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Concerns for Tibet

Europeans Giving More Voice to Olympic Boycott Options

Violence in Tibet and China's harsh response to it have marred China's hopes for calm before it hosts the 2008 Olympics. At first, countries played down any kind of boycott in response. But contrary voices are now starting to make themselves heard.

Although a number of countries including Britain, the United States and Germany have voiced a lack of support for any boycott of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games or its opening ceremony in response to China's supression of protests in Tibet, some cracks in this wall of restraint are starting to form in Europe.

The responses come more than two weeks after violence erupted in Tibet on March 14 and spread to some other western Chinese regions following three days of peaceful protests marking the 49th anniversary of Tibet's failed uprising against China.

The Chinese authorities have reported 22 dead in the violence, although Tibetan rights groups put the number closer to 140, according to the Associated Press. Thousands of police and troops have been deployed to quell the violence.

The European Union this week urged China to show restraint in its suppression of unrest in the Himalayan region.

A number of individual countries have indicated that they would not rule out a boycott of the Beijing Olympics if matters in Tibet did not improve. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, for example, said Tuesday that France might consider boycotting the event's opening ceremony, which is scheduled for Aug. 8.

"Our Chinese friends must understand the worldwide concern... about the question of Tibet," Sarkozy said Tuesday, according to the AP, "and I will adapt my response to the evolutions in the situation that will come, I hope, as rapidly as possible."

The Belgium government has also announced that it would not rule out a boycott of the Olympics.

Any concerted boycott would be particularly frustrating for the Chinese, who have been hoping to make the best possible presentation of their country as they host the games.

German Grumbling

In Germany, there has yet to be any widespread call for boycotts, but subtle differences of opinion have been making themselves more known over the last few days.

On Monday, Thomas Bach, vice president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and president of the German Olympic Committee (DOSB), announced that the German organization had no plans to boycott the Olympics, claiming that boycotts do not work.

"Sport is not a suitable tool to be used to apply political pressure," Bach's statement said. "Sport builds bridges, not walls."

Günter Nooke, however, the German government's human rights representative, voiced disagreement with Bach's statements in Wednesday's edition of the daily Berliner Zeitung, calling on the IOC to allow athletes to take part in political protests.

"If the IOC is going to award the games to countries like China and Russia it must also allow athletes to express themselves politically," he said.

These opinions come a week after the German government said it would suspend talks with China on climate change and renewable energy until the violence in Tibet came to an end. The two countries seemed to have patched up relations after a falling out last year following China's angry response to Chancellor Angela Merkel's meeting with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader, in her office last September.

On Tuesday, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD) demanded that the veil of secrecy about China's current actions in Tibet be lifted. In a telephone conversation with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, Steinmeier asked China to "provide the greatest possible transparency about events in Tibet," according to the DPA German news agency. Steinmeier stressed, however, that he believed a boycott of the games would be an inappropriate response.

Steinmeier's fellow party member, Johannes Pflug, who is a member of the German parliament and head of the German-Chinese Parliamentary Group, echoed Steinmeier's sentiment against a boycott. He did, however, tell the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung's Wednesday edition that the international community should "come to better grips with the issue of Tibet."

Stronger, though, were Pflug's comments that Germany might consider economic sanctions against China. "We need to talk about which goods are being delivered to China and about how business relations are," Pflug told the paper, referring to high technology and energy-related goods.

An Unwelcome Comparison

China has been slow to respond officially to complaints about its activities in Tibet. State-controlled media have, however, complained about the West's bias for the Tibetans in its reporting of the issue, according to the AP.

A strong response also came late Tuesday, according to the AP, when the Chinese Foreign Ministry posted on its Web site a response to an editorial in a British newspaper comparing the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games to the 1936 games in Berlin, organized and orchestrated by Hitler and the Nazis.

The editorial, published in The Sunday Times and written by Michael Portillo, an ex-cabinet member and defense secretary, compared the German and Chinese games and criticized world leaders for ignoring China's human rights record.

The Chinese response criticized the editorial as "an insult to the Chinese people and an insult to the people of every nation of the world."

In an apparent response to Western criticism regarding transparency, Wednesday saw the first foreign journalists readmitted into Tibet since being banned at the outset of the violence. According to the AP, a small group of journalists was escorted into Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, by officials from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

jtw/ap/reuters/dpa