Judoka Rafaela Silva, who won Brazil’s first medal – gold - on Aug. 8, had received racial slurs like “monkey that should be in a cage” when she was disqualified from the London 2012 Games; now she is fa heroine. Credit: Roberto Castro/Brasil2016

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 18 2016 (IPS)

Brazil’s first gold medal of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics gave it a new multipurpose heroine, Rafaela Silva, whose defeat of the favourites in judo has made her a strong voice against racism and homophobia. Not only is she black and poor, but she just came out as gay.

In her first remarks as an Olympic champion, on Aug. 8, she referred to the harsh criticism she received after being disqualified in the second round of the London Olympics in 2012, when people lashed out against her in the social media, with one saying she was a “monkey who should be in a cage.” Her medal is her vengeance against racism.

It is also an example of a triumph over the poverty and crime that drags down so many young people in the Cidade de Deus, the Rio de Janeiro “favela” or shantytown where she grew up, which was made famous by the film City of God.

Colourful figures like Silva or Jamaican runner Usain Bolt, or unbeatable athletes like U.S. swimming legend Michael Phelps,are crucial in the Olympics, which have become a huge global media event, more than the leading international sports competition.

Sheer overkill also plays a key role in the media spectacle. In the Aug. 5-21 Rio Games, 11,552 athletes – eight percent more than in London 2012 – are participating in 306 medal events in 42 disciplines.

But the number of journalists grew even more, by about 20 percent. More than 25,000 accredited reporters are covering Rio 2016, which translates into 2.2 press, TV, radio and internet journalists for each athlete during the 19-day Games.

The Rio Games – the first held in South America – are the most connected Olympics in history, with data traffic and internet activity four times greater than in London.

And while six million tickets were sold for the stadiums, according to the organisers, billions in profits have been made from the spectators watching the Games on TV or over the internet worldwide.

The opening ceremony alone was watched by an estimated three billion people around the globe. The colourful ceremony and its special effects, directed by prize-winning filmmakers, cleared up the doubts about the success of the Games, due to threats like construction delays, the Zika virus epidemic and Brazil’s political and economic crisis.

The filtered view provided by dozens of TV cameras is no substitute for the actual atmosphere of the stadiums, but it makes it possible to see up-close details from different angles, including up above, which is impossible for spectators in the stadiums. And the technological advances constantly improve the experience of watching the Games from far away points on the globe.

Aesthetics is another dimension that colors the competition. It played a role in the inauguration of the Games and its strong presence in some disciplines, like the various gymnastics or diving events, helped minimise the military origins of many Olympic sports, like wrestling or shooting.

Judoka Rafaela Silva, who won Brazil’s first medal – gold – on Aug. 8, had received racial slurs like “monkey that should be in a cage” when she was disqualified from the London 2012 Games; now she is fa heroine. Credit: Roberto Castro/Brasil2016

But the drama seen in many of the contests is perhaps the central element of the Olympic media spectacle.

More people remember Swiss long-distance runner Gabriela Andersen’s struggle to finish the 1984 Olympic marathon in 37th place, staggering with heat exhaustion in the final 200 metres, than the actual winner of the marathon in Los Angeles that year.

For the honour of lighting the Olympic cauldron at the inauguration of the Rio 2016 Games, the athlete chosen was Brazilian runner Vanderlei de Lima, who became famous in Athens in 2004 when an Irish priest shoved him to the side of the road when he was in the lead in the marathon.

A Greek spectator helped free Lima from the grasp of the priest – who was later defrocked – and he continued the race. But he lost time and his rhythm was broken, and he ended in third place. For exemplifying the spirit of sportsmanship he showed by settling for the bronze, the International Olympic Committee awarded him the Pierre de Coubertin medal, a special decoration that carries the name of the founder of the IOC.

The footage of the incident, broadcast over and over around the world, made Lima an Olympics symbol.

The show needs heroes. National ones abound; sometimes winning a medal is all it takes. So far in Rio 2016, there are many examples.

Judoka Majlinda Kelmendi will surely provide a major boost to the eight-year-old Kosovo’s consolidation as an independent nation now that she has won the country’s first medal – gold. In 2012 she competed under the Albanian flag.

Fiji as well won its first medal – also gold – in Rugby Sevens, which debuted in these Games as an Olympic sport. (Rugby union was played at the Olympics from 1900 to 1924.)

