A Chinese girl waves the Chinese national flags and wears the 2022 Olympic bid logo to show her support at the ski resort in Yanqing, a suburb of Beijing
Tibetan groups calling on the IOC to reject Beijing’s bid for the 2022 Winter Games are out of touch with the Himalayan region and their campaign is “doomed to failure,” a Chinese state newspaper said Saturday.
In an editorial, the Global Times accused the organizations of pandering to foreign audiences and said their accusations of rights abuses would “only cause laughter” among International Olympic Committee officials responsible for evaluating Beijing’s bid.
“They feel excited in slapping Tibet and China. The repeated protests also fit certain needs of Western societies, which will win them some resources for survival in the West,” the editorial said.
“They are doomed to fail,” concluded the paper, a nationalistic tabloid published by the ruling Communist Party publication People’s Daily.
A coalition of more than 175 Tibet organizations on Thursday said they sent a report to IOC President Thomas Bach underlining that the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing failed to improve human rights in China.
The 12-page report said repression in Tibet is “currently at an all-time high” and warned that giving the Olympics to China again would be “making the same mistake twice.”
Beijing is competing against Almaty, Kazakhstan, for the right to host the 2022 Games. Kazakhstan has also been criticized for its human rights record.
The Tibet groups say the IOC should reject Beijing and consider the Almaty bid “with extreme caution.”
In its response, the Beijing 2022 Bid Committee said it was natural for groups to “raise specific interests around major sporting events,” but that it believed politics shouldn’t intrude into sports.
“Beijing 2022 will continue to follow the Olympic Charter and stand by the effort to keep politics and sport separate,” the committee said in a statement.
The exchanges come days before a 19-member IOC evaluation panel is to begin inspections in Beijing on Tuesday. The full IOC will select the host city on July 31.
Tibetan groups launched similar complaints ahead of the 2008 Games and were in the forefront of widespread street protests that marred China’s unprecedented global torch relay.
China claims Tibet has been part of its territory for seven centuries and communist troops occupied the region following their 1949 victory in the civil war against Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. Christopher Bodeen, Beijing, AP
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