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Activists call on China to respect Olympic vow

China needs to make serious efforts to deliver on the failed pledge it made to the international community in 2001 to win the Olympic bid, a group of human rights activists said at a torch relay in Taipei yesterday.

The torch transfer drew a massive crowd, including athletes, human right activists and political figures.

“We hope [this relay will] attract the world’s attention to China’s oppression of its people. The Olympics is a peaceful event, which directly contradicts what China is doing to human rights activists, Falun Gong members and Tibet,” Taiwan Falun Gong Association chairman Chang Ching-hsi (張清溪) said.

The human-rights torch was first lit on Aug. 9 in Athens, Greece, by the Coalition to Investigate the Prosecution of Falun Gong in China and has since traveled to 34 countries, collecting 589,624 supportive signatures, with an eventual goal of reaching Hong Kong just before the Games, Chang said.

“In order to host the Olympics, China promised the world to cease its notorious oppression against its people in 2001. Here we are in 2008, and instead of improvements, we find only worse neglect of human dignity and rights,” Chang said.

Human rights lawyer Tung Wen-hsun (董文薰) said Taiwanese should be especially concerned with this deterioration, compared with the rest of the world, because there are 1,400 Chinese missiles aimed at them.

Drawing statistics from her book The Dawn Chorus — A Sound That Wakes the World, Tung said a direct correlation existed between human rights conditions and military safety in Taiwan.

“From 2000 to 2008, the number of Chinese missiles aimed our way has increased from 200 to 1,400 — and the same rate of increase had been observed in their number of human organ harvests, mass acts of environmental destruction and wrongful tortures inflicted upon Falun Gong members,” she said. “The more extreme the measures China’s leaders employ on their own people, the more severe the attack you can expect them to deploy to take down Taiwan should a war break out.”

Athletes going to China for the Games can play a part in the pursuit for human rights improvements in China by acting as “peace ambassadors” to the Chinese people, human-rights torch representative Peng Wei-yau (彭偉堯) said.

“By going to the games, athletes can make known to Chinese people the type of oppression they are under, and the value of freedom,” he said.
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