Dousing the Olympic spirit

The Olympic flame has been paraded through various capitals, but the Olympic spirit has died in the torture chambers in China, claims Edward McMillan-Scott

Amnesty International and most other NGOs agree that the human rights situation is getting worse in China because of the Olympics. Parliament’s president Hans-Gert Pöttering has made clear his reluctance to attend the games, while Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel have not ruled out a boycott and Nancy Pelosi has begged George Bush to stay at home. Many in the European parliament believe it is no longer a question of whether there should be a boycott but rather of what sort of boycott it should be.

The penalty for opposing the Beijing regime is harsh. The eco-campaigner Hu Jia has been convicted of subversion and jailed for three-and-a-half years for the ‘crime’ of talking to foreigners – he contributed to a hearing of parliament’s human rights sub-committee where he said the Olympics were being misused for political purposes by the regime. I have been campaigning for a debate about a boycott since my last visit to China in May 2006. All those with whom I had contact – reformers, dissidents, ex-prisoners of conscience – were arrested, imprisoned and, in some cases, tortured.

There is universal acknowledgment in the human rights community that the situation in China is worse than it was in 2001, when China was awarded the games by a hopeful IOC – the most political decision since its 1964 boycott of South Africa because of apartheid. Parliament unanimously adopted a resolution expressing “serious concern” about human rights in China and asking the IOC to make its own assessment of Beijing’s compliance with its 2001 promises.

Harry Wu, the noted dissident, now runs the US-based Laogai Research Foundation. He estimates that China’s prison camps hold nearly seven million people under forced labour, detention without trial and torture. Manfred Nowak, the UN’s torture rapporteur, says it “remains widespread in China”. I have met many survivors of torture in China’s camps. They tell of the progression from brainwashing and sleep deprivation to months of standing 20 hours a day motionless, then immersion in excrement, then beatings and electronic goads to the genitals. The husband of one victim, Zhang Lianying, told me she was beaten black and blue and had lost her sight and hearing as she was tortured to renounce her faith.

In China, as in Soviet Europe, religion will play a part in change. Those belonging to banned groups like Falun Gong are non-persons in China. Some 3,000 practitioners of this blameless Buddha-school spiritual movement have died under torture since repression against their 70-100 million adherents began in 1999. There have been 40,000 ‘extra’ organ transplants in China since the persecution of Falun Gong began – they are literally being killed to order.  I am not alone in drawing a connection between the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the Beijing games. As US supreme court judge Felix Frankfurter said in 1942 after hearing Jan Karski’s testimony about the Nazi death camps: “I did not say that this young man was lying; I said that I could not believe what he was telling me. There is a difference.” It is time for the democratic world to stand up and be counted.