Nothing Olympian about it

Both China and the human rights camp have tried to use the Olympics for their own ends

On July 6, 2007, Yang Chunlin was picked up by the police for "inciting subversion". He was denied access to lawyers. In prison, his arms and legs were stretched and chained to the four corners of an iron bed so he could not move (the infamous 'Death bed' version of Chinese torture). He had to eat, drink and defecate in that position. The police beat him with electro-shock batons when he tried to talk to his family members. Chunlin's crime?

He led a petition campaign under the banner, "We don't want the Olympics, we want human rights". So much for the assurance given by China in 2001 that allowing Beijing to host the Games would "help the development of human rights". 

Human rights watchdogs such as Amnesty International have documented innumerable cases of human rights abuse such as Chunlin's, which are taking place even as the world gets set to feast on sport's biggest ever spectacle. And the tragic irony is that many such abuses are taking place not in spite of but because of the Olympics.

Contrary to expectations, the Olympics have catalysed not reform but new waves of repression. In fact, the parallels between Beijing 2008 and another Olympics hosted by another repressive regime, Berlin 1936, are eerie.

Though the world debated - as it did this year - right till the start of the Olympics in the first week of August 1936, the Nazis were determined to showcase "the new Germany" and host the best Olympics ever. And they did, just as China will. With 51 countries participating, the Berlin Olympics was the biggest of the modern era. And like the Chinese are doing today, the Nazi administration also swept "undesirable persons" off the streets and dispatched them to detention camps outside the city.

The most chilling parallel is between Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews and Communist China's treatment of practitioners of the Falun Gong movement.

According to a report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur presented to the United Nations General Assembly in February this year, Falun Gong practitioners (who number 70 to 100 million) are the prime target of human rights abuse in contemporary China, simply because they openly challenge the legitimacy of the Communist regime. They are arrested, tortured, and sent to slave labour camps to produce cheap goods for export. They are also medically tested and murdered for the purpose of organ harvesting.

The report points out that in 2005, only 0.5 per cent of total transplants in China were accounted for by donations by relatives or dead donors and "the discrepancy between the number of transplants carried out and the number of available sources is made up from the harvesting of organs from Falun Gong practitioners."

And this is just one aspect of human rights abuse in China. There are several: China is the world leader in capital punishment, accounting for 90 per cent of all executions in 2004; it has the most sophisticated system of internet control and surveillance (a cartoon policeman pops up to warn you of dire consequences if you are about to visit an "illegal site"); and according to the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, 1.25 million Chinese citizens were forcibly evicted from their homes due to "Olympics-related redevelopment", without due compensation.

The list is long, and it raises an uncomfortable but unavoidable question: how can we 'celebrate' the 'Olympic spirit' of fairness and humanity when the very spectacle of the Games is erected on an edifice of inhuman cruelty?

Principle 5 of the Olympic charter states, "Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement." Is China honouring this spirit at all - by not targeting political dissidents at least in the Olympic year? The answer is of course no.

Yet participating countries have brushed aside calls for a boycott by saying that the Olympics is about athletes and not about politics - exactly the same argument put forward by Nazi Germany when there arose a powerful global movement, for boycotting the 1936 Berlin Olympics on account of the Nazis' discrimination against Jews. In India too, which happens to be the home of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile as well as the Dalai Lama, protests, marches and petition campaigns by Tibetan activists have made little impact.

A solitary sportsman, footballer Bhaichung Bhutia, refused to carry the Olympic torch in a gesture of solidarity with the Tibetans. But celebrities from other fields were more than happy to be a part of the Olympic bandwagon.

One Bollywood star who is trying hard to project an image of being socially conscious, Aamir Khan, was publicly urged by Tibetan human rights activists not to take part in the Olympic torch relay.

After some initial prevarication, Khan joined in with convoluted justifications ("I will run in the Olympic torch relay but with the Tibetan cause in my heart.") But the nation as a whole seems to have had little patience for either the Tibetan or the human rights campaigners. The might and majesty of the Chinese economic machine has worked its magic in India, as elsewhere.

Both the Chinese and human rights activists have tried to use the Olympics for their own ends. For China, the Olympics is a "coming out party" that will mark its formal arrival on the global stage as a world superpower.

For human rights groups, the Olympics was supposedly an opportunity to pressure China into following international norms, free political prisoners, reform its prison laws, and so on. The reality is that while China has succeeded, the human rights camp has failed abysmally.
sampath@dnaindia.net