Marching to Beijing's Olympic beat

Marching to Beijing's Olympic beat

It was good to learn this week from the Chinese government-controlled Xinhua news agency that the international community has fallen into line and is "depoliticizing" the Olympics. China was crowing about French President Nicolas Sarkozy's backpedalling on plans to boycott the Games' opening ceremonies.

"To politicize such a grand and happy ceremony will only hurt the feelings of all the peace-lovers including the Chinese people and tarnish the spirit of the Olympics," the editorial went on, chastising those staying away -- including Canada's Stephen Harper.

But there's never been a time when the Olympics weren't political. Adolf Hitler certainly understood that in 1936. So did Palestinian terrorists when they stormed the athletes' village and killed Israeli competitors in 1972.

So did the United States, Canada and other western nations when they boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics, following Russia's invasion of Afghan-istan. (Which opens the question of whether countries might boycott the Vancouver Olympics Games because of Canada's continued military presence there.)

"The Olympics are all about politics and the athletes are part of it," says Kevin Wamsley, director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies. "They [the athletes] can claim they are not a part of what's going on in China or in Berlin [in 1936], but in a way they are. Their participation legitimates what goes on in the country. That's a very vulgar way to state it, but how can it not?"

Nothing was more political than the International Olympic Committee's decision in 2001 to let Beijing host the Summer Games. China understood that, which is why its leaders made the unfulfilled promise to use the Olympics as a means to improve its human rights record.

(Former IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch told a Spanish newspaper in the midst of the torch-relay protests earlier this year that it's fruitless to exert pressure on China. Samaranch, who urged the IOC to accept Beijing's bid, said the Chinese people are so sensitive, they don't need anyone to teach them lessons in international politics.)

At every step, China has got its way. Despite the IOC directive that the Games should be compact, venues are widely scattered with equestrian events in Hong Kong, a 31/2-hour flight away.

Even though the IOC -- following decades of debt-plagued Games from Montreal to Athens -- has said the Olympics should be affordable, at $42 billion these are the most expensive in history by a wide margin.

As for human rights, this week China opposed attempts to send Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir to the International Court for war crimes because of the genocide in Darfur. (In case you've forgotten, that's why Steven Spielberg ended his involvement with the Beijing Games.) It has continually blocked motions in the United Nations against Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe.

At home, Human Rights Watch reported earlier this month on how swiftly and brutally Chinese security forces moved into Tibet in March to break up demonstrations and rid the area of journalists. It outlined dozens of contraventions of the law passed in 2007 aimed at giving greater freedom for foreign journalists. The report detailed how several western journalists have been roughed up and detained and their phones and audio recorders confiscated.