Apr
25
Boycotts Olympics? Athelets Say No.
April 25, 2008 | | Leave a Comment
By Tia Tian Chi
Back in 2001, there were strong disagreements with the decision by the International Olympic Commission to award the 2008 Olympics to Beijing because of China’s poor human rights records. The voice to boycott the Beijing Olympics has been continued for the past seven years with purpose-built websites like Boycott the Beijing Olympics to call for international action. The the boycotting issue has been further aggravated by Darfur crisis, which began in 2003, and Tibet unrest, which took place in Lhasa in mid-March.
Here is a list of public figures who have openly called for boycotting the 2008 Olympics, mainly due to China’s financial and diplomatic support of the Khartoum government in Sudan: former French presidential candidate François Bayrou, actor and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Mia Farrow, Genocide Intervention Network Representative Ronan Farrow, author and Sudan scholar Eric Reeves, filmmaker Steven Spielberg, the The Washington Post editorial board, among others.
Since this march, some high-ranking politicians have announced publicly that they will not attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, including Secretary-general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon; the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown; the German chancellor, Angela Merkel; Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk; the president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus; and Japanese royal family. Although most of them have said they had not planned on going to Beijing anyway, their decisions have been seen as adding pressure on China’s involvement in Darfur and treatment of Tibet.
If all the effort they made is to stop the ongoing violence in Darfur, then will boycotting the Beijing Olympics, which is originally supposed to be an apolitical sports event, make a real difference? If all they are hoping for is the best of Sudanese, then where is their voice?
In an article from The Christian Science Monitor, Sudan’s Olympic athletes refuse to boycott what Darfur campaigners called the “genocide games”. Like most other athletes, they want to win metals and show their talent, but not only focus on their country’s problems. Ismail Ahmed Ismail is a Fur, whose tribes have suffered under janjaweed militias, and Abubaker Kaki Khamis is from Arab, whose militias were the forerunner of the janjaweed. Despite all the ethnic conflict, they are roommates in the Sudanese athletics team. Mr. Ismail said “We don’t think: These are Fur, there are Arab. It doesn’t matter here.” He continued “talk of a boycott makes me angry. We have people in the team from Darfur who are running. If we lost the chance of the Olympics, we would have to wait another four years before having another chance.” Another athlete, Nawal El Jack, who is a 400-meter runner in Sudanese athletics team express the same opinion: “People only think of bad things when they think of Sudan. Beijing is our chance to show people that we can do good things too.”
Athletes from other countries have shown similar concern. For instance, Athletes from Switzerland’s international Olympic Committees “rejected any boycott of the Beijing Games and said sport should be kept separate from politics despite China’s poor human rights record.” They said in a statement that “boycotts are pointless and senseless – and only hurts the athletes… with so many issues and conflicts in our world, if we allow our event to be the place to raise them, this would change the essence of what we are there to do – to compete athlete against athlete in the spirit of respect, friendship and fair play.”
As an article from the Telegraph concluded, “Dozens of states are guilty either of domestic human rights violations or of foreign belligerence or both. If we boycotted each one, our sportsmen would find half the world barred to them, and we should barely export any goods…The Olympics have never quite lived up to their ideal as a symbol of peace and international brotherhood. From the start, there was gamesmanship, commercialization, cheating and one-upmanship. But, for all that, they represent something worth celebrating: a common endeavor whereby athletes from every country compete under agreed rules and accept the results.”
