Bush still just a “sports fan” in Beijing
In a wide-ranging interview with the BBC yesterday, President Bush reiterated that he’s going to Beijing this summer for the handball and hurdles. Politics (read: human rights, Tibet, Darfur) won’t be on his agenda: I’m going to the Olympics. I view the Olympics as a sporting event.[…] There’s a lot of issues that I suspect ...
In a wide-ranging interview with the BBC yesterday, President Bush reiterated that he's going to Beijing this summer for the handball and hurdles. Politics (read: human rights, Tibet, Darfur) won't be on his agenda:
In a wide-ranging interview with the BBC yesterday, President Bush reiterated that he’s going to Beijing this summer for the handball and hurdles. Politics (read: human rights, Tibet, Darfur) won’t be on his agenda:
I’m going to the Olympics. I view the Olympics as a sporting event.[…] There’s a lot of issues that I suspect people are gonna, you know, opine, about during the Olympics. I mean, you got the Dali Lama crowd. You’ve got global warming folks. You’ve got, you know, Darfur and… I am not gonna you know, go and use the Olympics as an opportunity to express my opinions to the Chinese people in a public way ’cause I do it all the time with the president.
But using the Olympics as an opportunity to press the Chinese government and speak publicly to the Chinese people is exactly what Bush should be doing. Yang Jianli, a Chinese democracy activist who was imprisoned and tortured for five years on trumped-up charges, recently wrote in FP that keeping mum or flip-flopping on human rights when economic issues are raised only convinces the Chinese people that American friendship can be bought and sold. Chinese leaders want to make this year’s Olympic Games the party of the century, Yang argues, and they are desperate to have world leaders and top-tier celebrities attend. That gives these attendees leverage:
So my proposal is conditional participation. The idea is that when the Chinese authorities extend the invitation to you to go there, you bring up human rights. Then press the Chinese authorities to do something to facilitate your participation. For example, when President Bush accepted [President] Hu Jintao’s invitation, he said, “I will go to Beijing as a sports fan. I will not make any political statements.”
He accepted the invitation too easily, but I don’t think it’s too late. There is still time for him to say something like, “I would love to go to China to participate at the Olympic Games, but I want to see the ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,” or “I won’t go unless a dozen political prisoners directly related to the [Tiananmen] massacre are released.”
[The party leaders] want President Bush to be there. They want all the renowned athletes to be there to the help them showcase their achievements. They need them to be there. So, why don’t we do something?
Steven Spielberg gets this, albeit a little late. And if Bush goes to Beijing only as a sports fan, he’ll miss an enormous opportunity.
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