[celddiskend]

for China and the IOC

Human Rights, and Wrongs

Washington Post
By Sally Jenkins
Sports Columnist
Friday, February 22, 2008; Page E01

International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge spoke yesterday, and, as usual, he didn't say anything. Which is just how the Chinese government likes it. The idea of awarding the Olympics to Beijing was that it would help change the behavior of the Chinese government. Instead, the Chinese government is changing the behavior of everyone else.

They should start a new Olympic event for Rogge in Beijing: the Apolitical Head Duck, which should take place at the conclusion of the Dissident Roundup. Every week, another Olympic suit from a supposedly free society issues an edict that the athletes who go to the Beijing Olympics must watch their tongues about the host country. Let's think about that for a moment: Competitors should refrain from speaking their minds about the actions of the Chinese government, for fear of offending their hosts, who are known to flog with truncheons those who speak their minds.

But the Olympics are apolitical. Right?

Last week, Chinese officials had a public fit when Steven Spielberg dropped out as artistic director of the Opening and Closing Ceremonies because he couldn't stomach their dealings in Darfur. They ridiculed him as a naive Hollywood guy. Actually, what's naive is to think that any sports event held in Beijing could possibly be apolitical. Spielberg quite smartly recognized something that the IOC, along with corporate sponsors such as McDonald's and Visa, will have to reckon with before these Games are done: Silence is not neutral. It's complicit.

Less than six months before the Opening Ceremonies, the notion that the Beijing Games will be the occasion of mere polite sport is proving to be nonsense. Human Rights Watch has documented a systematic crackdown on dissent in China. Critics of the government and their family members have been jailed or placed under house arrest, charged with "subversion" to silence them. Censorship of the Internet has been heightened. Serious human rights violations linked to the preparation of the Games include millions of forced evictions, land seizures and suppression of petitioners.

"The IOC is a catalyst for change in China but it is not a panacea," Rogge told the Associated Press yesterday.

This is the exact opposite of what Chinese officials promised when they pleaded for the Games in 2001. In his final presentation before the IOC vote, Beijing Mayor and Bidding Committee president Liu Qi proclaimed, "I want to say that the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games will have the following special features: They will help promote our economic and social progress and will also benefit the further development of our human rights cause."

Vice Mayor Liu Jingmin, another key Olympic official, told The Washington Post in 2001, "By applying for the Olympics, we want to promote not just the city's development, but the development of society, including democracy and human rights."

Liu was full of promises for what wonderful change would be wrought in China if it got the Olympics: "If people have a target like the Olympics to strive for, it will help us establish a more just and harmonious society, a more democratic society, and help integrate China into the world."

The IOC bought the pitch. One person who fell for it was Dick Pound, who back then was an IOC official helping to "franchise" the Olympics by selling them to networks and corporate sponsors. "Part of its presentation to the IOC members was an acknowledgment of the concerns expressed in many parts of the world regarding its record on human rights, coupled with a pre-emptive suggestion that the IOC could help increase progress on such matters by awarding the Games to China," Pound said.

So there it is. The IOC explicitly awarded the Games to Beijing on the basis of political promises regarding human rights. Now contrast those promises and expectations to China's performance the past seven years. And then listen to Rogge's apologia on behalf of the IOC, so flat and cautious. "We believe the Olympic Games are a force for good, but don't expect from the Games what they cannot deliver," he said.

In fairness to the IOC and the participants, the Beijing Games present an ethical morass. It's tempting to see the Games as a chance for a stunning cultural exchange, a gateway to better understanding of a gorgeous continent and culture, and we should be respectful while we're there. We should also respect the Olympic Charter, which says, "No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues, or other areas."

But the Olympic Charter was never intended as a curb to basic free speech. Nor was it intended to be diplomatic cover for offenses against humanity. Yet, that's exactly what the IOC is in danger of offering, along with, oh, roughly $2 billion in advertising and sponsorship, when it doesn't press Chinese officials to fulfill their basic human rights promises.

There may be only so much Rogge can do. But American corporate executives will find it less easy to cop Rogge's plea of ineffectuality, and they certainly can't plead that they are "apolitical." Seven of the top 12 Beijing Games sponsors are American, and they have poured money into the event in return for Olympic-sized access to the Chinese market. You should know who they are: Visa, Kodak, Johnson & Johnson, McDonald's, General Electric, John Hancock and Coca-Cola.

Silence from these entities isn't good enough. Their presence in China isn't neutral. McDonald's, GE and Johnson & Johnson and the other sponsors are full partners with the Chinese government in this Olympics, and they should have to justify their participation in the face of China's inaction on human rights.

We've passed from a state of optimistic dreaminess about what they might accomplish, to an uncomfortable intermediate stage of denial, in which we try tell ourselves that the Games are mere games. Pretty soon, we're going to have to come fully awake to the notion when the Olympics were awarded to Beijing, they plunged us all into the politics of China.

If the IOC wanted to remain apolitical, it never should have gone there.

"All we're asking anyone to do is encourage the Chinese government to uphold their own voluntary commitments on human rights," said Human Rights Watch spokeswoman Minky Worden. "Can you imagine a more modest request? It shouldn't be any type of hardship for any country, sponsor, government, or Olympic body to remind the Chinese government that they made these commitments, and it's expected that they will be upheld."

[IoninnyHaro]

From The Sunday Times

February 17, 2008
China repents and seeks to woo Pope

Michael Sheridan, Far East Correspondent and John Follain

TEMPTED by the prize of a historic visit to China by Pope Benedict XVI, the nation’s leaders have authorised a renewed effort in confidential discussions with the Vatican to heal their rift and inaugurate diplomatic ties.

The talks have intensified over recent months, leading some diplomatic observers in Beijing to believe the Chinese may be seeking to announce a deal before the Olympic Games in August.

Liu Bainian, the de facto head of Beijing’s official Patriotic Church, has said on several occasions that he would like to welcome the Pope to China once an agreement has been reached.

While the Vatican says it has received no formal invitation, observers say Liu’s words would have been uttered only with approval from the highest levels.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle3382290.ece

[TSVIDeo]

This is going to be the worst Olympics in years. China is a horrible human rights violator and doesn't deserve to hold the Olympics.

just horrible disappointment, they are now slandering Spielberg because he pulled out from working for them ....

disgusting...

China Takes Spielberg To Task
Forbes.com staff 02.20.08, 6:30 PM ETChina has, at last, taken Hollywood director Steven Spielberg to task for his support for an international campaign to persuade China to use its influence to end the violence in the Sudanese region of Darfur.

An editorial in the People's Daily accused Spielberg, identified only as "a certain Western director," of naiveté and defying common sense in resigning last week as an artistic director of the Olympic Games to be held in Beijing this summer (see "Spielberg Takes China To Task.")

"The Darfur problem was not created by China and is not in any way related to China's policies in Africa," the People's Daily said. "Linking the Darfur problem to the Beijing Olympics is unfair." The editorial added that childish vanity lies behind the West's criticism of China's policy on Darfur.

Editorials in other Communist Party-controlled media, including China Youth Daily and Guangming Daily, have taken a similarly scathing line.

On Internet forums in China there has been a general sense of outrage, scorn and bewilderment expressed over the fact that the Beijing Olympics, which the government is turning into an event of extreme national pride, has come under international criticism.

The Chinese government's standard response has been to either ignore protests connecting its human rights record to the Games or to criticize its critics for what it calls attempts to "politicize" the Games.

It took Beijing about a day and a half before it gave its first official comment on Spielberg's resignation--a modest expression of regret--but the worldwide attention that the director's celebrity attracted for his protest has prodded it into both fiercer words and a charm offensive. Liu Guijin, China's special envoy for Darfur, is due to give a high-profile speech in London later this week about his country's role in the region, en route to Sudan.

In an echo of its attack-with-defense response to the product-safety issue, Liu has also said that Western countries can help move forward the peace process by pressuring rebel leaders to take part in negotiations.

Meanwhile, Beijing has been shoring its defenses against what is likely to be the next point of attack by activists: the Games' commercial sponsors. The Games' marketing director, Yuan Bin, says her committee has been in close contact with 63 Olympic sponsors, which include McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Johnson and Johnson, Volkswagen, General Electric, BHP Billiton and Manulife Financial.
"Although our sponsors are under pressure, none have withdrawn," Bin said in Beijing Wednesday.

A spokesman for the Adidas sportswear company, one of the Games' top-tier sponsors, and which reportedly will pay $100 million to use the Olympics logo in China, appeared with Yuan to say that his company has no plans to withdraw from the games (see "Beijing Olympics Won't Change China").

[chuecalovers]

Changing the Rules of the Games "The message here isn’t hard:
Genocide bad; China helping.”
Jessica Wynne for The New York Times
Jill Savitt and Mia Farrow in the Dream for Darfur offices in New York.
NY TIMES
By ILAN GREENBERG
March 30, 2008
>> Correction Appended
On a morning in mid-February, the four staff members of Dream for Darfur sat in silence in what they call their war room, contemplating posters of Beibei the Fish and her four fellow Olympic mascots taped to the walls. In this cramped office in a shared space on the 16th floor of a downtown Manhattan Art Deco building, Beibei smiled welcomingly, as did Jingjing the giant panda, Huanhuan the red Olympic flame, Nini the green swallow and Yingying the horned orange Tibetan antelope: anime-style drawings that regardless of name appear strikingly the same, Medusa hair fused on teddy-bear faces with little-girl expressions. Once the Summer Games begin in Beijing on Aug. 8, Chinese Olympic officials plan to sell millions of the mirthful mascots; the Chinese government has planted them everywhere in the country, hanging like religious icons from the rearview mirrors of Beijing taxis, greeting guests as stuffed toys atop hotel check-in desks and buzzing above city skylines on huge billboards like hovering fairies.
“I don’t know about the rest of you,” said Jill Savitt, Dream for Darfur’s executive director, as she scanned the posters, “but these cartoon creatures creep me out.” Scattered on the floor around her were boxes overflowing with Dream for Darfur’s own media salvo: white T-shirts emblazoned with “Genocide Olympics?”
Savitt, a peripatetic, hyperarticulate 40-year-old human rights activist, is the mind behind a long string of organizations conducting campaigns to pressure China to change its policies by threatening to tarnish this summer’s Olympic Games. Dream for Darfur orchestrates a coalition of the believing — N.G.O.’s committed to ending the continuing violence in Sudan, but also groups concerned with government abuses inside China; Olympic athlete associations; organizations concerned about Tibet or China’s influence in Burma; and a spindly archipelago of other China-related causes. “We are happy to walk into space that’s been created by the Darfur people, because they have created something fresh,” says Mary Beth Markey, vice president for advocacy at the International Campaign for Tibet in Washington. “It’s been opportunistic for us.” But while Savitt’s many allies have adopted her strategy, Dream for Darfur still has just one goal: to convince China’s government that the Games are imperiled unless it halts its support for Sudan’s regime.
“China,” Savitt told me proudly, “is looking at the entire world calling its cherished games the ‘Genocide Olympics.’ ” Nonetheless, shaping world opinion is a tall order, especially with a staff of four; and the Olympics is not as easy a target as it might appear. Who isn’t rooting, at some level, for a successful Olympics, a precious two weeks set aside for idealism and newly minted heroes? Aren’t the Games meant to eclipse issues of the moment, aspiring to something universal and transcendent? Who would want to tarnish that? Why would anyone want to ruin such a good party?
“People say there are a lot of problems in the world, so why single out Darfur and why target China?” Ruth Messinger, the former Manhattan borough president who is now head of the American Jewish World Service, told me recently in her Manhattan office. “But this is the first genocide, since the word was coined, where it was defined as genocide by the American government while it has been happening,” she added, referring to Colin Powell’s statement in 2004 that the Darfur killings were indeed a genocide and a Congressional resolution making the same designation. Messinger is one among perhaps three dozen professional political operatives and freelance agitators who have collaborated closely behind the scenes with the Dream for Darfur team, participating in strategy sessions and connecting Savitt with larger political networks. “Darfur is singular,” Messinger told me. “China is the reason Darfur is happening. And it is happening now. There is nothing fast about the killing in Darfur.”
For those on board with Dream for Darfur, connecting the dots between the Summer Games and hundreds of thousands of African corpses is not much more complicated than that. The brief against China is by and large uncontested (except by China): the Sudan government buys its weapons from China with the foreign currency it makes from selling China its oil. China, meanwhile, protects Sudan from excessive attention in the United Nations Security Council. “The Olympics is a unique lever with the Chinese, and we’re not going to get another one — it ain’t happening again,” Savitt said one morning in January. (She has met five times with Chinese diplomats, who each time, Savitt says, use the opportunity to explain just how much the Chinese people like the Olympics and dislike street demonstrations.) Now every form of opposition to the Beijing government seems to have its Olympic angle; the repression of Tibetan protests earlier this month, for example, immediately led to calls for a boycott of the Games.
But Savitt is keenly aware that her approach has to be nuanced, and in her speeches she is careful to say that she is a fan of the Games and that her organization is against a boycott. In a recent conference call with other activist groups, she quickly shot down a suggestion to publish a newspaper op-ed essay asking President Bush to skip the opening ceremonies. “He’s not going to do that, and I’m not in the business of asking for things I know I’m not going to get,” she snapped. The message to Olympic athletes has been so nuanced that it verges on abstruse: they should speak out on human rights issues but steer clear of politics; opposing genocide demands the ultimate in moral outrage from everyone, yet athletes shouldn’t jeopardize their medals. Speaking at a Dream for Darfur rally on Feb. 12 outside the Chinese Mission to the U.N., the Canadian Olympic swimmer Nikki Dryden (1992 and ’96) put it like this: “China sullies everything the Olympics stands for because of what it allows to happen in Darfur, but I would never ask athletes to go outside their comfort zone.”
Savitt’s message to corporate sponsors is less ambivalent but in some ways trickier. “No company wants to be the first whale to spout” is how she put it to me. Dream for Darfur asks that the major sponsors like McDonald’s, Anheuser-Busch, Microsoft and Volkswagen take very small but potentially significant actions: to meet privately with Chinese officials to express concern over Darfur, for example, or to take a symbolic stand by calling publicly for officials from Sudan who have been accused of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court to be banned from attending the Games. “These companies aren’t pushing guns in anyone’s faces” in Darfur, says Ellen Freudenheim, a consultant working on corporate outreach for Dream for Darfur. “We have to be careful in how we frame this. They are not directly responsible. Yet the morality is, You are complicit when you do nothing to try to stop genocide when you can.”
Savitt says that the sponsors are starting to take notice. Even executives at Coca-Cola have privately expressed anxiety about their association with the Games, according to Minky Worden, a veteran China specialist at Human Rights Watch. (On Tibet, Lenovo, the Chinese computer giant, recently said it was following the conflict there “with concern and regret.”) “Everything all these groups are doing has massive popular support from inside China, which isn’t understood here,” says Worden, who speaks fluent Cantonese and is focused on internal Chinese issues — like migrant-worker rights and press freedoms — and holding the Chinese government accountable for the promises it made to the International Olympic Committee in 2001. “Here is the thing: our demands for internal human rights are not something that Chinese people don’t want, nor are they anything the Chinese government hasn’t explicitly promised to do. We’re pushing an open door. These companies are making a huge mistake in thinking the Chinese respect them for saying what they think they want to hear. Just the opposite. The Chinese government respects foreigners who repeatedly and reliably tell them the truth. How hard is it really for G.E. or Microsoft to push for something that the Chinese government already said it is receptive to doing?”
While the messaging to athletes and corporate sponsors is articulated diplomatically, Savitt’s overall campaign to bend the government of China to her demands remains straightforward. “Now we can really begin,” she said with a wide smile on the day in mid-February when Steven Spielberg resigned as a creative consultant for the opening ceremonies. The actress Mia Farrow, who has visited the greater Darfur region eight times and says that she may move permanently to that part of Africa when her youngest child, now 14, gets a little older, had originally identified Spielberg as a target. Farrow communicates daily with Savitt and works on nearly every aspect of the campaign. She popularized the Genocide Olympics slogan in an opinion column — written with her son Ronan Farrow, a 19-year-old Yale law student — in The Wall Street Journal a year ago. Farrow had decided that for the director of “Schindler’s List” to have a role in China’s Olympics was unacceptable; she called him a “key collaborator.” She and Savitt relentlessly criticized Spielberg. He didn’t respond to their requests for a meeting; Farrow said she heard from back channels that he was feeling the heat but that he doubted fate would hand him “his Lillian Hellman moment,” referring to the playwright’s refusal in 1952 to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. And then Spielberg changed his mind, saying his “conscience will not allow me to continue business as usual.”
