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China's Heavy Olympic Footprint on Tibet

By International Campaign for Tibet  

On the eve of an Olympics closing ceremony, which will include a final propaganda push on Tibet, tight security remains in place across the Tibetan plateau, including shoot to kill orders to prevent further unrest during the final days of the Olympics Games.

Beginning in March and continuing in the weeks and months preceding the Beijing Olympics, a tidal wave of protests swept across the Tibetan plateau, the result of more than half a century of Chinese government misrule. The uprising revealed the breakdown of Beijing's Tibet policy at a time when China hoped to convey to the world an image of harmony, as characterized in their "one world, one dream" Olympics slogan.

"Thanks to its own hard-line policies and miscalculations - and the determination of free people around the world - Beijing utterly failed to portray the happy picture of Tibet it had planned for. In the lead-up to the Olympics and during the Games, Chinese authorities have espoused vitriol against the Dalai Lama and his supporters, broken their pledges of media access and committed both petty and gross violations against internationally recognized human rights norms, from blocking access to rock songs celebrating peace to shooting Tibetan demonstrators dead," said John Ackerly, ICT President.

The Olympics closing ceremony on Sunday, August 24 will feature an operatic depiction of China's historic relations to Tibet. The piece was commissioned to support Chinese legitimacy in Tibet and first performed following the March 1959 uprising in Lhasa, which led to thousands of Tibetan deaths and the flight of the Dalai Lama into exile.

Mary Beth Markey, ICT Vice President for International Advocacy, said today: "There is a real drama going on in Tibet during these Olympic Games and it has little to do with the flying Buddhist sprites of the opening ceremony or the operatically conveyed propaganda of the closing ceremony. China's leaders now should move beyond showmanship to statesmanship and engage the Tibetan people in finding real solutions to the real problems in Tibet."

According to numerous reports received by ICT, there are serious fears that the crackdown could worsen still further after the Olympics, once the global focus is no longer on China. Many Tibetans are concerned - and in some cases, have been warned by Chinese security personnel - that more reprisals may follow the Olympics, with people who are now being monitored being taken into custody later. One source referred, chillingly, to the well-known Chinese phrase of "settling accounts after autumn harvest" (qiu hou suan zhang).

Veteran China analyst Willy Wo Lap Lam believes this may well apply throughout China, saying: "Not only have the Olympics failed to act as a catalyst for political liberalization in China, but the regime's pre-Olympics security buildup looks set to enable the government to crack down as hard as ever on dissent after the Games are over... Growing instability on various fronts has predisposed the Hu leadership toward strengthening the police-state apparatus that has been put together in the name of ensuring a trouble-free Olympics. Moreover, cadres in the law-and-order establishment, who include senior officials in the Central Political and Legal Commission as well as military, police and judicial departments, have gained immense clout, not to mention much more funding, since early this year." (Wall Street Journal).

New images and reports received from Tibet despite China's attempts to impose an information blackout give evidence of the following: