RENAMING THE GAMES
by Claire Ward
maisonneuve.org, August 9, 2007
http://maisonneuve.org/index.php?&page_id=12&article_id=2865
The
“Bloody Harvest Olympics” is what former Edmonton MP David Kilgour is calling
the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Kilgour is pushing for a worldwide boycott of
the Games to protest the alleged crimes against humanity committed by the
Chinese government against practitioners of the Falun Gong faith. Kilgour and
Winnipeg lawyer David Matas made international headlines last year with a report
detailing the persecution of the Falun Gong, describing the process in which the
Chinese government harvests the organs of Falun Gong practitioners for sale to
foreign tourists. Supporters have charged that the Chinese government operated a
facility, much like a concentration camp, where practitioners were imprisoned,
executed, their organs removed and their bodies cremated. In response to
Kilgour’s rumblings, the Chinese embassy in Ottawa issued a written statement
last night which argued that any attempt to politicize the games violates the
spirit of the Olympic movement. “To exploit the chance of the Beijing Olympic
Games to engage in anti-China activity is not only shameful but also doomed to
fail,” the statement said, as reported in the Citizen.
Today, Kilgour is
inviting the media to Athens, Greece, to cover a Global Human Rights Torch
Relay. The year-long event, which will take a torch through one hundred cities
around the world, including Ottawa, is designed to draw attention to the cause
of members of Falun Gong. The question of Beijing’s suitability for the Olympics
is taken up by The National, which raises the issues of smog density in Beijing
and whether the city is making an effort to clean up in preparation for the
Games. As this CBC article mentions, Chinese officials have taken some measures
to guarantee cleaner air, such as keeping cars off the roads during the
seventeen-day period of the Games and firing rockets containing sticks of silver
iodide to induce rain and clean the air. And yesterday’s top story is not
forgotten either, as the Western Pro-Tibet activists who were deported from
China returned home. The Globe spoke to protestor Melanie Raoul of Vancouver,
who explained that her group was interrogated for hours by Chinese security
police, were given little chance to sleep, and were given no opportunity to
contact family or the Canadian embassy throughout the thirty-six hours they were
held. It appears that the desire of the Chinese embassy in Ottawa to separate
politics from the 2008 Olympic Games is, in its own words, a “doomed”
one.