Puerto Rico, an associated free state of the United States, with its own delegation in the Olympics, also took its first gold medal in Rio, won by Monica Puig in tennis.

The IOC recognizes 208 national committees, surpassing the 193 members of the United Nations. Some participants in the Olympics are not independent states, as in the case of Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, the Virgin Islands or American Samoa.

Dramatic incidents like the one involving Vanderlei de Lima also give rise to Olympic heroes, who add to the show.

Etenesh Diro of Ethiopia was cheered when she completed the 3,000-metre steeplechase, even though she finished seventh. She had pulled off her shoe when it was torn in a tangle with other competitors and continued on, barefoot.

But although she didn’t qualify for the final, the authorities rewarded spots in the race to her and two others who fell.

Heroes are generally individuals. Maybe that’s why football didn’t overshadow the Games – a worry that was apparently behind some restrictions set on participating in the sport, which is wildly popular in Brazil, such as a 23-year age limit, with three exceptions.

At any rate, the Olympic audience is guaranteed thanks to the diversity of sports, cultures and dramatic personal or national situations.

The excess of raw material for journalists and for the television and online show and the out of proportion size will make it difficult for another country of the developing South to host the Games in the near future.

Besides aspects linked to the needs and pressures of what is, more than anything, a huge global spectacle, the decision will also be influenced by the problems that cropped up in Rio, like construction delays, urban crime, water pollution, half-empty stadiums, and unsportsmanlike loud booing of some foreign athletes and teams.

Kaillana de Oliveira Donato, 14, plays basketball in the Olympic Villa in Mangueira, a poor neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro, and participates in U.N. Women’s “One Win Leads to Another” programme. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 12 2016 (IPS)

At the age of 14, Kaillana de Oliveira of Brazil knows she won’t be as tall as most professional basketball players, because of family genetics. But she is not letting that get in the way of her dream of standing out in the sport.

“I’m point guard, and you don’t have to be so tall for that position,” Oliveira, a student at the Olympic Villa – a multi-purpose sports complex – in the poor Rio de Janeiro neighbourhood of Mangueira, told IPS.

That public sports facility produced three of the players on Brazil’s women’s national basketball team, which is competing in the Aug. 5-22 Rio 2016 Olympics.

Oliveira trains at least four days a week, “for three hours, sometimes more.” She gets up at 5 AM to attend a school in a distant neighbourhood, which offered her a scholarship as a promising young athlete. She is disciplined and is in bed by 9 PM.

Oliveira has participated in many tournaments for girls. “Basketball is a fast, dynamic contact sport,” she said. That’s why she chose it five years ago, from the various sports she tried in a complex near the Mangueira “favela” or shantytown, where she lives.

Her family supported her choice, but she faces prejudice among her classmates. “They say it’s for lesbians,” she said.

“I want to be a good player; if I don’t make it, I’ll be a lawyer,” Oliveira told IPS in a conversation on the basketball court where she trains.

She participates in the programme “One Win Leads to Another”, an initiative of U.N. Women and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) aimed at empowering girls through sports, as a legacy of the first Olympic Games to be held in South America.

The programme, based on the Dutch NGO Women Win, includes weekly workshops on issues like self-esteem, leadership, sexual rights, violence and financial planning, as well as sports activities.

It began in Rio de Janeiro and until 2017 will function as a pilot project, with the goal of boosting the autonomy and self-confidence of 2,500 girls between the ages of 10 and 18, as well as 300 adolescent mothers who have dropped out of school.

The activities are held in 16 multi-sports complexes called Olympic Villas that the city government has set up in poor neighbourhoods.

The programme will later be adapted to local conditions and expanded to other cities around Brazil and Latin America.

Kaillana de Oliveira Donato, Marcelly de Mendonça and Adrielle da Silva are active in the U.N. Women’s and International Olympic Committee’s “One Win Leads to Another” programme, standing next to Juliana Azevedo, a vice president in Procter & Gamble, another partner in the initiative, during the presentation of the programme in Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Women Win, a U.N. Women partner, developed the original programme, which has already been implemented in 25 countries.

A survey found that of 217,000 participants, the proportion of girls who saw themselves as leaders increased from 46 to 89 percent, and the proportion of those who know how to avoid getting pregnant or catching a sexually transmitted disease rose threefold, to 79 and 77 percent, respectively.

The initiative also seeks to expand access among teenage girls to the benefits of sports. Around the world, 49 percent of girls quit practicing sports when they hit puberty – six times the proportion for boys, which aggravates gender inequality, according to U.N. Women.

“The power of sport should never be underestimated. It can change lives, through increasing girls’ and young women’s beliefs in their own abilities, encouraging them to take initiative and aim high,” U.N. Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said at the Aug. 6 presentation of “One Win Leads to Another” in Rio de Janeiro.

One of the big challenges the programme has taken on “is leveling the playing field for men and women,” the representative of U.N. Women in Brazil, Nadine Gasman, told IPS. “In the Rio Olympic games, women make up 46 percent of the competitors, and there are no sports that do not include women, but the difference in resources is appalling.”

“Ten national Olympic committees include no women, and very few are on the International Olympic Committee,” which means they have less of an influence on sports, she said. “Women are also less visible on TV sports channels, where the broadcasting of men’s sports wins 10 to one, with the exception of the Olympics.”

The history of the Olympic Games reflects women’s struggle for inclusion. Women were absent from the first modern-era edition, in 1896 in Athens. In the next Games, in Paris in 1900, the only women’s sports were tennis and golf, and women made up just 2.2 percent of the total number of participants – 22 out of 997.

The proportion only climbed above 10 percent after 1952, growing to 44.2 percent in 2012, after women’s boxing was finally accepted as an Olympic sport.

But inequality persists. The funds earmarked by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) for the national teams that participated in the men’s 2014 World Cup, also hosted by Brazil, were 40 times greater than the amount that went to the 2015 Women’s World Cup, Gasman pointed out.

Teenage basketball players training in an Olympic Villa, one of the sports complexes created by the Rio de Janeiro city government, in the “favela” or shantytown of Mangueira, close to the installations where the Olympic Games are being held. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The women’s winning team’s prize was smaller than the amount that went to the team that came in last in the FIFA World Cup, reflecting the discrimination still suffered by women athletes, she added.

But in the Olympics, the imbalance is being reduced more quickly. In 1995 the Women in Sport Commission was created in the IOC, to advise the executive board and president on how to expand women’s participation in decision-making and how to develop and implement the IOC women and sports policy.

Since 2004, women have served as vice president of the IOC, and since March this year, at least one-third of the members of the IOC working groups are women.

But cultural and social prejudice continues to hinder progress towards gender equality in the practice and administration of sports.

Adolescence is a critical period of physical changes and peer pressure. That is why it is essential to intervene at that time, as “One Win Leads to Another” does, “to keep girls in sports, which helps them prepare for life at the same time,” said Gasman.

In Brazil, the rate at which girls drop out of sports at puberty is lower than the international average reported by U.N. Women and the IOC, but it is still worrisome.

A survey carried out by the Ministry of Sports in 2013 found that 34.8 percent of girls quit sports before the age of 15, compared to 19.3 percent of boys.

But this is not true in Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic Villa sports complexes. “We have more girls than boys, and they stay throughout adolescence. But they prefer ballet, jazz or rhythmic gymnastics,” said Norma Marinho, a social assistant at the Miécimo da Silva Sports Centre in Campo Grande, a huge working class neighborhood west of Rio de Janeiro.

The idea that certain sports are for boys keeps girls away from track and field and many other disciplines. “They crowd into ballet classes, even if the teacher is a man,” said Marilda Veloso, who teaches handball at the sports complex, where 13,000 students and other people are active in 28 different sports.

Factors that lead girls to drop out are “embarrassment about their bodies, household chores, and prejudices,” although fewer are quitting these days, Veloso, who has worked at the sports centre for 30 years, told IPS.

Garbage in Ahshtyrskaya near Sochi. Credit: Environmental Watch on North Caucasus.

By Pavol Stracansky
MOSCOW, Nov 11 2013 (IPS)

Despite an endorsement from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for their adherence to environmental standards in preparations for next year’s Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russian authorities are cracking down harder and harder on people trying to expose the environmental cost of projects related to the Games.

Local environmental activists have for years been warning of what they claim is serious damage being done to Black Sea beaches as well as the Sochi National Park and the Caucasus national nature reserve near the city.

