Mixed blessings from Beijing

I am as pleased as anyone that 'Team GB' (Oh how I hate these corny marketing titles) is doing so well at the Beijing Games, a total of eighteen gold medals accrued so far - way beyond the expectations before the team set off.

But it's interesting that, outside the glare of the events, the careful gloss China put on its image in order to get the Games has begun to unravel pretty quickly. Journalists have been arrested and dragged away in mid broadcast, John Ray of ITN news being one of a number carted away for trying to film a 'Free Tibet' protest near the Olympic Park.

Even the pretty basic right of poster protest, allowed in China before the Olympics, has been savagely terminated and protesters put in prison.

China promised that an area of park would be set aside for political protest during the Games on submission of an application in advance. So far 80 applications have been submitted and every one has been refused. It is a joke. Protests such as the one pictured below are, of course, only possible outside the country.




Of course the damn fool IOC fell for every promise of a 'free flow of information during the Games' and there has, of course, been nothing of the sort.

Human Rights Watch has criticised the affluent sponsors of the Beijing Games for failing to live up to their corporate responsibilities and adopting a 'see no evil, hear no evil' approach while they sit in their lavish boxes and lap up the luxury.

China is basking in the publicity it is getting for hosting a well organised games but I desperately hope, at the end of all this, there will be a stream of consciousness emanating from those covering the Games and those involved in the decision to take them to China asking 'but at what cost?'

I don't believe that the International Olympic Committee has come out of this very well..and not for the first time. They seem interested only in the spectacle itself, heedless of the consequences and impact of awarding the Games to totalitarian regimes. It is a policy bereft of any moral decency. Human Rights Watch is urging the IOC to set up a committee to investigate human rights abuses before the Games are awarded in future. Well it won't be done, and actually there is no need for it. Amnesty International, HRW itself and other organisations are well equipped to point out the flagrant human rights abuses in countries like China.

The single biggest failing is that the IOC simply refuses to listen - or apparently care.