Russian and Tibetan activists, speaking at a news conference in Moscow where the IOC meeting is being held, said awarding the 2008 Olympics to Beijing would encourage China to crack down on human rights even more severely. The activists called on IOC members to reject Beujing’s bid.
Ngavan Gelek, chairman of the Tibetan Culture and Information Centre in Moscow, said, “the present situation in both China and Tibet is deteriorating day by day”. He said if Beijing wins the Games, “they will, I think, take it as a license for more repression”.
Asked to respond to arguments that giving Beijing the Games would encourage China to improve human rights conditions and take a softer line on dissent, Sergei Kovalyov, a member of the Russian parliament and a prominent human rights activist said, “did that get humanity very far, this policy?”
Kovalyov and others said it was ironic that China was likely to be awarded the Games in Moscow, considering that China had strongly criticized holding the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow because of opposition to the war in Afghanistan.
The activists charged that China is exerting strong pressure to muffle them even abroad. They said that Chinese Embassy officials tried to force cancellation of the news conference and exiled Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng was to have come to Moscow to support the bid opponents, but was denied a visa apparently due to Chinese influence, they said.
Karma Yesha of the Tibetan Youth Contgress, an Indian-based group, said, “if they can’t allow one person from America (where Wei lives) to come here, how can we expect a good Olympics in 2008?”
The bid opponents plan to hold a protest demonstration on Friday outside the meeting site before the IOC vote, but organizers said it is expected to consist of only about 100 people.
No demonstrators will be allowed on the grounds of the conference site, said Vyacheslav Lapishev, security director at the complex where the meeting is being held and where the IOC members’ hotel is located.
Opponents of Beijing’s bid said that IOC members could be denied important information if they don’t see demonstrations, considering that members no longer make visits to bid cities.
Meanwhile, Rod McGeogh, leader of Sydney’s successful bid for the 2000 Olymics, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that Beijing should not be awarded the 2008 Games.
McGeogh also held a position on the board of the organizing committee of the Sydney Olympics until he quit in 1999. He said the IOC was trying to “have a bit both ways” by considering Beijing as an Olympic host.
“On the one hand…(the IOC) speaks on the floor of the United Nations, it wants to be a respected international body. It intervened in the laws of South Africa to change them before it would let that country come to the Games.
If you take that as the stand, then I just can’t see how you can ignore the human rights issues in China and I can’t see how the IOC could say, “well look, that’s a domestic matter, it’s of no concern to us”.
