believing that it was an especially auspicious day. Many Chinese people in this officially atheist nation remain highly superstitious. The number eight, "ba" in Chinese, is closely associated with prosperity and good luck because it sounds similar to the word "fa," which means rich.
China spared no expense on its Olympic debut, spending an estimated $40 billion on improving infrastructure and building sports venues. Its money was apparently well-spent. None of the venues, 31 of them in Beijing alone, was reportedly damaged.
Li Jiulin, a top engineer on the 91,000-seat National Stadium known as the Bird's Nest — the jewel of the Olympics — was conducting an inspection at the venue when the quake occurred. He said the building was designed to withstand up to an 8.0-magnitude quake.
"The Olympic venues were not affected by the earthquake," said Sun Weide, a spokesman for the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee. "We considered earthquakes when building those venues."
Ultimately, the series of crises could prompt China to reassess its true priorities, said Des Forges.
"I think there may be some way in which these crises are reminding the government that, as important as the games are, there are perhaps more important issues that need to be addressed," he said. Associated Press writer Stephen Wade contributed to this report. ... Read more
