Passing The Torch
If China wants to hedge bets around its involvement in darfur, let’s change the rules of the game
2007-08-13
By Monroe Anderson

Communist China's rush to become a world-class capitalist power has gone gangsta in more ways than one. Beijing has been pirating goods, dabbling in state-sponsored gunrunning and short-changing the yuan. Earlier this week, nearly a million made-in-China Mattel toys were recalled because they were covered in lead paint. We have recently learned that Beijing has been exporting melamine-laced pet food and tainted toothpaste.

Although thousands of American cats and dogs fell deathly ill or died from eating China's tainted pet food, it could have been worse: Ten Chinese citizens are known to have died from fake medicine after the former director of China's State Food and Drug Administration accepted $990,000 in bribes in exchange for approving the drugs.

But neither bad medicine nor poisonous products have taken the toll that China's adventures in Africa can claim: In a four-year genocidal offensive in Sudan, more than 200,000 blacks have been killed by marauding bands of the Janjaweed militia, the Arab soldiers of misfortune hired by and backed up with the air support of Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir's government. Entire African villages have been pillaged and burned, driving 2 million black Darfurians into refugee camps where women and children are routinely raped and starved. The bulk of the arms used to kill and maim the black Africans, according to Amnesty International, are being imported from Beijing. China says that's not so.

While it is true that China -- reluctantly and belatedly -- has coaxed Khartoum into finally agreeing to admit U. N. peacekeepers into the troubled region, it is also true that in April China agreed "to boost military exchanges and cooperation" with Bashir's government. And it is fact that China buys two-thirds of Sudan's oil and has signed a 20-year agreement with that country to help it develop offshore oil–a resource China naturally covets and desperately needs to propel its development into a First World nation.

It is in China's quest to compete with the other major players on the world stage that we might stop the madness–and the mass murdering. Next year the 2008 games will take place in Beijing. China sees the Olympics as an excellent propaganda ploy–a way and means of wowing the world as it hosts its first event viewed by the other four-fifths of the earth's population. When next year's Olympic flame is extinguished, China's rulers are counting on brandishing a bunch of shiny medals and a ton of glowing media–all highlighting their coming out party. But, as the old '60s saying asks, "what if you gave a party and nobody came?" I say we shouldn't go unless China exerts real pressure on Khartoum to stop the killing. 

I say we boycott the Olympics. I am not alone in this notion that the games are a good way to get to China's conscience. Mia Farrow, the American actress and U.N. goodwill ambassador, has designated the Beijing games as the "genocide Olympics" while proposing an Olympic-style torch relay through countries with histories of mass murders. Steven Spielberg, the movie producer, is threatening to drop out as the artistic adviser for the spectacular 2008 Olympics opening ceremony. 

The party line from the Chinese government is that the 2008 Olympics should be games for games' sake–with no political competition. "We are absolutely opposed to politicization of the Olympics," said Jiang Xiaoyu, one of the committee's executive vice presidents. "This is against the Olympic spirit and against the Olympic charter." 

Well, yes and no. The charter and spirit dictate one thing but reality and history has dictated another. Adolph Hitler tried to use the Berlin Olympics as a political and propaganda platform for Aryan supremacy in 1936. An African American, sprinter Jesse Owens, vanquished that big lie on Hitler's own turf by breaking three world records and tying another. Thirty-six years later, again in Germany, 11 Israeli athletes were kidnapped and murdered by Palestinian terrorists after demands that 200 Palestinians held in Israeli jails be released went unheeded. 

Three unrelated but successive boycotts followed the Munich Olympics. Twenty-eight African nations boycotted the Montreal Olympics in the summer of 1976 because New Zealand's national rugby team continued to compete against South Africa's rugby team although the South Africans had been banned from the Olympics in 1964 because of its apartheid policies. The 1980 Moscow Olympics were boycotted by the United States after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan a year earlier. Four years later, the Soviet Union retaliated with its own boycott of the Los Angeles Games. 

As the world prepares for next year's fun and games in Beijing, there are Darfurian women and children starving in terrible, teeming refugee camps. They are not responsible for their plight but who is? In an era where "taking responsibility" is the catch phrase of the moment, why won't China? Why doesn't the Bush administration do something substantive to stop the killing? Shouldn't the Congressional Black Caucus act more effectively? And, if no foreign or national responsibility takes hold, what about personal responsibility? 

Let the African-American Olympians (who will be responsible for making the games worth watching) choose to watch the 2008 competition from the comfort and safety of their homes in the good old U.S. of A.

Monroe Anderson is a frequent contributor to ebonyjet.com