But as the Olympics get closer and preparations for the games advance, they say they are facing growing harassment, including intimidation, wiretapping, arrests and, possibly, attempts on their life, by authorities desperate to avoid environmental scandals after making a “Zero Waste” pledge for the Games.

“The harassment is increasing,” Andrey Petrov, World Heritage Campaign Coordinator at Greenpeace Russia told IPS. “Organisations and the people working for them are facing pressure.”“The harassment is increasing. Organisations and the people working for them are facing pressure.”

One group in particular, the Environmental Watch on North Caucasus (EWNC) appears to have become the authorities’ prime target.

Two of its members, Evgeny Vitishko and Andrey Rudomakha have been detained by local police, both for what the group claims are spurious reasons. Both, later released, believe they were followed and probably wiretapped by police before being picked up by officers.

But there have been even more disturbing incidents. EWNC activist Vladimir Kimayev recently ended up in hospital after a traffic accident when the brakes on his moped failed to work.

He told local media that he suspects they had been tampered with.

Rudomakha, head of the EWNC, told IPS: ”Of course, the reprisals we have faced come from the concerns of the authorities that we will continue to expose lawlessness in the preparations for the Olympics.”

The intimidation comes as authorities face serious questions over the environmental impact of the Games.

Billed by the hosts as the cleanest Olympics ever, the government has pledged the Games – to be held between Feb. 7 and 21 next year – will be ‘zero waste’.

But it has been revealed that the state-owned rail monopoly has been dumping tons of waste into an illegal landfill just north of Sochi, posing a contamination risk to local water sources.

The news was an embarrassment to local and federal authorities as it came during the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Conference on Sport and the Environment being held in Sochi.

At the event – which the EWNC and Greenpeace Russia were not invited to and which the WWF boycotted because of its criticism of the authorities’ approach to the environmental impact of the Games – IOC officials had given a ringing endorsement to the Games’ organisers, saying they had met environmental standards in their preparations for the Games.

But following the revelations about the landfill, some IOC members called for a full investigation. The IOC did not respond when contacted by IPS, but in a previous statement it said that local authorities were responsible for dealing with the illegal landfill.

Russia’s Environmental Protection Agency, which issued a report months ago identifying the use of the illegal landfill, said that it had not ordered the dump closed but that Russian Railways had been fined 3,000 dollars. The project it is working on – a 30-mile road and rail link between Games venues – has so far cost 8.5 billion dollars.

The company blamed the landfill on a subcontractor and last week said that the subcontractor had dealt with the problem. This came despite trucks being seen to be still dumping tons of waste in the landfill.

Residents in and around Sochi say that there are numerous other smaller dumps which have cropped up in the area, and point to the fact that since the Russian Railways project began wells near the village housing the illegal landfill site have dried up. Locals are forced to get their water from cisterns which are brought in once a week.

The problem with the illegal landfill is just one of many that environmental groups have said the Games have caused.

These include the destruction of thousands of hectares of rare forests, spawning sites for endangered fish, hibernation sites and migration routes for animals. They have also pointed to the fact that low quality projects which did not take into account local weather conditions had already led to some deaths as storms washed away sites under construction.

The government has denied any serious environmental problems connected to the Games and maintains it is meeting its environmental commitments.

But critics point out that the government has already backslid on promises to keep the Games as clean as possible. Its 51 billion dollar budget for the Games – the largest in Olympic history – has no provisions for dealing with construction waste.

Legislation has also been repeatedly amended to help Games preparation – at the expense of the environment.

Then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin last year cancelled waste legislation from Games preparation plans, including construction of recycling facilities. This meant that Sochi authorities were free to do what they wanted with waste and soon after abandoned plans for recycling in favour of burning non-separated rubbish.

Prior to this, between 2006 and 2009, environmental conservation legislation was changed, allowing for sports events to be held in national parks and rare species of trees and plants to be destroyed for Olympic construction.

Authorities seem determined to ensure that the Games will go ahead with as little bad publicity over their environmental impact as ever and have already introduced legislation to ensure there will be no protests in the run-up and during the Olympics.

Mass meetings of any kind have been banned in most of the area in and around Sochi from Jan. 7 until Mar. 21 next year.

However, the environment has already been scarred, activists say, and the effects will be felt long after the Games end.