Spielberg’s withdrawal from the Olympics lifted Dream for Darfur from a low in its campaign. (Admittedly, the publication that same day of an open letter signed by nine Nobel Peace Prize winners urging China to take action in Darfur also lightened spirits somewhat.) Dream for Darfur was getting little in the way of news coverage, and attempts to get the International Olympic Committee to hold China to account for Olympic-related promises had failed. “The I.O.C. expressly and repeatedly told Human Rights Watch in January that it will not speak in public about human rights abuses in China,” says Worden. Days before, Savitt had told me she thought she was losing. “Darfur is getting worse,” she said one evening as we walked to the subway on which Savitt commutes to Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband and their 8-year-old son. “More people are dying, not less. It’s not like we can say, ‘Well, at least we made some difference in these people’s lives.’ Either there is security on the ground in Darfur or there isn’t. There is nothing we can achieve less than this that means anything.”
Many of the corporate sponsors were also refusing in February to meet with Farrow, who travels with a MacBook containing her PowerPoint presentation — an affecting narrative of grim statistics and photos she snapped of displaced women and orphaned children with dancing eyes. Darfur remains to many an obscure, opaque conflict, and Farrow’s slide show is a powerful instrument of communication in the Olympic campaign. Weaving statistics (“2.5 million displaced people”) with personal stories of encounters with the people in her photos (“this child had lost her entire family, yet she was able to laugh and laugh”), she unleashes the presentation on TV chat shows and on her friends, like Barbara Walters, whom Farrow is currently lobbying. In the car on the way to a radio interiew, Farrow told me she wanted Walters to include Farrow’s plan for a “Live From the Camps” broadcast as a regular feature on Walters’s popular daytime gabfest, “The View.” “Live From the Camps” is envisioned, as the name suggests, as a live broadcast of Farrow from inside one of the camps housing Darfur refugees, to be transmitted as an alternative to watching commercials during the Olympics.
Dream for Darfur is also giving a report card to corporate sponsors rating their actions on Darfur. Those who earn lower than a C will be the focus of demonstrations at their offices beginning next month. And a “Turn Off/Tune In” campaign will ask viewers of the Olympics to turn off the ads of flunking sponsors and to watch Farrow’s broadcast from refugee camps.
“From start to finish, what we want China to fear is death by a thousand cuts,” Savitt says. “China thought it would only face a ham-fisted boycott. It is getting something more sophisticated, more insidious.”
The Spielberg news came as Savitt and Farrow were speaking at a sidewalk news conference in Midtown Manhattan. It was freezing cold, and Farrow’s hands froze tight while speaking into a bank of cameras. Savitt returned to the office to find messages from dozens of news outlets requesting interviews. Ben Cohen, the Ben in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, called with his congratulations. Cohen came to New York in February to meet with Dream for Darfur to offer his resources. Cohen said he would lend Dream for Darfur his three mobile billboard trucks, then on loan to the Obama presidential campaign. “And I told Jill and Mia that I would like to focus on getting the attention of the corporate sponsors and work on pre-emptively branding the Olympic mascots,” Cohen said to me from his cellphone in Vermont. “I’m interested in running some sort of campaign that introduces these little guys to the world as ‘Looks cute — supports genocide.’ There was a time at Ben & Jerry’s — we were still a small company — we were going up against Pillsbury, who owned Häagen-Dazs. We ended up attacking the Pillsbury doughboy. And we won.”
In January 2007, an English professor named Eric Reeves went to Washington to propose, for the first time, a large-scale Beijing Olympics campaign at a meeting of Save Darfur, an umbrella group of some 180 organizations concerned with the violence in Sudan, ranging from the N.A.A.C.P. and Amnesty International to Yeshiva University and the Affiliation of Christian Engineers. Reeves, a 6-foot-5 tenured professor at Smith College with an effulgent personal presence who speaks in fluid, often lyrical paragraphs, had spent the previous nine years working on Sudan issues — publishing more than 200 newspaper and magazine articles; writing a book called “A Long Day’s Dying” that comprehensively tallied the years of killing; sending thousands of e-mail messages to politicians; supporting human rights workers on the ground; and browbeating diplomats to do something about Darfur. Reeves, an expert on John Milton and lately an investigator into the medieval origins of modern reading habits, crisscrossed New England to speak on college campuses and to meet with journalists, government officials and U.N. diplomats. He began, mostly from a desktop computer in his restored Victorian home in Northampton, Mass., an ultimately successful campaign to pressure international companies; at the same time, by his count, some 80 universities and 22 states have divested from Sudan.
But at the Save Darfur meeting that January, Reeves’s Olympic proposal was immediately shot down as uninformed. “Save Darfur was interested in selling bracelets and in consciousness-raising,” Reeves says. “Let’s remember that Sudan has more than $25 billion in external debt. The country only survives because of help from certain foreign governments. I didn’t quite storm out, but I left. And that’s when I met Jill, who ran out after me.”
Over the next three months, Savitt, along with her colleague Nicky Lazar, discussed the idea with Reeves. Savitt had a comfortable senior position with an establishment human rights organization called Human Rights First. “I go a lot by intuition, and I knew this couldn’t just be me, couldn’t just be viral,” Reeves says. “Jill and Nicky wanted to do it, but they were cautious, too cautious. They were timid in their presentations, and we got turned down for funding.”
Around the same time, Savitt and Reeves connected with Humanity United, an unusual grant-making organization in Redwood City, Calif., underwritten by Pam Omidyar, the wife of the founder of eBay, Pierre Omidyar. It focuses on financing efforts to stop contemporary slavery and mass atrocities around the world and is committed to spending $100 million over five years. The organization takes its cue from Silicon Valley’s famed tolerance for failure, according to Randy Newcomb, Humanity United’s executive director. He says his strategy is to make big bets on game-changing ideas, a philosophy that “at best annoys the elite policy community; at worst, it threatens them.”
Newcomb was talking on the phone from Richard Branson’s Caribbean estate, where he was participating, along with Nelson Mandela and Peter Gabriel, in a conference on conflict resolution. Newcomb drew a long breath and changed his tone: “But frankly, where were they? Where has the traditional foreign-policy establishment been in pressuring China in relation to the Olympics about Sudan? A lot of people tell me that we’re wasting our money on this kind of long-shot campaign. But our ethos is the willingness and ability to take a greater risk for the ultimate yield that will come from that risk. We aren’t saying that we do things without rigor. But we’re willing to absorb greater risk.”
Last spring, Humanity United wrote Dream for Darfur a check for $500,000. The financing followed publication of Farrow’s “Genocide Olympics” article — Reeves and the actress were already closely collaborating. “Now we had a campaign, a phrase and a target,” Reeves says. As Ruth Messinger explained to me: “Maybe China’s vulnerability on the Olympics is starting to look obvious to people now. But the amazing thing about this campaign — and the genius of Jill and Eric and Mia — was in making the connection. They were the first and for a long time the only ones to make it.”
Late last month, Savitt arranged a meeting with M+R Strategic Services, a national consultancy specializing in high-tech campaigning that happens to have its New York offices in the same building as Dream for Darfur. The goal was to gather advice on how to better focus the campaign and to come up with a plan to galvanize a grass-roots insurgency. She asked the consultants what actions to take consistent with her resources and size. Michael Ward, who consulted for Savitt when she was at Human Rights First, suggested making use of existing databases of activists, sending out mass e-mail messages frequently and leveraging free-marketing venues like social-networking Web sites. “Facebook should be the place,” he advised.
“O.K.,” Savitt said, looking pointedly at her staff, Allison Johnson and James Dunham, both in their mid-20s.
Savitt next asked for advice to give Ben Cohen for his jihad against the Olympic mascots. “Tell him to keep his message short,” Ward said. “The message here isn’t hard: Genocide bad; China helping.”
Looking over a list of Olympic sponsors, Ward advised Savitt to streamline her targets: “Choose two or even one company and hammer it. Everyone had sweatshops but it took that woman” — referring to Kathy Lee Gifford — “to make it real. McDonald’s is a phenomenal target; they are so retail. Johnson & Johnson is less of a brand and therefore less useful. Same goes with General Electric.”
“O.K.,” Savitt said. “But then we have to give up on my crazy bumper-sticker idea. She jumped to a white board and wrote “(GE)nocide.” She looked at Ward and deadpanned, “The only problem is G.E. isn’t actually responsible for any genocide”
“That’s an issue,” Ward said with a smile.
By the end of February, indications that the Olympic campaign was making inroads with Chinese government officials began to surface in negative form: the Save Darfur coalition met with F.B.I. agents to discuss what appeared to be cyberattacks originating in China. Around the same time, curious e-mail messages sent in Savitt’s name began popping up in the in-boxes of people Savitt had previously written: “Dear (name of recipient),” began the tersely worded messages. “There is no link between Darfur and the Olympics. Best Wishes, Jill Savitt.” Meanwhile, e-mail messages actually written by Savitt failed to arrive at their intended destination.
