German athletes mulling Beijing boycott over Tibet

BERLIN: International Olympic Committee vice-president Thomas Bach said a number of top athletes were considering boycotting the games in China over the bloody crackdown on protesters in Tibet.

“Several sports stars are feeling ill at ease when they think about the Olympic Games. Some are even considering cancelling,” Bach, of Germany, told yesterday’s edition of the Bild am Sonntag newspaper. Bach said he understood the athletes’ concerns about the situation in Tibet but said he was advising them to participate.

“They will realise when they assess the situation that it is better to make an appearance than to stay away. That is a symbol that will be noticed by the public,” he said.

Asked if human rights had been a concern when Beijing was selected to host the August Games, Bach said the IOC believed the intense focus on China would have a positive effect.

“We are of the opinion that the Games will help China open up. But we cannot solve the problems that UN secretaries general have not been able to solve for generations,” he said.

“The Olympic Games can foster change and be a catalyst for a solution but they are not a panacea.” Bach said the current debate over China reminded him of the discussions before the US-led boycott of the Olympic Games in Moscow in 1980 over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

“We call on both sides to reject violence,” he said. “I hope there will be a peaceful solution.” The newspaper quoted German athletes expressing doubts about China as the host for the Games.

“I have considered whether I can compete in China under these conditions,” equestrian Ludger Beerbaum said. “We will surely discuss the issue amongst ourselves here at the tournament in Dortmund (running until Sunday).”

Javelin thrower Christian Obergfoell said the Games were her first priority but that her impression of China had worsened with the latest developments. “I had been asking myself the whole time why they gave the Olympic Games to China,” she said.

“After Tibet, my feeling will not be any better.” The unrest in Tibet followed three days of protests by hundreds of monks in Lhasa, India and elsewhere around the world marking the anniversary of a failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule.

The Tibetan government-in-exile has said 80 have been confirmed dead in the Himalayan region, contradicting the Chinese official report of 10 fatalities.

Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama on Sunday condemned the violence but said the Beijing Olympics should go ahead, rejecting calls for a boycott by Tibetan exiles. (AFP)

On the other hand, German government is against it. So we may have the situation where German athletes boycott the Olympic Game on individual basis.

Merkel rejects Olympics boycott over Tibet

Date : 17 March 2008 0105 hrs (SST)

URL : http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific/view/335383/1/.html

BERLIN : German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Sunday she does not favour a boycott of the Beijing Olympics in August over China's crackdown on pro-independence protests in Tibet.

"I do not believe in an Olympics boycott," the daily Bild newspaper quoted her as saying before leaving for a three-day trip to Israel.

The right-leaning newspaper said the conservative leader believed a boycott could backfire and exacerbate the situation in China.

Meanwhile German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said he had spoken to his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi for a nearly an hour by telephone on Sunday and expressed Berlin's "great concern" about the violence in Tibet.

A statement from his ministry said Steinmeier had called for Beijing to do everything in its power "to avoid a further escalation of the situation and bring about a peaceful end to the conflict."

He also called on Yang to ensure "the greatest possible transparency in the events in Tibet" and urged him to do all he could to protect Germans currently in the country.

Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama on Sunday condemned what he called China's "rule of terror" and "cultural genocide" in Tibet after reports of heavy casualties among protesters.

But he refrained from calling for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics, as many Tibetan exiles have been demanding.

Relations between Berlin and Beijing plunged to freezing point after Merkel hosted the Dalai Lama, whom China considers a dangerous separatist, at her offices in September.

The Chinese government axed a series of official meetings over the row and relations have only recently begun to return to normal.

Germany is China's biggest trading partner in Europe.

The unrest in Tibet followed three days of protests by hundreds of monks in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, India and elsewhere around the world marking the anniversary of a failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule.

The violence has left at least 80 people dead, according to Tibetan exiled officials, although the official death toll according to China's state-run media remained at 10. - AFP/de

THE MOVEMENT TO BOYCOTT THE BERLIN OLYMPICS OF 1936
Soon after Hitler took power in 1933, observers in the United States and other western democracies questioned the morality of supporting Olympic Games hosted by the Nazi regime. Responding to reports of the persecution of Jewish athletes in 1933, Avery Brundage, president of the American Olympic Committee (AOC), stated: "The very foundation of the modern Olympic revival will be undermined if individual countries are allowed to restrict participation by reason of class, creed, or race." Brundage, like many others in the Olympic movement, initially considered moving the Games from Germany. After a brief and tightly managed inspection of German sports facilities in 1934, Brundage stated publicly that Jewish athletes were being treated fairly and that the Games should go on, as planned.
Debate over participation in the 1936 Olympics was greatest in the United States, which traditionally sent one of the largest teams to the Games. By the end of 1934, the lines on both sides were clearly drawn. Avery Brundage opposed a boycott, arguing that politics had no place in sport. He fought to send a U.S. team to the 1936 Olympics, claiming: "The Olympic Games belong to the athletes and not to the politicians." He wrote in the AOC's pamphlet "Fair Play for American Athletes" that American athletes should not become involved in the present "Jew-Nazi altercation." As the Olympics controversy heated up in 1935, Brundage alleged the existence of a "Jewish-Communist conspiracy" to keep the United States out of the Games.
Judge Jeremiah Mahoney, president of the Amateur Athletic Union, led efforts to boycott the 1936 Olympics, pointing out that Germany had broken Olympic rules forbidding discrimination based on race and religion. In his view, participation would indicate an endorsement of Hitler's Reich. Mahoney was one of a number of Catholic leaders supporting a boycott. New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, New York governor Al Smith, and Massachusetts governor James Curley also opposed sending a team to Berlin. The Catholic journal The Commonweal (November 8, 1935) advised boycotting an Olympics that would set the seal of approval on radically anti-Christian Nazi doctrines.
Another important boycott supporter, Ernst Lee Jahncke (a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy), was expelled from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in July 1936 after taking a strong public stand against the Berlin Games. The IOC pointedly elected Avery Brundage to fill Jahncke's seat. Jahncke is the only member in the 100-year history of the IOC to be ejected.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not become involved in the boycott issue, despite warnings from high-level American diplomats regarding Nazi exploitation of the Olympics for propaganda purposes. Roosevelt continued a 40-year tradition in which the American Olympic Committee operated independently of outside influence. Both the U.S. ambassador to Germany, William E. Dodd, and George Messersmith, head of the U.S. Legation in Vienna, deplored the American Olympic Committee's decision to go to Berlin.
Many American newspaper editors and anti-Nazi groups, led by Jeremiah Mahoney, president of the Amateur Athletic Union, were unwilling to accept Nazi Germany's hollow pledges regarding German Jewish athletes. But a determined Avery Brundage maneuvered the Amateur Athletic Union to a close vote in favor of sending an American team to Berlin, and, in the end, Mahoney's boycott effort failed.
Short-lived boycott efforts also surfaced in Great Britain, France, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, and the Netherlands. German Socialists and Communists in exile voiced their opposition to the Games through publications such as Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (The Worker Illustrated Newspaper). Some boycott proponents supported counter-Olympics. One of the largest was the "People's Olympiad" planned for summer 1936 in Barcelona, Spain. It was canceled after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, just as thousands of athletes had begun to arrive.
Individual Jewish athletes from a number of countries also chose to boycott the Berlin Olympics. In the United States, some Jewish athletes and Jewish organiztions like the American Jewish Congress and the Jewish Labor Committee supported a boycott of the Berlin Games. Once the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States voted for participation in December 1935, however, the other countries fell in line. Forty-nine teams from around the world competed in the Berlin Games, more than in any previous Olympics.

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