A bipartisan resolution asks to move the games to another country, since China has “committed crimes against humanity”

by Marco Respinti

The Winter Olympics Games should not be held in China in 2022. There is no reason for the world to support the regime led by the CCP by giving it more opportunities for business and propaganda.

This is what a bipartisan group of US senators is now requesting from the International Olympic Committee (IOC), citing the miserable human rights record of China. In a resolution presented on March 4 by Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) and cosponsored by Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), which draws on data by the US State Department, the group of senators cites the staggering fate of what they indicated as “more than 1 million” ethnic Muslims, including Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz, detained in as many as 1,200 “vocational training centers.” These are the transformation through education camps that Bitter Winter has constantly documented as being in fact jails, where people are brutally tortured.

But, as Bitter Winter has often mentioned, based on the most accurate statistics by independent researchers, the figure of Uyghur Muslims detained in those camps is now up to 3 million, to which thousands of other Turkic Muslims of other ethnicities should be added.

There is more than that, obviously. The CCP regime persecutes minorities and all religions, ranging from Protestants and dissident Catholics to Buddhists and Taoists, from Jews to believers in Chinese traditional folk religions, with many new religious movements being especially targeted, from Falun Gong to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, from the Shouters to the Association of Disciples, and The Church of the Almighty God, which is today the single most severely persecuted religious movement in China. And in fact the US senators’ resolution does underline that “the Government of the People’s Republic of China subjects Christians and members of other religious groups to forced labor in brick kilns, food processing centers, and factories as part of detention for the purpose of ideological indoctrination,” and acknowledges that, “forced organ harvesting has been carried out for years throughout the People’s Republic of China on a significant scale, and practitioners of Falun Gong have been the main source of organs,” to conclude that, “the Government of the People’s Republic of China has committed crimes against humanity with respect to Uyghur individuals and practitioners of Falun Gong.”

All this considered, how can such a joyful event as the Olympics, celebrating peace and friendship among nations and peoples of the world, be held in a despotic country, which torments its own citizens?

The illiberal CCP regime gives no guarantee of respect of human dignity, and even public safety. We know that the world can’t trust it. The regime constantly sustains itself through propaganda, fake news, and the manipulation of truth. The world can’t rely on what this regime says, and we can’t take for granted any single piece of official news coming out of China. Human rights activists and NGOs know that all too well since decades, but the general international public has suddenly realized this now. The world still doesn’t know the whole truth about the spreading of coronavirus and, as Bitter Winter documents daily, the CCP regime is rather using the virus threat as an excuse to crack down harder on religious groups, dissidents, and ethnic minorities. There is no stop on the cynic march of the regime treading on its own people. Why then should the world give the Olympics to such a despotic government?

Repeatedly, persecuted minorities, dissidents, churches, religious groups, and common Chinese citizens have called for an international reaction to the ghastly CCP misdeeds. Mostly, their calls have gone unanswered. A few important moves at international levels have, however, been taken since 2018. The call of the US Senators to IOC is an important one: it is the official recognition that the CCP regime is guilty of crimes against humanity. The IOC should act now in the direction indicated by the US senators, and all free countries of the world as well as international organizations should support them.