Greenpeace’s Petrov told IPS: “Apart from everything that has already been destroyed, there is a serious threat that after the Olympics many buildings will no longer be used and will start to fall apart and decay. This would lead to catastrophes over much wider areas than just those that have been built on.”

Recently reconstructed Maracaná stadium in Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Governo do Rio de Janeiro CC BY 3.0

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 17 2013 (IPS)

As Brazil prepares to host several sporting mega-events, human rights abuses and authoritarian interventions by the authorities are going on behind the scenes, favouring major urbanisation projects and stadium remodelling, a study says.

The state has forced almost 30,000 families across the country to leave their homes, according to the Comité Popular da Copa e das Olimpíadas (World Cup and Olympics People’s Committee), made up of around 50 social movements, researchers, NGOs and trade unions.

The Committee’s report, “Megaeventos e Violações dos Direitos Humanos no Rio de Janeiro” (Mega-events and Human Rights Abuses in Rio de Janeiro), says that in this city alone, which will host the 2016 Olympic Games, 3,000 families have already been displaced from their homes and another 7,800 are facing eviction.

The forced displacement of thousands of people and the privatisation of public areas constitute the dark side of Brazil’s sports projects, claims the study which was presented in Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday May 15.

Brazil will host the FIFA (International Federation of Association Football) World Cup, which is to be held in 12 cities, in 2014. A dress rehearsal for this will be the ninth FIFA Confederations Cup, a tournament between the top national teams from each continent, from Jun. 15-30 this year.

“Our fears are being confirmed. The benefits and social legacy that are so widely trumpeted really hide a dark legacy: an elitist, segregated and unequal society. It is a sad thing to see,” said Orlando Alves dos Santos Jr., a sociologist and urban planner and one of the study coordinators.

In the view of dos Santos Jr., a researcher at the Observatório das Metrópoles and the Institute of Urban and Regional Planning and Research at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the multi-million dollar investments carried out under the cloak of preparations for the World Cup and the Olympic Games go beyond the scope of sports facilities and are part of a grand project of urban reform.

Interventions in cities, like evictions, are having an immense impact in terms of social exclusion, the report says.

“We show that poor people are being relocated outside the areas of investment, which are concentrated in the centre, south and north of Rio de Janeiro. These are areas where real estate has vastly increased in value,” dos Santos Jr. said.

He said the rise in housing prices has been largely based on the displacement of the poor towards the outskirts of the city.

“All this has been accompanied by a complete lack of information for the evicted families, as well as coercion, the use of violence and human rights abuses. What is happening in the city is extremely serious,” he said.

Christopher Gaffney, a U.S. geographer who studies public policies on sports and security for big events, told IPS that evictions and the privatisation of public spaces represented a great failure of democracy in this country of over 195 million people.

“The policy is a big step backwards. It represents a reversal of values that eliminates the role of government as the guarantor of essential citizen services, like housing and culture. Forced evictions are a clear violation of the right to housing. Real estate speculation is rife in Rio,” he said.

Gaffney, who is also a member of the People’s Committee and a researcher with the Observatório das Metrópoles, said that there is no “coherent practical criterion” being applied in the eviction of thousands of families, and that those affected by the policy complain of a lack of dialogue, transparency and information.

“The uncertainty associated with being made homeless creates constant panic, and terror methods are being used to expel these people from their communities at any price,” he said.

“There have been cases where families have been told they must vacate their homes, without any time for them to collect their belongings; and others where their eviction has been negotiated right alongside the bulldozers that were ready to demolish the houses. This is enormous psychological pressure,” he said.

Only a few families received a decent house after their eviction, Gaffney said. The authorities provide indemnities for expropriation that are not enough to buy a new house, or they put families into housing plans that have requirements that many of them cannot meet, such as that the head of household must have a formal sector job and a bank account.

The report argues that the real Olympic legacy in Rio de Janeiro will be that of “an even more unequal city, which will exclude thousands of families and destroy entire communities…a project that will appropriate the majority of benefits for a select few economic and social agents.”

One of the main criticisms is the privatisation of public spaces worth millions of dollars. In Rio de Janeiro, sporting facilities like the legendary Maracaná stadium are being renovated, as well as infrastructure and transport facilities, and urban remodelling projects have mushroomed.

The initial budget for investment in the city for the upcoming events has risen by 95 percent, from 1.1 billion dollars to 2.1 billion.

