IOC President Rogge must resign

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) called on Sunday for the resignation of IOC President Jacques Rogge following the new kowtowing of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to the Chinese authorities with their arbitrary behaviour. "The IOC President has caused severe damage to the Olympic idea and the respect for human rights in China with his catastrophic handling of crises and contradictory information policy”, criticised the GfbV Asia consultant, Ulrich Delius. Rogge’s unconditional fawning to the Chinese leaders has become unbearable and disregarded the limits of the political neutrality pledged by the IOC.

Rogge took back his promise on Saturday at a press conference in Peking that there would be absolute freedom for international correspondents during the Olympic Games and in spite of the present conflict over the censure of the media he spoke of "excellent working conditions”.

"To make sure that a similar fiasco does not in future take place the IOC must bring in binding standards of human rights for the allocation and conduct of the Olympic Games”, said Delius. "The IOC is out of touch with reality if it on the one hand regularly has the quality of the air checked at the venues in accordance with its environmental standards, but if on the other it is apparently indifferent to the mass arrests near the stadiums.” As the example of China shows, it is not only bad air which troubles people.

Rogge’s inability to react in a suitable way to China’s constant

word-breaking is all the more shocking because the fiasco was foreseeable. Before the beginning of the Games it was clear that one would have to reckon with an increase in the violations of human rights. Rogge should have been prepared for this and in a position to react in a fitting manner. But it took him all of fourteen days after the outbreak of the disturbances in Tibet to make any comment in public about his concern over the violence. Peking’s method of intimidation, which reminds one of the "Stasi” methods in the former German Democratic Republic, during the Olympic torch-run in Xinjiang/East Turkistan and Tibet did not produce any reaction from him, criticised Delius. A virulent political speech given by the head of the Communist Party in Tibet on the arrival of the torch-run in Lhasa, in which the Dalai Lama was violently attacked, produced also – no reaction. Instead of this the IOC President issued an open warning on 25th April 2008 against "nagging away” at China because of its human rights situation.