Tibetans call for boycott of Beijing Winter Olympics

Bengaluru: The Regional Tibetan Youth Congress (RTYC) organised a bike rally from Bengaluru to national capital New Delhi with a call to boycott the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics condemning Chinese aggression.

The bike rally will be flagged off on Friday on the occasion of the World Human Rights Day.

The aim of the bike 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.

"We call upon and appeal to the basic human conscience of all people and boycott Beijing Winter Olympics 2022 as an expression of solidarity with the people in Tibet, Xinjiang, South Mongolia and Hong Kong who are suffering under Chinese repression and oppression," RTYC president Tsering Chomphel stated.

Though sport ideally must be kept away from politics in a normal time, however, the atrocities carried out by Chinese 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, he stated.

"We cannot and should 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," he said. The world had already given an opportunity for China to host the Olympic games in 2008 with the hope that the same opportunity will be a progressive impetus for the Chinese leadership to improve human rights situation but the Chinese government did the opposite of what the international community had expected of it, he explained.

"The international Olympic Committee is fully complicit in the ongoing cultural genocide and systematic repressions in Tibet and Xinjiang by not raising the same issue with China," he alleged.

"We call upon all the relevant international governments, NGOs, companies and sportspersons to boycott Beijing Olympics 2022 in order to make China accountable for its gross violations of human rights. The international community should 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 and repression, he said.

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 crimes against humanity, he demanded.