Arab News Japan
TOKYO: On the day (February 4) that Beijing celebrated the one-year countdown to the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, a group protesting human rights violations in China called on the Japanese government and the international community to “boycott the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
The group at the press conference in Tokyo represented the Tibetan Community in Japan, the Japan Uyghur Association, Stand with HK@JPN, the Southern Mongolia Congress and the Free Indo-Pacific Alliance. Adding their signatures to the statement were commentator Kotaro Miura and Ou Dai, Vice President of the Federation for a Democratic China.
The statement noted how the Olympics is a festival of peace and sports and how the Olympic Charter states that the goal of the Olympic Games is to “encourage the establishment of a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity” and “understand each other with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play without discrimination of any kind.”
The statement bluntly noted how this is at odds with what is happening in China.
The statement outlined the issues facing China: “At the moment, in the People’s Republic of China, millions of Uighurs are reportedly detained in de facto concentration camps in the name of re-education centers in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. In the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the people are deprived of an opportunity to receive education in the Mongolian language at school.
In an area where Tibetans live, as well, the destruction of Buddhist temples and religious oppression continue, as once done during the Cultural Revolution.
In Hong Kong, democratic activists and members of the Legislative Council have unlawfully been arrested one after another.”
The statement likened the holding of the Olympics in Beijing to that of Berlin in 1936 under the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, which, it said, “was used to hide its autocracy, oppression of human rights, and racial discrimination policy.”
China, it said, had failed to improve human rights as promised to the International Olympic Committee.
The group made several demands, calling on China to improve human rights, stop the oppression of democratic activists, “abolish concentration camps, release political prisoners, and guarantee the freedom of speech, expression, faith, and association.”
It also asked for China to allow an “international investigation team” to confirm that the situation regarding human rights had improved before the 2022 Olympics and called on the Japanese government and the international community to “boycott the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics unless the human rights situation improves for the realization of freedom, human rights, and self-determination of peoples in China and to protect the Olympic spirit.”