Only a game ...
Thursday, August 7, 2008
TO BORROW A PHRASE from the sportswriters ... How about those Olympics, huh? As the gaudy opening ceremony finally arrives tomorrow, the constantly shifting global image of China ever since this Olympiad's locale was first chosen, so controversially, might just about come to some kind of rest.
The long winding road here has seen China's PR agents taking some hard knocks.
I mean of course the Tibetan Buddhist uprising in March and its bloody put-down by Chinese authorities (plus its smaller echo with the Uighur Islamic bombing foray just this week in the city of Kashgar) ... the Chinese client state of Sudan's behavior in its Darfur region (enabling campaigners like the activist actress Mia Farrow to so memorably and effectively pin the label "The Genocide Games" on Beijing, and to shame director Steven Spielberg into resigning as the Games’ media maestro) ... and then Amnesty International's devastating report only last week definitively cataloguing China's internal repression.
But on the other hand they had boosts, too. There were the unlooked-for effects of Sichuan's earthquake, with its rush of international sympathy (plus its smaller echo with a 6.0 trembler just three days ago - probably a delayed aftershock from May) ... and the generally reliable Pew Research Center's opinion poll which found extraordinarily fulsome support (how does 96% strike you?) among ordinary Chinese people for the Games they are hosting.
It's worth recalling that the Olympic Charter identifies “respect for universal fundamental ethical principles" as a core principle of the Olympic movement. But the International Olympic Committee keeps circling back to a claim that human rights are a purely political matter above which it soars as a sporting body. Nonetheless, the IOC's president Jacques Rogge has gone on record – notably in a combative interview with the BBC - claiming that he'd pressed the Chinese to improve their human rights "as much as possible ... as soon as possible", since after all "the IOC is a responsible organization, be it in the field of human rights, be it in the field of just logistics".
On China's Sudan policy, some effect has undoubtedly been registered, though more likely by protesters than by the “responsible” IOC. But it is minimal, and may only amount at the end of the day to mere set-dressing. There's been, after all, what exactly? China’s appointment of an envoy to Khartoum ... its support nowadays for some of the UN Security Council’s Darfur actions, such as they are, instead of perpetual knee-jerk rejections ... and its grand total of 300 personnel contributed to the inadequate international peace-keeping force on the ground.
Meanwhile, with human rights inside China - as journalists are finding now they’ve flooded in to the Games press facilities (encountering, not least, the lunacy of jammed access to important websites) - there's been no change at all in the denial of domestic freedoms. Indeed the Amnesty survey concludes powerfully that there's been a vicious tightening of repression at home - and in all probability it's precisely because of the Olympics, given the authorities’ determination to make the event pass "smoothly" and trouble-free.
But here we are at the Opening, and with an unprecedented international endorsement at that – the arrival of the office-holder once labeled “the leader of the free world” (even while, speaking as it were out of the side of his mouth, this same George W Bush delivers some human rights criticism of China during a stop-over in Thailand).
The hope today of many PR operatives, Chinese and Olympian, is – incomprehendingly enough – that all the negative fuss will just go away.
President Rogge, especially, seems not to get the measure of what's been going on. He’s told reporters that what he calls "politics" will now effectively be eclipsed. "The day after the opening ceremony," he said, "the magic of the Games and the flawless organization will take over."
Let's check back with him on Saturday, shall we?
**A RADIO DISCUSSION OF THIS COLUMN AIRS EVERY WEEK ON CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**
Listen to THE MEDIA BEAT podcasts by clicking HERE.
MEANWHILE IN THAT CLIENT STATE, SUDAN the local media are agitated by another international slap in the face, coming as it does hard after President Omar al-Bashir (pictured above, far right) attempted to project a new caring image in Darfur – a tour on which some American, and surely heavily ironic, reporters reached to append the description “Charm Offensive”.
This remarkably charmless individual is, you’ll of course know, in the cross-hairs of the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, as he seeks a warrant for the president’s arrest on charges of genocide and other crimes against humanity.
With that warrant pending, word has spread - initially from the enterprising pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat - that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon (pictured with al-Bashir) has been warned by his own UN legal department to now “distance himself” from the dictator.
When Reuters’ news agency sought to check out the story, a U.N. official told it anonymously that the policy shift was simply "common sense" advice. Ban’s official mouthpiece Michele Montas naturally refused to confirm or deny the report. "I don't have a response," she said in tones that are time-honored in the spokesperson’s daily press briefing at the organization’s New York headquarters.
I’ve learned, though, that the source for the story is none other than the Secretary General himself, talking loosely with Al Hayat’s UN correspondent Raghida Dergham during a July 30th off-the-record lunch on the fourth floor of that headquarters building.
If he does keep a distance, Ban will find it even harder to achieve the task he's assigned himself - getting al-Bashir to agree before year’s end to the now pathetically small international peace force in Darfur being doubled. (It would still, even then, be 8,000 troops short of the 26,000 reckoned to be necessary.)
Another complication – I also hear that al-Bashir intends to come and speak at this year’s opening session of the UN General Assembly, just five weeks from now.
Watch out for a convoluted diplomatic and public relations game-plan, while Darfurians continue to starve and die.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -