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| article from San Francisco Chronicle by Jonathan Zimmerman
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/04/EDH0124R8M.DTL
To change the Olympics, change the channel
Jonathan Zimmerman
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
I love everything about sports: playing them, viewing them and writing about them. But when the Olympic Games start later this week in Beijing, I'm not going to watch. And neither should you.
Call it the People's Boycott. Despite worldwide protests, every major nation is sending its athletes to Beijing. That's all the more reason for you and me to stage our own silent demonstration. If you want to change the Olympics, change the channel.
Anything less will make you party to the cynical brutality of China's leaders, who have broken nearly every promise they made when they were awarded the Games in 2001. Although the government pledged to allow journalists unfettered access to the Internet during the Olympics, for example, censors have blocked Web sites such as Radio Free Asia and Amnesty International. This is the same regime that bankrolls Sudanese dictator Omar el-Bashir, who was recently indicted for genocide and war crimes in Darfur. But China turns a deaf ear to the international community, insisting that the Darfur crisis is an "internal affair."
And that's the same line it uses with respect to Tibet, of course, where China crushed a rebellion earlier this spring. Ditto for the jailing of political dissidents and the muzzling of parents who lost children during last May's earthquake. "Internal affairs," all.
If you really believe that, go ahead and watch the Olympics. But if you think that people should have the same human rights, no matter where they happen to live, then it's incumbent upon you to look away when the Games come on. The People's Boycott will face objections, of course. I can already predict five of them:
1. The Olympics shouldn't be "political." That's like saying unmarried men shouldn't be bachelors. The Olympics have always been political. They were political in 1936, when Adolf Hitler used the Games to burnish his international standing; in 1968, when two African American medal-winners raised their fists in a black power salute; in 1972, when Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes; and in 1980, when 60 nations boycotted the Moscow Olympics to protest the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. One of those nations was - you guessed it - the People's Republic of China.
2. Protesting the Olympics reflects "anti-Chinese" bigotry. No, it doesn't. It's a critique of the Chinese government, not of its citizenry. I have written hundreds of columns questioning the American government's behavior, in Iraq and elsewhere, and but that doesn't mean I'm "anti-American." So why does a demand for an Olympic boycott make me "anti-Chinese"?
3. The United States commits its own human-rights abuses, in Iraq and elsewhere. Like I said, I'm no friend of the war in Iraq. But I'm also free to tell you that, in print and in person, without fear of government goons harassing me or my family. Chinese dissidents aren't so lucky.
4. The People's Boycott will penalize hard-working athletes. That was the best argument I have heard against a true Olympic boycott: if a country withheld its athletes, their toil and preparation would go for naught. Now that all of the nations are participating, however, it's hard to see how turning off your television set will harm Olympic competitors. They'll still get to play, but they'll also get put on notice that lots of people object.
5. The People's Boycott won't make a difference. Maybe not this year. But down the road, it will. After all, NBC bid nearly $900 million to broadcast the Beijing Games. If its TV ratings suffer, you can bet that the International Olympic Committee - which derives the bulk of its revenue from broadcast fees - will think twice before awarding the Games to another dictatorial government.
And remember: Whether you watch the Olympics or not, your children will be watching you. One day, people will read about the Beijing Games and ask how the world could possibly have played along. Your kids will have a ready answer: We didn't. And they'll be proud of it, too.
Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history and education at New York University, is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory," forthcoming from Yale University Press.
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| Hi Everyone,
I would just like to encourage everyone to continue in their endeavor and fight for human rights by boycotting the Olympics. The Olympics are Aug 8-24. Please do not participate in the Olympics as spectators or buy/use any products from the Olympics sponsors.
Here is a list of some of the sponsors:
Worldwide Olympic Partners:
McDonald's
Coca-Cola
Johnson & Johnson
GE
Samsung
Panasonic
Omega
Visa
Kodak
Atos Origin
Lenovo
Manulife
Sponsors:
UPS
Budweiser
Tsingtao beer
(many more)
If you have facebook, please join the Boycott the beijing Olympics group:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2210428260
Thank you everyone for your support!
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| http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/09/04/china.activist.ap/index.html?section=cnn_latest
BEIJING, China (AP) -- China has arrested an activist who gathered 10,000 signatures on an open letter rejecting the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics and demanding more respect for human rights, a watchdog organization said Tuesday.
Land rights activist Yang Chunlin was detained July 6 in his native province of Heilongjiang in northern China and formally arrested on suspicion of subverting state power on August 3, said the China Human Rights Defenders, an international network of activists and rights monitoring groups.
Yang's family told the group the arrest was linked to Yang's campaign to gather signatures for an open letter titled "We want human rights, not the Olympics." It was not clear whom the letter was addressed to.
Before his arrest he had gathered more than 10,000 signatures, mainly from Heilongjiang farmers, the organization said.
Police told Yang's family that he was suspected of taking money from "anti-China" organizations abroad, it said, without giving details.
The case against Yang points "to the nervousness and political sensitivity with which the government views efforts to link the Olympics and human rights," China Human Rights Defenders said in a statement.
Yang, a laid-off factory worker, had been helping Heilongjiang farmers seek compensation for lost land over the past few years, it said.
Property disputes and illegal land grabs have accelerated as China's economy expands at double-digit rates and farmland is gobbled up for industrial parks and skyscrapers. Government officials often have sided with developers, touching off riots and protests.
Land seizures have become a particularly sensitive issue ahead of the Olympics. Some activists have accused Beijing of forcing more than 1 million people from their homes to make way for new sports venues. | | |
| article found here
By ERICA BULMAN, AP Sports WriterTue Jun 5, 3:15 PM ET
Some 1.5 million Chinese have been forced from their homes during preparations for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, a rights group said Tuesday.
China rejected the figures from the Geneva-based Center on Housing Rights and Evictions as "groundless" and said some 6,000 families had been compensated and properly resettled.
"Our research shows that little has changed since 1988 when 720,000 people were forcibly displaced in Seoul, South Korea, in preparation for the Summer Olympic Games," said Jean du Plessis, COHRE's executive director. "It is shocking and entirely unacceptable that 1.25 million people have already been displaced in Beijing, in preparation for the 2008 Games, in flagrant violation of their right to adequate housing."
Some 6,037 households have been demolished since 2002 to make way for nine venues in the process of preparing for the 2008 Olympic Games, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said.
"Those citizens have received cash compensation and been properly resettled. Not one single household has been forced to move out of Beijing," Jiang said.
IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies told The Associated Press that the study "touches upon a very important subject," and that the IOC planned to attend a COHRE workshop addressing the issue June 14-15.
"We'd like to get a better understanding of the issues and see what international norms and UN standards exist that could serve as guidelines for governments in the future," Davies said.
The three-year study covered seven past and future Olympic host cities — Seoul, Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney, Athens, Beijing and London.
The study says that large-scale events often lead to rising housing costs, resulting in forced evictions, displacement and criminalization of homelessness.
Five years ahead of the London 2012 Olympics, more than 1,000 people face the threat of displacement from their homes, while housing prices are escalating, the study said.
The report said organizers of the 2010 Vancouver Games had vowed to respect housing rights, but preparations already have led to the loss of 700 low-income housing units and the conversion of inexpensive housing into tourist accommodations has displaced hundreds of poor and elderly.
Past games were often worse:
• For the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, 720,000 people were forcibly evicted from their homes and homeless people were rounded up and detained in facilities outside the city, the report said. Development and urbanization led to unaffordable housing.
• Leading up to the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, more than 400 families were displaced to make room for the Olympic Village, 20 families were evicted from the site of the Olympic stadium and 200 other families were displaced for the construction of ring roads. Housing prices and rents increased 139 and 149 percent respectively during the six-year period before the games and the lack of affordable housing forced low-income earners out of the city.
• For the 1996 Atlanta Games, some 30,000 poor residents were displaced due to gentrification. About 2,000 public housing units were demolished. Legislation was introduced to criminalize homelessness, the report said.
• Legislative measures also were introduced ahead of the 2004 Athens Olympics to simplify the expropriation of private property. Hundreds of Roma were evicted from their settlements.
• Because the main sporting complex for the 2000 Sydney Games was built on surplus government wasteland, no one was directly evicted or displaced for those games. But the city's gentrification caused housing prices to more than double between 1996 and 2003. Rents soared 40 percent, forcing many to move to the city's fringe.
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Associated Press writer Alexa Olesen in Beijing contributed to this report. | | |
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