Olympics Could Backfire on Beijing?

The Chinese Communist Party's hope of launching itself on the world stage with the 2008 Olympics could well backfire if it does not address its human rights violations, says senior statesman David Kilgour.

Mr Kilgour a former Canadian Secretary of State for the Asia Pacific, warned that if the regime did not attend to the international community's concerns about human rights in China the Olympics could become a "PR disaster".

"I'd hope that the government of China would say to themselves 'look we are at a critical point here. If we don't stop killing Falun Gong and prisoners of conscience; if we don't address human rights for Tibet and Uygers and religious communities, very quickly these games could blow up in our faces'," Mr Kilgour told The Epoch Times.

An international investigative coalition which includes David Kilgour and Australian Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett, has called for an end to the worst of China's human rights abuses or it will support a global effort to boycott the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

The call was made in a statement read during a rally held outside the Australian Parliament in Canberra on May 24.

The statement, initiated by an international body, Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong in China (CIPFG), said China had won the right to host the Olympic Games by promising to improve its human rights but recent reports from the UNHRC and Amnesty International indicate that the human rights situation in China is deteriorating.

"Particularly hard hit is the community of Falun Gong practitioners due to the central authority's policy to 'eradicate', [Falun Gong]" the statement said. "If such genocide does not stop, China is not fit to host the 2008 Olympic Games" .

David Kilgour, who along with international human rights lawyers David Matas, co-authored a report on the extent of organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners in China, said he understood the serious nature of a boycott. However, what was happening in China ran counter to everything the Olympics stood for and the two things could not occur at the same time.

"We are talking about human lives that are being snuffed out in order to provide organs for both wealthy people in China and from outside of China," he said. "It is unthinkable under the Olympic Charter that the same government torturing people in one part of Beijing could be hosting the Olympic Games in another part of the same city."

Senator Bartlett said he would have preferred the Olympics had not gone to Beijing, but once it had been granted it provided "a pivotal opportunity for nations around the world to join together and basically send that signal to China."

"Giving an event like the Olympics to countries like China should hold some obligation to go with it," he said. "Countries holding the Olympics should be ones that are not grotesquely abusing human rights."

The CIPFG statement has demanded that if three points were not given a satisfactory response, a call for a boycott of the Olympics would come into effect on August 8, this year.

The first of the three points states that the Chinese regime must: "Stop the persecution of Falun Gong immediately and release all practitioners incarcerated for their faith"; the second requires that the regime, "stop the persecution of friends and supporters and defence lawyers of Falun Gong practitioners (eg, Gao Zhisheng, Li Hong)"; and the third that independent inspections be allowed of "Labour camps, prisons, hospitals and related secretive facilities. "

According to The Economist , the Chinese Communist Party sees the Olympic Games as much more than just about sport.

"They [the Beijing Olympics] will be much the biggest international event ever staged on its soil: a coming-out party of huge symbolic importance," the magazine said.

David Kilgour said the international community had already been mobilised by American actress Mia Farrow's campaign to stop China's support of the genocide in Darfur.

Unless the present Chinese regime demonstrated that it was seriously addressing concerns raised by the CIPGF and other human rights groups, increasing awareness of the equally horrific human rights violations occurring within China would only damage China's international reputation further.

"We have already had Mia Farrow coining the term 'Genocide Olympics' and that is a term that is sticking, really sticking". Mr Kilgour said it may turn out to be a "PR disaster" for China.