The eyes of the world are on Beijing where athletes have been arriving for the 2008 Olympic games due to begin this coming Friday. And as the opening ceremony nears human rights activists around the world are stepping up the pressure on the Chinese regime, demanding greater openness and the release of all prisoners of conscience.
On Friday Olympic Watch, a human rights organization set up in Prague in 2001, called on national Olympic teams to “adopt” China’s political prisoners and find some way of expressing public support for them, such as enquiring about their fate at press briefings, dedicating their medals to them or even attempting to visit them in prison. Olympic Watch has suggested that the Czech national team “adopt” the Tibetan spiritual leader Tenzin Delek Rinpoche and that the Czech prime minister should express public support for the Dalai Lama. The response to the appeal so far has been cautious. Czech Olympic Committee spokesman Jan Martínek said that the committee would leave it up to individual athletes to decide whether or not to express support for prisoners of conscience and in what way. Although the Chinese regime has made a show of opening up to the world and has granted foreign journalists limited access to a number of banned internet sites, it has issued thinly-veiled warnings to would-be protesters. Three parks in Beijing have been marked out as possible protest venues but any protest must be announced well-in-advance and the Chinese authorities reserve the right to ban any that are “in conflict with China’s national interests”. As Czech journalists on the spot say, there is no telling how the authorities in Beijing may decide to interpret that phrase. Among the Czech politicians who will be traveling to China are Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek, who caused a stir by wearing a badge with the Tibetan flag on his lapel when he announced his intention to attend the games, and Interior Minister Ivan Langer, neither of whom is going to attend the opening ceremony. Neither has officially responded to the appeal by Olympic Watch.
However some Czech politicians feel that in view of the country’s communist past, Czechs should be more active than other nations in support of Chinese dissidents. Many have firmly refused to go to the Olympic Games. Green party ministers Ondřej Liška and Martin Bursík are among those who have signed a petition in support of human rights in China initiated by spiritual and political authorities such as the former president Václav Havel and Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu. They too have added their voice to that of Olympic Watch, urging athletes to express support for individual prisoners of conscience and pointing out that speaking of human rights is not politics, as the Chinese regime would have the world believe, but a moral duty.
