"Free Tibet" vs. "Free-Speech Zones"

News: San Francisco Dispatch: The Olympic torch's forthcoming pass through North America is shaping up to be a uniquely lefty grudge match.

By Josh Harkinson

March 31, 2008

TOOLS E-mail article Print article BACKTALK E-mail the editor

Few things give the people of San Francisco a warmer, fuzzier feeling than the sight of two dozen real-life Tibetans wrapped in chuba dresses and sun flags taking to the streets to demand justice. One such demander was Tsewang Khangsar, a beatific former shepherd boy who fled his Tibetan village on foot in 1961 and last week held a placard on the steps of City Hall that said "Olympics in China: Torture in Tibet" and proclaimed, "We are totally outraged." That his outrage was directed squarely at the city's own lefty mayor, Gavin Newsom, hardly dampened the enthusiasm of passing motorists, who smiled and waved. "Tibetans liked Newsom when he was first elected," Khangsar said. "But we didn't know he could totally turn his back on us."

The clash between the Free Tibet movement, one of the Bay Area's most popular causes, and Newsom, one of its most popular politicians, was sparked in March by the city's plans to host the Olympic torch's only pass through North America. Anticipating massive demonstrations by human rights activists at the April 9thevent, the city has withheld the full torch route and announced that it will restrict protesters to "free speech zones," a practice widely employed during appearances by President Bush, but virtually unheard of in San Francisco in recent years. The protest issue has divided the city's elected Board of Supervisors, with some members pushing for a resolution condemning China's human rights record during the event and others siding with Newsom, who told the San Francisco Chronicle that he did not want to "politicize the Olympics." He added, "I separate the issue of Tibet. . .from the Olympic games," which should be a time "to focus on the things that unite us and not divide us."

The perceived disdain of city leaders for Olympics-related protest has incensed human rights groups ranging from Save Darfur to the ACLU and surprised experts on the history of the Olympics. "I think the idea that the Olympics shouldn't be politicized is silly," says David Wallechinsky, vice president of the International Society of Olympic Historians. The long tradition of protests at the games includes campaigns by Jewish, Catholic, and Labor groups leading up the 1936 Olympics in Berlin; the Black Power demonstration by African American athletes on the top of the victory stand in 1968; and boycotts of the event by the United States in 1980 and Moscow in 1984. "The Olympics are part of the world," Wallechinsky notes, "and the world is political."

Unlike the 1988 games in Seoul, which are credited with nudging South Korea toward democracy, many Olympic historians believe that awarding the Games to Beijing was a mistake that is likely to strengthen China's communist regime without improving its human rights record. South Korea was an emerging economy looking to enter world markets; China is the United States' second-largest trading partner and holds $388 billion in American foreign debt. "What the Chinese Communist Party wants more is not to impress the outside world but to impress their own people—to show that the world is coming to them," says Wallechinsky, who is also the author of a comparative book on dictators. "And I think that they don't see any reason to change. Even if they did do something like open up the Internet for three weeks, once the closing ceremony is over, the next day they are going to shut it down again."

Though now a symbol of global unity, the torch relay got its start during the so-called Fascist Olympics held in 1936 Berlin, when the Nazis seized upon the idea as a way to associate the Third Reich with ancient Greece. The Olympics have often been linked with bursts of authoritarianism in host countries: Moscow banished its dissidents, Seoul shuttered its dog restaurants, and Atlanta booted its homeless out of downtown.

In the wake of China's recent military crackdown in Tibet, the imperative to expose its human rights record at the Olympics is clear, says University of Texas sports historian John Hoberman. "Human rights matter more than athletes' rights," he says, adding of Newsom's free-speech zones, "As somebody who spent '66 to '72 in Berkeley, that doesn't sound very Bay Area to me." Wallechinsky called the free-speech zone idea "Bushian" and "kind of surreal." (Newsom, who didn't respond to interview requests, has backed off of the idea in recent days).

To be sure, San Francisco has good reason to handle protests against China gingerly. The Bay Area is one of China's largest U.S. trading partners and also a perennial contender to host the Olympic Games. On Sunday, U.S. Senator and former San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein publicly urged the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to shelve its protest resolution, arguing that publicly dissing the Chinese during what is considered a goodwill gesture will only make discussing human rights concerns with them more difficult. A few days later, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who had visited the Dalai Lama in India and proclaimed the Chinese crackdown on Tibetans "a challenge to the conscience of the world," endorsed the rights of San Franciscans to protest during the torch ceremony. "The Olympics should provide more opportunity for free expression, not less," she said in a statement, but stopped short of speaking in favor of the protest resolution.

Authored by San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly along with Tibetan and Falun Gong activists, the resolution urges the city's representative in the torch ceremony to "make publicly known that the 2008 Summer Games Torch is received with alarm and protest." That kind of broad, shrill statement would probably be counterproductive, Wallechinsky says, but he'd still like to see San Francisco's representative give a nuanced speech during the ceremony objecting to China's policies without appearing to condemn China's people or the Olympics.

Globally, San Francisco is far from the only city to grapple with how to receive China's torch; it will pass through New Delhi, London, and Paris, where French president Nicolas Sarkozy has floated the possibility of boycotting the Olympics' opening ceremony. For Wallechinsky, the irony of the torch relay this year is the spectacle of cities in the free world defending China's police state against their own citizens. "That," he says, "is a really strange dynamic."

Josh Harkinson is Mother Jones' San Francisco reporter.

Comments: