The International Olympic Committee (IOC) on Friday said that it is not a “super world government” that can resolve political issues in China ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games next year, even though rights advocates say that it has ignored Tibetan and Uighur claims of human rights violations.
Beijing is to become the first city to host summer and winter Games next year after also staging the 2008 summer Games, but the IOC has been criticized for awarding the winter Olympics to China, given the country’s human rights record.
Representatives of Tibetan and Hong Kong groups as well as the world’s largest group of exiled ethnic Uighurs earlier on Friday said that the IOC had not acted on their concerns after meeting them in October last year.
Photo: Reuters
They also said that any assurances from China to the IOC were of no value.
“We are taking this very seriously,” IOC president Thomas Bach told a news conference when asked specifically about claims of rights violations in China.
“Human rights and labor rights and others are and will be part of the host city contract,” he said.
“We are working very closely with the organizing committee,” Bach said at the end of a virtual IOC session.
“We are monitoring supply chains, labor rights, freedom of press and many other issues. This is our responsibility,” he said.
The US earlier on Friday condemned China’s abuse of ethnic and religious minorities, including what it called “crimes against humanity and genocide” in Xinjiang against Muslim Uighurs and severe restrictions in Tibet.
“We are not a super world government where the IOC could solve or even address issues for which not a United Nations security council, no G7, no G20 has a solution,” Bach said.
“This is in the remit of politics. We have to live up to our responsibilities in our areas of responsibility,” he said.
China rejects US charges that it has committed genocide against Uighur and other Muslims in the remote western region, where rights groups say that more than 1 million are held in internment camps.
Beijing says that the complexes it set up in Xinjiang provide vocational training to help stamp out Islamist extremism and separatism.
Allegations of forced labor and human rights violations are “groundless rumors and slander,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs says.
Bach on Friday also pleaded that there be no boycott of the Winter Games, saying that such a move would only punish athletes.
The IOC is politically neutral and it is up to governments to live up to their responsibilities, he said.
“People must learn from history,” Bach said.
“The boycott of the Olympic Games has never achieved anything,” he said, citing a boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. “The Soviet army withdrew in 1989, so it really served nothing but punishing their own athletes and led to a counter-boycott in Los Angeles” in 1984.
Additional reporting by AFP
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