Earlier this month, China sent a special envoy to Sudan, Liu Guijin, a senior diplomat. “Since last May, I have visited Sudan four times,” Liu told reporters. “In the future, if it is necessary I will pay more visits. We have a good relationship with Sudan, we have some advantages in talking to Sudan, so we should use this as leverage.” Then Liu said something no Chinese official has ever said in the past: “We will persuade them in a direct way to work with the international community and be more cooperative,” he told reporters, adding that “concerning the Olympic Games, any advice or comments, even if it contains misunderstandings or criticism, we are open to and welcome this advice.
“We are willing to listen to any comments that contain reasonable elements,” he went on to say, but warned that “for those few who attempt to tarnish the Olympic Games on the pretext of issues totally unrelated to the Olympics, like the Darfur issue, we are firmly opposed to such attempts.”
Savitt was floored; it seemed that they were getting under China’s skin. “It’s stunning,” she wrote in an e-mail message to me. The same week, Dream for Darfur began developing a more focused message to Olympics sponsors — several of which had now agreed to meet with Farrow — asking them to publicly call on the United Nations to fully deploy, at long last, the authorized multinational force in the Darfur region, with China taking the lead.
Dream for Darfur was now viewing the corporate sponsorship part of the campaign as more crucial than before. A significant point of leverage that could tip the balance: Olympic broadcasters and corporate sponsors account for 87 percent of Olympic revenue. Microsoft, which is poised to become an even bigger player in China if its acquisition of Yahoo goes through, responded in a written statement that the company is “shocked and horrified by the violence and human rights violations in Darfur.” The company further “commend[ed] Dream for Darfur and other organizations for their leadership in casting a spotlight on this atrocity and the need for immediate international resolution. Governments and international organizations — the United Nations chief among them, as well as humanitarian relief organizations — will need to continue to work together locally and globally to address the problems in the Sudan. Microsoft will continue to support these organizations in their mission through technology assistance and other resources.”
Sponsors of the torch relay that began last week, which include Coca-Cola and Lenovo, are especially vulnerable. The relay will traverse Tibet, where in mid-March police cracked down on protesters, including monks, leading to at least 16 deaths. Indeed, the Tibetan conflict is threatening to supercede Darfur as the driver of the Olympic campaign. Given the recent violence, Farrow is considering backing groups like Reporters Without Borders in attacking heads of state like Gordon Brown and George W. Bush, pressuring them to skip the opening ceremonies to signal lack of support for China’s policies. The way some activists see it, the opening ceremony is distinct from the rest of the Olympics and fair game for a boycott. But it is also possible that the Tibet situation could deteriorate to a point where the Darfur activists will feel they have no choice but to go along with a boycott.
“The conventional wisdom you continue to hear, in articles that are still coming out today, is that these advocates are great, God bless them, but they are misled, they are making the wrong calculation that China is going to move,” says Sharon K. Hom, executive director of Human Rights in China, a leading political pressure group on China that disseminates banned information to, and advocates on behalf of, a vast network of reformers inside China, especially Chinese lawyers working within the country’s court system. Hom criticizes this view as myopic and credits the Dream for Darfur team for penetrating the Chinese government bubble, a piercing that may lead to unanticipated political consequences down the road in China.
For the human rights organizations concerned with reform inside China, the key date is Aug. 25 — the first day after the Olympics. Their challenge is to try to institutionalize their reform efforts. “The minute the Olympics end, we lose our leverage,” says Worden of Human Rights Watch. “Somehow we have to preserve our gains and keep the attention on external players. Private diplomacy alone does not work.”
According to Representative Sander M. Levin, “There is consensus in Washington that China should live up to the commitments they themselves made when seeking the Olympics.” Levin, who heads the joint Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which has held hearings on the Beijing Olympics, continued: “Their own statements about progress and the spotlight of the Olympics disable some of China’s standard repertoire of available responses to criticism. In this case, the international spotlight is going to remain on long after the closing ceremony.”
As summer approaches and excitement builds for the start of the Games, no one knows how Chinese authorities will respond to an escalating “Genocide Olympics” campaign abroad or the actions of agent provocateurs at home. A security consultant working on the Olympics for a media outlet told me that his chief worry is an isolated overreaction, perhaps from a municipal police officer, that then spins out of control. “It just takes one banner and one televised beating for everything to go to hell,” he said. China watchers are deeply concerned about the ramifications of China’s massive installation of surveillance technology across Beijing. The city-to-city torch procession that is a lead-up to the Games is also a potential powder keg. Groups representing aggrieved minorities in China, like the Falun Gong religious sect and the ethnic Uighurs in China’s western Xinjiang Province, hint at planned “street actions” almost certain to spark an angry police response. The torch-carrying route from Greece leads to the summit of Mount Everest to Beijing — and right through Tibet.
Dream for Darfur has also publicized that it has a “secret plan” for drawing attention to Darfur during the Games but is staying mum on details for security reasons, according to Savitt. Another reason for the secrecy, however, might be that Darfur’s fate will be sealed months before, in April or in May. In order for Dream for Darfur to reach its goal of security on the ground for Darfurians by the start of the Olympics, U.N.-sanctioned troops, with their vital helicopter support, will need at least two months to mobilize.
“You reach a point of diminishing returns,” Reeves says. “If there is a point of ignition, April is it.” For Dream for Darfur, the consequences of the big street demonstrations planned during early April will be critical, especially an extended rally planned in San Francisco. The coalition of Darfur advocates wants these demonstrations, designed to garner maximum media exposure, to set loose a contagion of critical perceptions about the Olympics. The idea is that these demonstrations will put the words “Genocide Olympics” on tens of millions of lips around the world. “The Chinese had underestimated us,” Reeves says. “I seriously doubt they will underestimate us in April.” No matter how it plays out, the last day of the Olympics marks the end of existence for Dream for Darfur, which will disband after the Summer Games wrap up on Aug. 24.
China has eased its opposition to Security Council action on Darfur, including the joint United Nations-African Union force currently trying to patrol Darfur. But China is not going to convince Dream for Darfur that gradualism is the answer in Sudan.
Dream for Darfur may, however, have to wrestle with the price of its success in leveraging China’s desire for a problem-free Olympics: other organizations want to share the stage, and the momentum of Tibetan activists could overwhelm the cause of Darfur. “The most climactic part of our campaign will be during the Games themselves,” says Tenzin Dorjee, the deputy director of a group called Students for a Free Tibet, which claims 650 student chapters around the world. Dorjee, who works out of New York, is planning a massive march from Dharamsala, India, home to the Dalai Lama and a large exiled Tibetan population, to the Chinese border. The group also plans to surreptitiously hang Free Tibet banners on highly trafficked Chinese landmarks, as it did last year on the Great Wall. “We plan to do more of the same: high-profile direct actions in prominent places,” Dorjee says. “China will either have to let these protests happen or crack down. And when it cracks down, it shows its true colors. It gets unmasked. That’s our plan.”
Savitt maintains that “it’s actually great there are more voices in the chorus — it puts exponentially more pressure on China to do something.” In her view, this will not necessarily detract from the Darfur cause. “If there are going to be immediate changes having to do with the Olympics,” she says, “I think it’s going to be with external issues — it’s more of a baby step. It’s one reason Darfur has gained so much traction.”
Ilan Greenberg, an adjunct fellow with the Asia Society, reported on Central Asia for The Times until last year. His last article for the magazine was about Mikhail Saakashvili, the president of Georgia.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 30, 2008
An article on Page 52 of The Times Magazine this weekend about this summer’s Olympics in Beijing and the effects of political activists on them and their sponsors omits a sentence from a statement from Microsoft, a sponsor of the games, about the need for international organizations to intervene in Sudan, which buys weapons from China. The passage containing the statement should read: The company further “commend[ed] Dream for Darfur and other organizations for their leadership in casting a spotlight on this atrocity and the need for immediate international resolution. Governments and international organizations — the United Nations chief among them, as well as humanitarian relief organizations — will need to continue to work together locally and globally to address the problems in the Sudan. Microsoft will continue to support these organizations in their mission through technology assistance and other resources.”
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

[lesso73]

DREAM FOR DARFUR

[Frodogzzz]

One Olympic Victory

By RONAN FARROW and MIA FARROW
Published in The Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2008
http://www.miafarrow.org/editorials.html

Almost a year ago on these pages we questioned Steven Spielberg's position as an artistic director of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. We highlighted China's role as business partner, diplomatic protector and underwriter of Sudan's campaign of ethnic destruction in Darfur.

The piece, which labeled the games the "genocide Olympics," provoked immediate self-protective action from the People's Republic of China. Within days, Beijing placed rebuttal letters in prominent papers, hired two international press firms to sanitize their image, and appointed a special envoy to Darfur. Most significantly, China reconsidered its long-standing obstruction of United Nations Security Council actions on Darfur, and for the first time signed on to a resolution authorizing peacekeepers for the region.

Beijing's determination to keep the 2008 Olympic Games from being tainted proved to be a unique point of leverage with a country that has long been impervious to criticism. This sensitivity sparked new hope for Darfur.

Steven Spielberg responded too. He sought advice about China's role in Darfur, and tried over many months to engage Chinese officials, urging them to address the Darfur crisis in advance of the Games. His efforts were futile -- Sudanese government forces have intensified attacks on civilians, killing hundreds and displacing tens of thousands within the past two weeks. Expressing frustration last week, Mr. Spielberg resigned. In an eloquent statement, he explained that "my conscience will not allow me to continue with business as usual."

For an unthinkable five years, governments have watched the slaughter in Darfur and failed to take action. And so an unprecedented trend has emerged: Individuals have taken up the responsibility to protect this tormented population. Mr. Spielberg has joined scores of U.S. congressmen and European parliamentarians, as well as Nobel Prize winners, athletes, entertainers and ordinary citizens who have taken a public stand urging China to use its influence to stop the killing. In doing so, these individuals may just move China to reassess its no-strings-attached backing of abusive regimes across the globe.

The 2008 Olympic Games were to be China's post-Tiananmen Square coming-out party. That the event has prompted frantic street cleaning, construction and anti-pollution measures is unsurprising. That China's human rights record has been called into question is also no surprise. But that the typically intransigent regime might actually be pushed to action on human rights issues -- and by a movement of individuals, not governments -- has caught many off guard. The slogan of the Olympic Games is "One World, One Dream." The dream of a modern China observant of human rights domestically and in its foreign policy is rapidly becoming the defining theme of these Games.

If that dream is to become a reality, new voices will need to be heard. Other powerful individuals lending their imprimatur to Beijing also bear the burden of conscience that Mr. Spielberg described. President George W. Bush, who plans to attend the Games, said "I view the Olympics as a sporting event" and smoothly refused questions about China's abuses and its backing of mass atrocities abroad.

We don't care what Mr. Bush does next year, but this year he is representing the American people. Should he be taking his place next to Chinese President Hu Jintao at the Genocide Olympics? Mr. Bush and other powerful political figures should, at minimum, release strong statements of concern regarding China's human rights record. Better still, they could follow the lead of Prince Charles of Wales, who recently decided not to attend the games.

Corporations, too, will have to act. Mr. Spielberg has thrown the ball squarely into the court of those most likely to have China's ear in the lead-up to the Games: those underwriting the ceremony. Now, more than ever, corporate sponsors must step up and do their part.

McDonalds, Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Visa and Microsoft should join the ranks of responsible individuals protesting the Games. These companies should publicly express concern, and do their utmost to persuade Beijing to actively seek change in Darfur. This cannot be, as Mr. Spielberg notes, "business as usual."

One powerful artist has added his voice to the movement of citizens working to ensure that the Olympic Games herald not just self-promotion, but real reform. "With growing influence," Mr. Spielberg observed, "comes growing responsibilities." If China's rise as a global superpower is to be tempered with that kind of responsibility, individuals and institutions supporting the Games at all levels must join the chorus.

Mr. Farrow, a student at Yale Law School, has traveled in Darfur and worked on human-rights issues at the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Ms. Farrow, an actor, recently returned from her eighth trip to the Darfur region.

URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120338432062875839.html

[plantBanceper]

Olympic kow tow as British athletes are forced to sign
contracts banning criticism of Chinese regime... Gordon Brown is a moneygrubber!


Five shop girls were burnt to death in Lhasa riot,by the CCP 'spies? Why did Hu Jintao have the protest "out of control"?So many Hui and Han killed, to show the "Dalai Lama's cruelty"?So many Hui and Han killed, to show the "Dalai Lama's cruelty"?

The CCP dare not talk with the Dalai Lama,for that will incur attention on the autarchic system!

[Xavier_Spinner_Wheels]

Earthquake mutes protests of Beijing Olympics
By STEPHEN WADE
AP Sports Writer

BEIJING (AP) -- China's deadly earthquake may have saved the Beijing Olympics.

Just a few weeks ago, International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge described the games as "in crisis." They were being battered by pro-Tibet protests, health concerns about Beijing's noxious pollution, and calls for boycotts tied to China's support for Sudan.

The May 12 earthquake changed everything.


A torchbearer, center, runs at the Bund, one of the land marks of the town
during Beijing Olympic torch relay in Shanghai, China, Friday May 23, 2008.
The Olympic torch relay in Shanghai was postponed due to a three-day mourning period
for victims of the earthquake that killed more than 50,000. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

"I'm sorry to say it, but this has turned things around," said Gerhard Heiberg, a member of the IOC's executive board member and its marketing director.

After the tragedy in Sichuan province, the games are now riding a wave of goodwill - a feeling that the government's propaganda machine had failed for months to generate.
Of course, 11 weeks remain before the Olympics begin on Aug. 8, and another unexpected event could change everything. Politics still loom, and some athletes are still expected to use the games to speak out on political issues like Darfur and Tibet.

"What the earthquake has done ... it has essentially pushed the coverage of the preparations for the Olympics to the margins, temporarily," said Phelim Kine, Hong-Kong based Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch. "But that coverage and focus will quickly return in the days and weeks ahead.

"The media will move on from this immediate focus on the humanitarian tragedy in Sichuan, and there will be space for other stories and other coverage," he said.

At a track and field event that opened Thursday at the 91,000-seat National Stadium - the games' centerpiece known as the "Bird's Nest" - donation boxes for quake victims dotted the venue, and people were using them.

Activist groups grudgingly acknowledge that China's state-controlled media - by allowing uncharacteristic openness in 24-hour earthquake coverage - have shaped the news agenda and gained sympathy for a catastrophe that has killed more than 55,000 people.

Instead of criticism, China is receiving wide-ranging praise for its quick earthquake response.

Known for its secrecy, the government has let earthquake coverage flow more freely, with less censorship in an era of quick-moving text messages and the Internet.

State-controlled China Central Television has produced nonstop coverage of the disaster.
The government initially allowed more aggressive news reporting, most dealing with the government's rapid response, heroic rescues and grieving.

"Maybe the Chinese government hasn't had time to think about it, but later it may come to realize that, compared with the state-controlled media, the words from the ordinary people at the grass roots are more convincing and influential," said Luo Qing, who teaches at Beijing's Communication University of China.

Hoping to carry the momentum into August, the government has sent high-profile former Olympic gold medalists Gao Ming (diving), Yang Yang (speedskating) and Deng Yaping (table tennis) into Sichuan province to boost the morale for thousands of orphaned children surviving in tents.

Trained in China's high-powered sports schools, the superstars have also shown formidable psychological skill, visiting the injured in field hospitals, or leading pep rallies for those displaced people taking shelter in tented camps.

"We really don't see that we have been outmaneuvered by the government," said Matt Whitticase, a spokesman for the Free Tibet Campaign. "Obviously, the earthquake has been awful, an act of God that no one could have predicted."

Other Olympics have been run principally by the host city. The Beijing Olympics are directed by China's communist government, and they've been designed to be colossal - a statement about the country's rising economic power.

IOC officials met this week in Beijing and entertained ideas about some kind earthquake commemoration during the opening ceremony. Athletes and citizens seem to favor it. One such commemoration took place at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics when the flag from the World Trade Center was displayed.

"The protocol for an IOC ceremony is very strict and formal, and it has to be," said Kevan Gosper, a senior IOC member and vice chairman of the IOC coordination commission, which works with the Beijing organizers. "On such an issue that has affected a host country, I believe that the president of the IOC would have a very open mind and listen to the advice coming from Beijing organizers."

He said an eventual tribute would have to be agreed to by the IOC and local organizers.

Gosper said China's earthquake disaster may be recognized during the opening ceremony, but he cautioned that the IOC "in principle tried to avoid ceremonial events referring to tragedies around the world." He said there were too many, and some group always feels left out.

Beijing organizers have declined to talk openly about specific changes they might make to the Olympics. Several top organizing officials declined interviews on the subject, but newspaper editorials and bloggers have been suggesting that a commemoration for the dead would help set the tone for the 17-day games. Some has even suggested that a quake survivor should light the Olympic cauldron on Aug. 8.

"I think it would be great if there were some program about the earthquake during the opening ceremony," said Mo Yingbin, a speaking on the street in central Shanghai. "It's very good to let the world know about the pain, the love and the tragedy the earthquake brought to us."

Following a three-day mourning period, the Olympic torch relay resumed Thursday in Ningbo, an eastern port city that greeted the restart with a minute of silence. Organizers also announced a rejigged relay. Instead of mid-June, the torch will pass through earthquake-ravaged Sichuan province on Aug. 3-5 - just days before the opening ceremony.

"Frankly, few people care about the torch relay these days," said Jiang Dongfang of Shanghai.

"The earthquake killed so many people and caused so much damage. I think it should be a part of the Olympic opening ceremony," she said.

Copyright 2008 New York Post

More multimedia links on the NYPost website HERE.

[sjdflghd]

Jiang Dongfang might be wise to be careful what she asks for ...

[FYIbiatches]

The 2008 Nazi Olympics
By CB Liddell

Back in 1936, a certain country used the Olympic Games to showcase the achievements of its totalitarian regime. Visitors were impressed by signs of economic progress, including a new national freeway system; amazed at technological innovations, like the first public use of live TV coverage; and awed by the orderly nature of a society where the police had the whip hand. Even the local athletes put on a good show. Apart from some unpopular successes for certain U.S. athletes of color, the host country easily topped the medal table, with 33 golds to the USA’s 24.

Now, 72 years later, we are to be treated to a similar spectacle — the Beijing Olympics, when another ascendant totalitarian power will pull out all the stops in an attempt to promote its economy, society and political system. But what, exactly, is China’s political system?

Although it claims to be a communist country, China can be more accurately described as a fascist state. Due largely to the horrific events of World War II, the word “fascism” and “fascist” are now terms charged with extreme emotions. But looked at in terms of political science, fascism is a system of state power that utilizes nationalism and big business to strengthen a country economically, industrially and militarily, especially when the country feels disadvantaged by the existing global system. In the past, Italy, Germany and Japan turned to fascism in an attempt to redress the power balance of what they saw as a biased international system that favored the main capitalist and colonial powers. Now China is doing something similar.

Instead of public ownership of the means of production and the equitable distribution of wealth that should characterize a communist system, the so-called Chinese Communist Party encourages big business, billionaires and bling. China is now a land of gross inequalities populated by high-class hookers and low-paid factory workers, a place where trendy consumer goods are promoted alongside the increasingly hollow platitudes of socialism.

The internationalist aspect of communism is merely used as a means of extending China’s influence in Africa, whose raw materials the Chinese covet but are too weak to control directly. Meanwhile, closer to home, under the umbrella of growing military might, Chinese nationalism has become increasingly virulent, with constant threats aimed at the Taiwanese or anyone who supports the independence of the Tibetans or Uighurs. Here in Tokyo, we get a front-row seat any time Japan does something that displeases the Chinese government — from visiting Yasukuni Shrine to complaining about poisoned gyoza. Then, we’ll see the Chinese rent-a-mob out there in force with its nationalistic slogans about “great China” and “little Japan.”

China’s role in the global economy is also interesting. Happy to be the “world producer” to America’s role as the “world consumer,” the Chinese government keeps the yuan low and exports high. While America closes factories and builds shopping malls, China builds steel plants and infrastructure, slowly altering the balance of power and transforming itself into the world’s major power. All this with a one party state, no democracy and oppression of dissent.

The big assumption is that involving China in the world economy like this will tie its interests to ours and promote Chinese democracy. In the meantime, China gets thousands of new factories and hundreds of millions of workers inured to hard labor and shortages, while the West gets to play with its credit cards. Chinese democracy, meanwhile, is left securely on the back burner.

In 1936, the very year of the Berlin Olympics, top Nazi Hermann Goering called on German workers to make greater sacrifices in the nation’s drive to become industrially and militarily powerful. “Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat,” he famously said. China’s role in the world economy is a clear case of “guns instead of butter.”

Recently, the film director Steven Spielberg called attention to China’s role in the ethnic massacres taking place in Darfur, a province of the Republic of Sudan, whose government China supports by trading, supplying weapons, and using its U.N. Security Council veto when necessary.

Spielberg’s decision to boycott the Olympics soon came under attack by critics who suggested that what we needed was “constructive engagement” with the Chinese. It might chill some of us to remember that exactly the same arguments were used back in 1936, when many had reservations about attending Hitler’s Olympics.

Of course, each nation — including China — has a sovereign right to develop its industry, economy, and even military power in whichever way it likes. But at the same time, the rest of the world should do a better job of recognizing what’s really going on: a powerful one-party state is using our greed for cheap consumer goods to gradually transform itself into the biggest concentration of industrial muscle on earth, while using the Olympics to send out a “dog whistle signal” that a new superpower has arrived and expects to be obeyed.

Metropolis Magazine (www.metropolis.co.jp)

[Zaxsdcxs]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...anrights/print

Remembering the Black Power protest

At the Beijing Olympics, the time is ripe for athletes to pick up the human rights baton from Tommie Smith and John Carlos

All comments ()

• Geoff Small
• guardian.co.uk,
• Wednesday July 9, 2008

Tommie Smith and John Carlos protest with the Black Power salute. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty

Though mention of their names would draw blank expressions from most people, we all owe a great debt to Tommie Smith and John Carlos. The American sprinters made history when they mounted the Olympic victory stand and thrust their clenched, black-gloved fists into the night sky over Mexico City, on October 16 1968. Their "Black Power" protest produced front page headlines around the world. Not to mention one of the top 10 iconic poster images of the last century.
Perversely, however, the raw iconography of the gesture has helped to obscure its impact and significance. For starters, while the gesture was redolent of the militant Black Panthers, it was actually a plaintive cry for civil rights. Indeed, the athletes were figurehead members of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, a non-violent student organisation that transposed racism in sport into the civil rights agenda.
Even so, Smith and Carlos's quiet act of defiance resonated every bit as much as the litany of violent interludes which marked 1968 as an apocalyptic year – the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the Tet offensive, student riots in Paris, and the massacre of hundreds of Mexican student protesters a few weeks before the games.
At the international level, their demonstration gave the lie to the idealistic notion that politics and sports should not mix. It also exposed the hypocrisy inherent in the American administration's racist policies towards black people. Until then, the white political elite had expected black athletes to deliver national glory abroad while regarding them as little more than "fast niggers" at home. Indeed, when OPHR still cherished hopes of organising a black Olympic boycott, its mantra was: "Why run in Mexico only to crawl at home?"
Smith and Carlos's stand was one of several similar black protests at the games. Collectively, these displays pushed the issue of black athletes' rights onto the agenda of the United States Olympic Committee. They forced the athletic authorities to meet OPHR's demands for the employment of black coaches and officials. Ironically, the first black person appointed to the Usoc executive was the legendary Olympian Jesse Owens, who was quickly dispatched to quell any repetition of Smith and Carlos's protest. But his meeting with the remaining black athletes – Smith and Carlos having been sent home in disgrace – culminated in his being branded an "Uncle Tom" and sent away in tears.
Smith and Carlos's legacy is a proud one. All the same, it is one that cost them dearly. Although they were deified by black America, they were equally vilified by white America. Smith's activism before the games had already cost his job washing cars. But both struggled to find work to feed their young families when they returned home from Mexico. Smith's marriage collapsed, Carlos's wife committed suicide. Worse, the threat of retaliatory white violence haunted them. They received regular death threats. Carlos's dog was butchered and left on his porch.
Smith and Carlos had to wait until the 1980s to see their reputations rehabilitated. The Reagan administration's boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics provided a crucial catalyst in their fortunes, proving, after all, that politics and sport are indeed compatible bedfellows. In 2005, Smith and Carlos's return to respectable society was crowned by the unveiling of a statue of their iconic protest on the campus at San Jose State University, their alma mater and the birthplace of OPHR.
The magnetism of that monumental moment continues to captivate and intrigue. For actor and playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah, it is "one of the most definitive expressions of manhood, of service" he has ever seen. And this notion of "service" makes Smith and Carlos's victory stand as relevant today as it was 40 years ago. From Athens to San Francisco, the run-up to this year's Olympic Games in Beijing has witnessed a series of embarrassing anti-China protests. British Olympic team athletes have refused to sign contracts that include "gagging clauses" that stifle their right to protest.
The world today bears little resemblance to the one occupied by Smith and Carlos four decades ago. But one feature that has not changed is injustice and our sensitivity to it. The time is ripe for the next generation of Smiths and Carloses. But only time will tell whether the current crop possesses the political will to use the Beijing stage to carry the baton.

[Lhiistyssdds]

The 2008 Olympics are simply a farce ...

IOC agrees to Internet blocking at the Games


(Teh Eng Koon/Agence France-Presse)
Foreign journalists using the Internet at the Olympic press center in
Beijing on Wednesday. Access will be limited during the Games.

INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
By Andrew Jacobs
Wednesday, July 30, 2008

BEIJING: The Chinese government confirmed Wednesday what journalists arriving at the lavishly outfitted media center here had suspected: Contrary to previous assurances by Olympic and government officials, the Internet would be censored during the upcoming games.

Since the Olympic Village press center opened Friday, reporters have been unable to access scores of Web pages - politically sensitive ones that discuss Tibetan succession, Taiwanese independence, the violent crackdown of the protests in Tiananmen Square and the sites of Amnesty International, Radio Free Asia and several Hong Kong newspapers known for their freewheeling political discourse.

On Wednesday - two weeks after its most recent proclamation of an uncensored Internet during the Summer Games - the International Olympic Committee quietly agreed to some of the limitations, according to Kevan Gosper, chairman of the IOC press commission, Reuters reported.

Gosper said that he regretted the limitations but that "IOC officials negotiated with the Chinese that some sensitive sites would be blocked on the basis they were not considered Games related."

A government spokesman initially suggested the problems originated with the site hosts, but on Wednesday, he acknowledged that journalists would not have unfettered Internet use during the Games, which begin Aug. 8.

"It has been our policy to provide the media with convenient and sufficient access to the Internet," said Sun Weide, the chief spokesman for the Beijing Olympics organizing committee. "I believe our policy will not affect reporters' coverage of the Olympic games."

The Chinese government and the IOC had repeatedly suggested up until two weeks ago that the 20,000 journalists covering the games would have full Internet access. Jacques Rogge, the International Olympic committee president, declared that the foreign media would be able to report and publish its work freely in China and that the Internet would be uncensored.

The revelation that politically sensitive Web pages will be off limits to foreign reporters comes at a time of growing skepticism about the government's commitment to pledges made when it won the right to stage the games in 2001: that it would improve its record on human rights and provide athletes with clean air.

Despite a litany of measures that include restricting private vehicles and shuttering factories, Beijing's skyline in recent days has been shrouded in a thick haze, prompting some hang-wringing over whether the government can deliver on its promise of a "blue skies" Olympics.

