Reporters sans Frontières on Thursday launched a website calling for a boycott of the Beijing 2008 Olympics over the human rights record of ”one of the world’s bloodiest dictatorships”.
The Paris-based media watchdog said China had failed to improve its rights record since being controversially awarded the Games in 2001.
”History has shown that totalitarian regimes are more sensitive to a balance of power than to ‘constructive dialogue’,” the group said on the website Boycottbeijing2008.net.
”A boycott therefore seems the only strategy to force Chinese authorities to respect human rights before 2008.”
It urged people to e-mail the United Nations to protest Beijing hosting the Games and called on the UN to publicly get behind the campaign.
”The Olympic movement was discredited in 1936, when it allowed the Nazis to make the Games a spectacle to glorify the Third Reich,” said the group.
”In 1980, in Moscow, the IOC suffered a terrible defeat when more than 50 countries boycotted the Olympics.
”The Netherlands, Germany, the United States, Egypt and so many others refused to countenance the Soviet regime.
”In 2008, the international sporting movement must refuse to tolerate one of the world’s bloodiest dictatorships.”
When the International Olympic Committee handed the Games to Beijing it said it was ”taking the bet” that China would reform and open up, but human rights groups said it had yet to happen.
”The People’s Republic of China is the world’s biggest prison for the press. Twenty-seven journalists and more than 60 internet users are detained for crimes of opinion,” said Reporters sans Frontières.
New York-based Human Rights Watch also launched a China Olympic Watch website this week.
While refraining from calling for a boycott, the group also said China had failed to make progress on human rights.
”China continues to have serious human rights problems,” it said.
”As China enters the global arena, the 2008 Beijing Olympics will provide an opportunity for China to come into compliance with international legal standards that protect human rights.
”While recent leadership changes have sparked some optimism that respect for human rights in China will improve, in fact this has not happened.” – Sapa-AFP