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Rogge's Silence

The Phantoms of the Beijing Opera

By Ullrich Fichtner in Beijing

There was once a hope that sports would trump politics during the Olympics. But the Chinese police continue to arrest citizens who register to stage demonstrations. IOC President Jacques Rogge is in charge of a show over which he has long since lost control.

In the first week of the Olympic Games, two men go missing in Beijing. It's last Monday, and in front of a police station in the city's southern section, Ji Sizun, a slight man of 58, gets into a dark Buick with the license plate number E/PO 397. Two plainclothes policemen accompany him to the vehicle and get in with him. Ji, holding a red folder, seems agitated as he waves goodbye. He is not seen again. The other man who disappears in Beijing is Jacques Rogge.

The world loses the IOC president shortly after his opening speech in the "Bird's Nest" stadium. He is seen again briefly on Monday, as he tours rows of giant pieces of transmission equipment on the Olympic Green. He writes his name in Chinese characters onto a panel. On Tuesday, he is reported to be attending handball and hockey matches, and watching the wrestling and shooting competitions. On Wednesday, he apparently spends time at the weightlifting and judo events, and on Friday he is shown on television watching the 100-meter trials in the Bird's Nest.

But it seems impossible to get a glimpse of him face-to-face, and the few photos of Rogge depict a face that looks pale, a face older than his 66 years. There are even rumors that Rogge is ill. He's staying in the Olympic Village, next to the Swiss Olympic team, but even that piece of information is based on nothing but hearsay. Rogge has turned into a phantom of this greatest of all operas, a prominent man who is somehow consistently absent -- and who has nothing to say about anything.

Not a word about the war in the Caucasus. Not a word about the armored personnel carrier that was standing in front of the Olympic press center on Tuesday, like a warning. Not a word about the doctored TV images from the evening of the opening ceremony. Rogge is silent. The IOC is silent. It has nothing to say about the ongoing arrests of protestors here and there, nothing about the growing number of soldiers and police officers on the Olympic Green and in the media village. Not a word about the case of Mr. Ji.

On Opening Day Ji went to the Deshengmenwai police station in Beijing's Xicheng district to file an application for a permit to stage a public protest. Ji's petition, written in the elaborate Chinese style, contains sentences like: "The party and the government are dependent upon the assistance and wisdom of the Chinese people. We are capable of successfully holding the Olympic Games, and we will be just as successful at bringing about reforms, so that the international community will congratulate us on our democratic culture."

In short, Ji wanted to demonstrate. He wanted to appear in one of the three "protest parks" the government has specifically designated in Beijing for the duration of the Games. As his petition states, he wanted to: 1. Hang up colorful posters, 2. Give speeches, 3. Distribute material, 4. Sell books, 5. Promote judicial reform. Essentially, what Ji wanted was what Jacque Rogge wants, and what was promised to the rest of the world before these games.

Repeatedly in his speeches, the last one two weeks ago, Rogge had insisted that China is willing to change. China, he said, wants to open up and will open up, and the country will change after the Olympics. Rogge raised the hope that the athletes arriving in China would be allowed to bring the Olympic ideals with them.

At the opening ceremony, he spoke of a great "dream" associated with these games, a dream he evoked in 19 short sentences between his greeting and his final "Thank you!" But most of all, Rogge referred to the games as a peaceful gathering of the peoples of the world. Even as he spoke, Russian tanks were already rolling through Georgia. And Mr. Ji was about to disappear with two police officers in a dark Buick van.

Ji's case is made public on Wednesday of the first week of the Olympics, two days after his disappearance, when the human rights organization Human Rights Watch sounds the alarm. Its report contains names, data and facts about Ji and a number of other Chinese who wanted to protest in the parks and were simply sent away or arrested and taken away on the spot. According to the organization's Asia director, apparently "the procedure for approved protests proposed by China was never intended to provide people with more freedom of expression, but merely to make it easier for the police to suppress freedom." The incident reached the Olympic Green on Thursday.

That was when the representatives of the world press demanded an explanation. Twenty thousand members of the media are accredited to cover the games, and every morning 100 of them attend a briefing with the IOC and BOCOG, the Beijing Organizing Committee. The briefing turns in a press conference verging on pandemonium. It's the kind of event China fears, and for which the IOC has no use.

Four times in a row, a British reporter asks IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies whether the IOC feels affronted by the fact that the China is not living up to its promises. Davies responds, almost robotically, that the IOC is proud of how wonderfully these games have developed.

Her remarks are met with heckling and heated comments, until Mr. Wang, the BOCOG spokesman, a consistently pleasant man with good manners, gives a small presentation about China's advances. Wang talks about new freedoms and great strides of progress. "But," he adds, "we cannot allow the country to descend into chaos."

It is during these moments on Thursday that the mood shifts within the press corps. Any desire to qualify the few, scattered protests quickly dissipates. And the desire to see beauty in the Beijing games, despite everything, to let politics be politics and concentrate on sports and its magic, shrinks. After enduring days of silence, blandishment and lies coming from the organizers, the reporters on the floor face a new certainty: This country is not going to change. This country has hijacked the games, merely to celebrate and congratulate itself, undisturbed by the IOC, as it looks on, either obediently or powerlessly.

Out in the city, it is becoming clear that in Beijing, in its seats of power surrounding the now consistently abandoned Tiananmen Square, no one ever seriously entertained the thought of accommodating Jacques Rogge and his ideals -- at least not more than was absolutely necessary. The promised protest zones in the parks are chimeras. They simply do not exist where the government claims they are supposed to be. The government never intended to allow public protests in Beijing. A week later, on Monday, August 18, the official Chinese Xinhua news agency will report that zero of the 77 applications currently on file to hold public protests in Beijing have been approved.

The government never intended to allow Mr. Ji to express his opinion openly. His telephone has since been disconnected -- not simply switched off. Dialing the number -- on Tuesday, Wednesday or Friday -- proved to be an exercise in futility. Upon leaving for Beijing, he told his family that his mobile phone would always be switched on and accepting calls -- day and night, always. He also told them that if he became unreachable, they could assume that there were "problems."

He has become unreachable. His relatives have not heard from him since Monday. They are familiar with his stories, dramas and anecdotes. The ones he related one last time in the hours before he disappeared on Monday -- when what promised to be a hot, humid day was dawning over Beijing. It was early morning and still cool outside as Ji waited at a bus stop. He was already sweating. He was in Beijing to tell his stories, to express his opinions.

An Internet blogger, a laid-back man with long, greasy hair, had contacted Ji. In 2003, the blogger's weblog was voted the country's best on Sohu, a popular Internet portal. From his bachelor's apartment near the Olympic Stadium, the blogger writes his accounts of daily life in Beijing for the rest of the world to read.

The blogger, known as "Tiger Temple," had hoped that the presence of a Western journalist would be enough to protect Mr. Ji. He had hoped that the enormous Olympic circus would impress Chinese security forces, at least a little, and that it would make them tread more cautiously when dealing with criticism and resistance. But Tiger Temple was wrong, as was Mr. Ji from Fujian.