As calls to boycott Beijing Olympics grow louder, Lithuania shows the way

New Delhi: With only ten weeks left for Beijing to become the first city to host both a winter and summer Olympics, calls to boycott the Winter Olympics are thrumming. Human rights groups and political critics of China are exerting pressure on many Western governments and firms to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, which will be held on Friday, February 4. Human rights groups urged international governments and sponsors to shun what they labelled China’s “genocide games” when Greek officials handed over the Olympic flame to 2022 Beijing Winter Games organisers on October 19th, 2021.

This year, on International Olympic Day, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Hong Kong activists rallied outside the White House against Beijing hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics. These protestors urged that the US should draw a line on China’s brazen slaughter of its ethnic minorities and withdraw from the games. The United States was the first country to condemn China of Genocide in Xinjiang earlier this year. In the month of November, the Hong Kong American Association of Hong Kongers in the United States went to five cities to implore people to boycott the upcoming Winter Olympics in protest of China’s human rights violations and Hong Kong's draconian National Security Law. Participating in the Beijing Olympics, as per a consortium of over 200 rights groups, would really be “an endorsement of the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian rule and would be interpreted as turning a blind eye to these misdeeds.”

The Olympic games are a celebration of human achievement and have a unifying power to bring the world together in peaceful competition. After being accused of exporting a pandemic and carrying out a genocide in Xinjiang, and as per media reports ill-treatment with Olympian named Peng Shuai, Beijing paradoxically is about to host the Winter Olympics.

China was accused of serial abuse of human rights and violated every provision in UN Genocide Convention. Over a million Uyghurs have been detained in Xinjiang's concentration camps, where there have been accusations of women being raped, organ harvesting, sterilisation, and IUD insertion. China is accused of the systematic oppression of its minorities, as well as the harsh repression of those who dare to speak out against the Communist Party's tyranny. In the face of mounting international outrage over China's human rights violations, Beijing plans to use the Winter Olympics as a diversionary tactic to hide its transgressions.

If the international community boycotts the Beijing Olympics, it will not be the first time in history; there has been precedence, and games have been boycotted in the past. To protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States led a boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980. More than two dozen African countries boycotted the 1976 Montreal Olympics as the International Olympic Committee refused to ban New Zealand's rugby squad for touring apartheid South Africa despite an international sporting ban. In 1964 South Africa was barred from taking part in the 18th Olympic Games in Tokyo over its refusal to condemn apartheid.  The same International Olympic Committee that forbade Afghanistan from participating in the 2000 Sydney Games due to gender discrimination is now turning a blind eye to China's atrocities.

Although Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States have accused Beijing of human rights violations and have considered a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics, only Lithuania has risen to the occasion. On Friday, December 3rd, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda announced that neither he nor his ministers would attend the upcoming Winter Olympics. Dovile Sakaliene, a member of the Lithuanian Parliament, a leading human rights advocate and a co-Chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) urged her country’s leaders earlier this year to stand up to the Communist Party of China's despotism and spoke fervently about it when the Red Lantern Analytica (RLA) had interviewed her in August. RLA also congratulated her on successfully leading the internal campaign in her country to boycott the upcoming Beijing Olympics.

Ninong Ering, RLA’s mentor and co-Chair of the IPAC, has also urged India’s government to boycott the Beijing Olympics diplomatically. He is also a former Member of Parliament who is currently serving as a Member of the Arunachal Pradesh Legislative Assembly.

“Indian Parliament should take up this matter and discuss it seriously, a diplomatic boycott of #Beijing2022 is the need of the hour to counter #CCPChina’s expansionist and repressive regime”, he tweeted.

RLA concurs with Ninong Ering and urges the Indian leadership to diplomatically boycott the Genocide Games. China has often shown its hostility toward India, whether through the Dokhlam clash, the Galwan dispute, or China's naked claim to Arunachal as part of its own territory. India's outright boycott of the Beijing Olympics will go a long way toward establishing our credentials as a responsible and sovereign democracy. The principles of global solidarity and human rights that India as a nation takes pride in must be upheld by the Government.

By allowing China to host the most prestigious international athletic event, the International Olympic Committee has given the CCP a symbolic victory and an avenue to divert attention away from the regime's true nature. This adds insult to injury for the thousands of people in Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, and Hong Kong who risk their lives every day to fight the  Chinese government for what is rightfully theirs—their Human Rights. The international community must stand up to belligerent China and if need be postpone or even cancel the 2022 Winter Olympics. Business can no longer go as usual with China.