Forget the Olympic Torch: Free Tibet!
by Tommi Avicolli-Mecca‚
Mar. 24‚ 2008
With Beijing hosting the Olympics in August, “Free Tibet” should be the Bay Area’s battle cry.
Especially with the Olympic Torch scheduled to come through San Francisco in early April. In fact, San Francisco is the only U.S. city slated to receive the official relay. San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly wants Mayor Gavin Newsom and the Board of Supervisors to make it clear when the flame arrives that the City is not in agreement with the Chinese government’s mistreatment of the people of Tibet.
Daly introduced a resolution to put San Francisco on record condemning human rights violations in the Himalayan country. It also urges the Chinese government to “genuinely comply with the principles of tolerance and respect as symbolized by the spirit behind the Olympic games.”
Daly also wants support for the Freedom Torch, which Tibetan activists lit at Ancient Olympia in Greece (the site of the original Olympics) on March 10. They intend to bring it to 50 cities (including San Francisco) before it arrives in Tibet on August 8, the opening day of the games in Beijing.
China has occupied Tibet since 1951. Its repressive policies have resulted in the death of over a million Tibetans. Countless persons have been incarcerated in prisons and labor camps. Writer Alexander Solzhenytsin, a survivor of a Russian gulag, once described the Chinese government in Tibet as “more brutal and inhumane than any other Communist regime in the world.”
U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a former mayor of San Francisco, opposes Daly’s resolution. She says that if it passes, it will hurt her efforts to bring exiled Tibetan religious leader Dalai Lama and the Chinese government to the negotiating table. The Dalai Lama left Tibet after an unsuccessful 1959 coup against the occupying forces. Feinstein and her rich investor husband Richard Blum have been trying for decades to get China to listen to reason. It’s all been to no avail. Perhaps a strong condemnation from San Francisco will give them more leverage. Nothing else has.
Would San Francisco officials silently accept a torch from a country that executes queers? Would these same officials say nothing if it were from a nation that practiced apartheid or ethnic cleansing?
Supervisors Carmen Chu and Sean Elsbernd need to be asked those very questions. At the committee hearing, they stripped Daly’s resolution of its guts and instead spit out a meaningless puff piece. Daly is not on the committee that heard the resolution.
It’s crucial that the full Board restore the resolution as it was. San Francisco should not be bullied into silence by the same government that almost 20 years ago crushed a student protest for democratic reform by sending tanks into Tiananmen Square. Those tanks fired on the crowd, killing hundreds of peaceful protesters.
As far as I am concerned, “Free Tibet” is the theme of this year’s Olympics.
Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a radical southern Italian queer atheist performer and writer with a website: www.avicollimecca.com
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