As calls to boycott Beijing Olympics grow louder, Lithuania shows the way
Zee News
Human rights groups and political critics of China are exerting pressure on many Western governments and firms to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing
New Delhi: With only ten weeks left for Beijing to become the first city to host both a winter and summer Olympics, calls to boycott the Winter Olympics are thrumming. Human rights groups and political critics of China are exerting pressure on many Western governments and firms to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, which will be held on Friday, February 4. Human rights groups urged international governments and sponsors to shun what they labelled China’s “genocide games” when Greek officials handed over the Olympic flame to 2022 Beijing Winter Games organisers on October 19th, 2021.
This year, on International Olympic Day, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Hong Kong activists rallied outside the White House against Beijing hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics. These protestors urged that the US should draw a line on China’s brazen slaughter of its ethnic minorities and withdraw from the games. The United States was the first country to condemn China of Genocide in Xinjiang earlier this year. In the month of November, the Hong Kong American Association of Hong Kongers in the United States went to five cities to implore people to boycott the upcoming Winter Olympics in protest of China’s human rights violations and Hong Kong's draconian National Security Law. Participating in the Beijing Olympics, as per a consortium of over 200 rights groups, would really be “an endorsement of the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian rule and would be interpreted as turning a blind eye to these misdeeds.”
The Olympic games are a celebration of human achievement and have a unifying power to bring the world together in peaceful competition. After being accused of exporting a pandemic and carrying out a genocide in Xinjiang, and as per media reports ill-treatment with Olympian named Peng Shuai, Beijing paradoxically is about to host the Winter Olympics.
