Quote:
Originally Posted by Slava
I don't think that there should be a boycott. I understand that there are human rights abuses and there are issues with Tibet. The thing is that the human rights abuses existed when the IOC gave the games to China, so you can't go back on that decision now.
As far as Tibet goes the Dalai Lama has said that he doesn't think people should boycott...so that is good enough for me.
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Unfortunately, I don't think its that simple. China has always been fairly secretive when it comes to their internal workings, stories slipped out about the organ harvesting. The execution of prisoners, and even the Tibet movement has been middle of the paper stuff, because even though we know its been going on, they've done a good job of allowing the media to transmit proof.
As soon as China opened these doors by showing a willingness to host the Olympics you just knew that all of these grievances were going to pop up, especially the Tibet issue. It might be ok for the Dalai Lama to go against the Boycott, however the Tibetien (sp?) community got a rare opportunity to make this front line news. Combine this with China's stupid and clumsy way of handling this up to and including using their own internal intelligence organs to stir this up so they could brutally put it down, and you've got an angry international movement thats going to leverage China's Olympic movement to call attention to the plight in Tibet.
Combine that with China's inexperience in dealing with accredited international journalists who can now demand access to everything, and an international community that was ineffective in handling other nations human rights issues and you have a massive powder keg waiting to go off in China's face and embarress them badly.
Which I think is going to happen. Like I mentioned my bet is that there are going to be podium protests, there are going to be athletes that don't show up for the opening ceremony.
China should have negotiated something with Tibet when they won the Olympics instead of merely beating them and shooting them.
Now their deplorable record is truly exposed and out there.
So while the Olympics are not suppossed to be political, they can certainly be used to push forward a political agenda.