Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin should be excluded from the Tokyo Games, according to activists who have a plan for the International Olympics Committee to humiliate "truly brutal dictators" who want to attend the event.
"The Olympics are something of a unique sporting event in millions and millions of people really aren't sports fanatics, nonetheless are drawn to this often very magnificent spectacle," Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice President Katrina Lantos Swett told the Washington Examiner. "There have been many, many brutal dictators who have sort of taken advantage of this opening ceremonies opportunity, as having huge propaganda value for them."
China's genocidal oppression of the Uyghur Muslims has spurred an international debate about whether the 2022 Winter Olympics should take place in Beijing as planned. Swett and other activists see the fast-approaching Tokyo Olympics, which are scheduled to launch in July after the pandemic forced their postponement last year, as the most imminent Olympic arena for human rights struggles.
"The Olympics has a desire to keep politics, per se, out of the games," Swett said. "But they are, in our view, sort of setting the table for the worst kinds of political propaganda."
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With that in mind, the Lantos Foundation and the Human Rights Foundation are pushing the IOC to exclude Xi, Putin, and 13 other autocratic rulers from the opening ceremonies and leave an empty seat in their place to call attention to their human rights abuses.
"The ‘Empty Box' campaign aims to punish dictators who take advantage of their athletes at the Olympics to whitewash the abuses of their regimes internationally," Human Rights Foundation Chairman Garry Kasparov, the retired Russian chess grandmaster, said last week. "Dictators and despots who disregard democratic norms and human rights do not deserve an equal platform with democratically elected leaders at the Olympic Games."
The IOC has a long history of failing in this regard, with the most infamous being Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's oversight of the 1936 Berlin Games. And State Department officials have likened Chinese Communist mass reeducation sites to the concentration camps of the Holocaust, and Uyghur women have reported that Beijing pays "Han people to come and marry Uyghur people" — a policy they describe as a "mass rape" program, although Chinese officials prefer to term it a "Pair and Become Family" initiative.
Swett, whose late father, California Democratic Rep. Tom Lantos is the only Holocaust survivor to have served in the U.S. Congress, said that the IOC's willingness to allow Xi to host the 2022 Winter Olympics is comparable to the failure in 1936.
"There is absolutely an analogy there," Swett told the Washington Examiner. "We have a genocide, ongoing, against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang province. Now, it's not a genocide that is identical, thank goodness, thank heaven, to the massacre of 6 million Jews by the Nazis, but … there is a clear body of evidence that indicates that China's actions vis a vis the Uyghurs can arguably be labeled a genocide under the Genocide Convention."
In addition to the chiefs of China and Russia, the activists are also targeting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, the regimes in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the leaders of Ethiopia and Eritrea, and the military junta that overthrew the nascent democratic institutions in Myanmar (also known as Burma).
"The 2020 Tokyo Olympics will be the first truly international event since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic," Swett and HRF chief executive Thor Halvorssen wrote last week to IOC president Thomas Bach. "They must reflect the values that the Olympics want to carry forward, during these Games and beyond."
Their proposed blacklist also includes Azerbaijan, Cameroon, Cuba, Egypt, Rwanda, and Vietnam. The initiative was spurred in part by the memory of the media coverage directed at North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un's tyrannical sister, Kim Yo Jong, in 2018.
"It was appalling," Swett said of the regime leaders. "They were just basking in this incredibly positive coverage."
The organizers want to humiliate the dictators without "harming the athletes themselves," Swett emphasized. "And so, we came up with this idea of the Empty Box initiative."
There is also precedent for banishing rogue regimes from the international athletic scene, she emphasized, noting the ban imposed on apartheid South Africa. Still, she's aware that even a more tailored approach will face political headwinds — not only in Tokyo next month but even more if China hosts the 2022 Winter Olympics. But this problem isn't going away, as autocratic regimes have demonstrated time and again, and Swett expects that the Empty Box campaign will have enduring applicability.
"It's kind of, if you will, an evergreen campaign," she said, forecasting a long-term effort to pressure the IOC. "This is going to take pressure from a wide range of people including, perhaps, most importantly, the public writ large, to make it problematic and uncomfortable and embarrassing."
https://denvergazette.com/wex/truly-brutal-dictators-activists-want-putin-and-xi-banned-from-tokyo-olympics/article_f918a8f8-7d22-58bd-8770-960a1b99e5cd.html
