Tibetan Youth Congress organises bike rally

Mysuru: Regional Tibetan Youth Congress Delhi launched a bike rally from Bengaluru to Delhi on December 10, World Human Rights Day. According to press release issued here informed that the aim of the rally is to bring 'international attention to the gross human rights violations committed by China in Tibet and East Turkestan (Xinjiang) which have been under Chinese occupation'. It adds: 'We call upon and appeal to the basic human conscience of all the people and boycott Beijing Olympic 2022 as an expression of solidarity with people in Tibet, Xinjiang, South Mongolia and Hong Kong who are suffering under Chinese repression and oppression.'

Though sport ideally must be kept away from politics in a normal time, however, the atrocities carried out by China against Tibetan and Uyghur people in the form of increasing police custodial deaths, tortures, forced sterilisation, forced disappearance, genocide and running of mass concentration camps raise fundamental questions about the basic tenets of humanity. We cannot and should not keep sports away from basic moral principles.

The international community cannot go on like business as usual with China regarding its repressions at home and aggression abroad from India's Himalayan borders to Taiwan and South China Sea. The world had already given China the opportunity to host the Olympic game in 2008 with the hope that the same opportunity can be a progressive impetus for the Chinese leadership to improve human rights situation and if not completely rectifying but to relax some of its

more repressive policies aimed at cultural genocide in Tibet and Xinjiang, However, on the contrary, the Chinese government did the opposite of what the international community had expected of it.

As it did before, China will use the spotlight of the Olympic Games to whitewash its crimes against humanity in Tibet and Xinjiang as if nothing had happened and thereby further encouraging the same totalitarian and imperialist regime to continue with its occupation and oppression against the Tibetans and other people under its colonial rule.

The International Olympic Committee is fully complicit in the ongoing cultural genocide and systemic repressions in Tibet and Xinjiang by not raising the same issue with China and demand to stop its gross human rights violations.

We call upon all the relevant international governments, NGOs, companies and sportspersons to boycott Beijing Winter Olympic 2022 in order to make China accountable for its gross violation of human rights and freedom and turn the spotlight of the game on China's

horrible human records in Tibet and Xinjiang, instead of letting China whitewash its crimes against humanity including genocide, repression and slave labour with it.

International events like the Olympic Games should be a celebration of human brotherhood, freedom and dignity and should never be sold out as a platform for a totalitarian and imperialist regime to whitewash its crimes against humanity.