In recent months, human rights advocates have accused Beijing of stepping up the detention and surveillance of those it fears could disrupt the Games. On Tuesday, President George W. Bush privately met with five Chinese dissidents at the White House to drive home his dissatisfaction with the pace of change. Bush, who leaves for the opening ceremonies in just over a week, also pressed China's foreign minister to ease political repression.

Concerns about free access to the Internet in Beijing had intensified Tuesday, when Western journalists working at the main press center in Beijing said they could not get to Amnesty International's Web site to see the group's critical report on China's failure to improve its human rights record ahead of the Olympics.

Journalist groups complained last week about treatment from security officials while trying to interview people waiting in line for Olympic tickets, according to Bloomberg News.

Jonathan Watts, president of The Foreign Correspondents Club of China, said he was disappointed that Beijing had failed to honor its agreement to temporarily remove the elaborate firewall that prevents ordinary Chinese from fully using the Internet. "Obviously if reporters can't access all the sites they want to see, they can't do their jobs," he said. "Unfortunately, such restrictions are normal for reporters in China, but the Olympics were supposed to be different."

Sandrine Tonge, the IOC media relations coordinator, said the organization would press the Chinese authorities to reconsider the limits.

How to circumvent censors

Reporters Without Borders is encouraging journalists covering the Beijing Olympics to skirt censorship with tips on how to get around firewalls, lock computer files and find safe translators, The Associated Press reported from Paris.

In a guide published on the Internet on Wednesday, the organization advised reporters to conduct phone calls and write e-mail messages with the knowledge that they might be monitored.

The new guide will probably help only journalists who have not yet left for Beijing: The press freedom group says its Web site, www.rsf.org, remains blocked in China. The country has backed away from a promise to lift all Internet blocks on foreign media.

Copyright © 2008 the International Herald Tribune

[SiM7W2zi]

Not to worry. I have it on good authority that the Olympic Mascots will not be blocked.

[Infiseeenvelp]

^ Cute little tykes. How could a person even consider blocking them?

[Frodogzzz]

China Bars American Gold Medalist Active on Darfur

By JOSH GERSTEIN, Staff Reporter of the Sun | August 6, 2008


The Chinese government is barring an American Olympic gold medalist who has criticized China's policies toward Darfur from traveling to Beijing for the Olympics. In a statement sent to reporters via e-mail, the former Olympian, William "Joey" Cheek, said he was scheduled to fly to China today, but an official from the Chinese Embassy in Washington called last evening to advise him that his visa, issued a few weeks ago, had been canceled. Mr. Cheek, who won the gold in speed skating in 2006, said the diplomat said he was not obliged to give a reason for the cancellation.

"I am saddened not to be able to attend the Games," the athlete said.

"The Olympic Games represent something powerful: that people can come together from around the world and do things that no one thought were possible. However, the denial of my visa is a part of a systemic effort by the Chinese government to coerce and threaten athletes who are speaking out on behalf of the innocent people of Darfur."

Activists such as Mr. Cheek, who heads an athletes' group called Team Darfur, have pressed China to use its influence over Sudan to bring an end to the genocide in that country's Darfur region. However, China has largely deferred to Khartoum on the issue and has vigorously denounced efforts to link the conflict to the Olympics.

"I still remain convinced of the great role the Olympics can play as a force for promoting peace around the world, including in the still raging crisis in Darfur," Mr. Cheek said. "Yet, despite the fact that I've always spoken positively of the Olympic ideal, and never called for a boycott or asked an athlete to break an IOC rule, my visa was revoked less than 24 hours before my scheduled departure."

Link to other similar articles HERE

http://www.nysun.com/foreign/china-b...-darfur/83299/

© 2008 The New York Sun,

[Babposa]

I don't see why anyone would want to watch hours of Red Chinese propaganda. This is basically a corrupt organization, the IOC, in bed with one of the most despicable and repressive governments in history.

It is the 1936 Berlin games all over again. A repressive regime on show for the world trying to prove it is all warm and fuzzy, complete with staging by their own Leni Riefenstahl. What makes it even more disgusting is that various world leaders are there legitimizing the whole spectacle. Then again, the Red Chinese government has been in power compared to the Nazis who were only in power for a short period when they had their Olympic legitimization.

An added bonus is NBC's jingoistic Amerigasm style of coverage of the Olympics. Before NBC spent absurd amounts of money for the rights it was covered properly by other networks, mainly ABC. ABC focused on the Olympics as a sporting event and not a vehicle for jingoism. We would be curious to see how NBC's jingoism and the Chicom propaganda mix, but we have unprogrammed all the NBC networks from the TV for the duration. It is just that bad.

About the only people we are rooting for in all this is the Chinese people. We hope they rise up against their oppressors and give the world a chance to see again what kind of government Red China has.

Lest we forget.

[idertedype]

^Lots of good points.

For example, I thought the NBC commentators were a disgrace. At one point Venezuela athletes were coming out and the bastards had to make snide comments about Chavez? In that case they could have mentioned we tried to assassinate him.
The environmental themes were beyond hypocritical, they have rivers so polluted nothing can live in them.
Still, for sheer spectacle I have to say this was incredible despite how evil I know the Chinese government to be.

[gogoleanylinkfo]

I don't see why anyone would want to watch hours of Red Chinese propaganda. This is basically a corrupt organization, the IOC, in bed with one of the most despicable and repressive governments in history.

It's too bad the political baggage can't be filtered out and the sports/entertainment enjoyed for its own value, but the George Orwell Games are a high water mark in geopolitical propaganda that began at the 1960 Rome Olympics. It was joked that there were more KGB and CIA agents in Rome that summer than reporters.

They should just run the Winter Olympics; they're not so overblown with nationalism. The venues are more laid-back, and it's too cold for posturing.

Quick. Who remembers where the last two winter games were held?

It is the 1936 Berlin games all over again. A repressive regime on show for the world trying to prove it is all warm and fuzzy, complete with staging by their own Leni Riefenstahl. When we look back and wonder what were they thinking in 1936, the answer is that it looked the same to them as 2008 looks to us.

[JeffStewart]

After watching the opening ceremonies can anyone really wonder if the Chinese have the means and the will to run the world?

Try to imagine Americans putting on that show with the cooperation and interaction of thousands of performers -- not to mention those behind the scenes.

Collective Purpose and Objective clearly laid out and achieved.

Fasten your seatbelts, kids ...

It's gonna be a bumpy century.

[AgindyMinnife]

After watching the opening ceremonies can anyone really wonder if the Chinese have the means and the will to run the world?

Try to imagine Americans putting on that show with the cooperation and interaction of thousands of performers -- not to mention those behind the scenes.

Collective Purpose and Objective clearly laid out and achieved.

Fasten your seatbelts, kids ...

It's gonna be a bumpy century.

Co-operation? Haha.

One reader of the Guardian posted this today:

"I am here in Beijing now. There was a great party mood in the town today, but yesterday was mixed. As the opening ceremony progressed and people gathered in various places to celebrate/watch then the police started to restrict access. It seemed to me that more than a hundred or so people gathered: no more pedestrian access - police lines stopped you walking through. A larger gathering - no access whatsoever, cars or people. I was walking around for a long time trying to get back to my hostel but after meeting the nth road-block I jumped in a taxi. We had to turn back a few times, but eventually made it round and got back to Qianmen.

Oh, and my mobile was blocked. Worked fine when I arrived, has worked fine again all day today, but last night: nada."

I guess if 1,000,000 people decide to co-operate to get together and protest censorship or some other issue, they may be met with the somewhat different co-operation of a tank battalion in the square ready to roll over them..

Co-operation according to whom - that is the question.