Construction and renovation of stadiums represent nearly 25 percent of this total. Maracaná stadium, where the finals of the 2014 World Cup will be played and where the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games will be held two years later, is the focus of controversy because it has been granted in concession to a private consortium for 35 years.

The cost of the works undertaken was 600 million dollars, compared with the 370 million dollars initially envisaged. The concession of the stadium into private hands for the first time led the public prosecutor’s office to launch an investigation into the state’s investments for the sporting mega-events.

In Gaffney’s view, the sporting facilities will be transformed from cultural spaces into consumption centres.

“Stadiums are the platforms where local culture is expressed in football. It would be virtually cultural assassination to substitute faithful, traditional fans with ‘clients’ or higher class consumers,” he said.

Moreover, the private initiative will also lead to the demolition of a major aquatic park, a public school, an athletics track and a prison, in order to build two multi-storey car parks for 2,000 vehicles, a heliport, a shopping mall and a football museum.

“This shows the vulnerability of Brazilian democracy, even as Brazil is trying to build stronger institutions. The FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games are accelerating anti-democratic processes,” Gaffney said.

Dos Santos Jr. said that society has taken the multi-million dollar renovation passively, and that construction of the Maracaná complex “will bring about the destruction of multi-purpose facilities that were used to practise other sports.

“It will only be a space for show and a commercial centre. Athletes in other disciplines will not have a place to train. And the entrance tickets will be too expensive,” he said.

The People’s Committee intends to present its study to public authorities, FIFA, the International Olympic Committee and international organisations such as the United Nations through its Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing.

In 2012, top TV news stories included elections, violence and extreme weather events in the United States, with little attention paid to most international events. Credit: scott*eric/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jan 17 2013 (IPS)

The presidential election topped news coverage in 2012 from the three major U.S. television networks, closely followed by violence in the United States and Middle East, and extreme weather events in the United States, according to the latest annual review by the authoritative Tyndall Report.

Britain also received a significant amount of airtime on the three most-watched evening news programmes, with the London Olympics and British royal family garnering more attention than any other foreign country or news story except Syria’s civil war, according to the Report.

Syria, the top foreign news story of the year, claimed 461 minutes of network evening news time, or roughly three percent of the total amount of “news” presented by the networks’ weekday evening news programmes, which for most of the public are the most important source of news information.

The Olympics and the British royals together received almost as much attention as Syria – a total of 377 minutes, which was more than the two next biggest foreign stories combined: the December killing in Benghazi of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three of his staff (163 minutes); and the fighting in Afghanistan (158 minutes).

Apart from those stories, the outside world received minimal or no attention, according to the Report, which for over 20 years has tallied the number of minutes that each weekday evening network news programme allocates to news events.

Despite the controversy surrounding immigration and drug-related issues, Mexico received a total of only 44 minutes of coverage by all three network news programmes in 2012, according to Tyndall’s tally. But that was far more than the rest of Latin America.

“Haiti, [Venezuelan President Hugo] Chavez’s illness and election hardly got anything. Nothing on Colombia, except the Secret Service prostitution scandal there,” noted Andrew Tyndall, the Report’s founder and publisher.

The scandal, in which a team of U.S. Secret Service officers was discovered cavorting with prostitutes, claimed 54 minutes of the networks’ time, or ten minutes more than all Mexico-related coverage.

Similarly, sub-Saharan Africa, led by stories about newly independent South Sudan and the “Kony 2012” viral video against the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), received less than 30 minutes’ coverage during 2012, he said.

The vaunted U.S. “pivot” to Asia and rising tensions in the region also received minimal attention.

The Eurozone crisis, which has had a serious impact on and poses still greater risks to the U.S. economy, received a total of 87 minutes of coverage – or about 40 percent less than the British royals.

“Here we are in this globalising economy and culture,” noted Robert Entman, a communications and international affairs professor at George Washington University. “This shows how the ability of Americans to understand this global interdependence is really hindered by the superficial and glancing coverage to what’s going on in the world.”

While Fox News, CNN and MSNBC are widely recognised as important sources of news, the evening news programmes of ABC, NBC, and CBS enjoy roughly seven times the viewership of the cable channels. Together, they have an average nightly news audience of more than 20 million people.

The Report reviews the three evening news programmes, which present an average of about 22 minutes of news each and together nearly 15,000 minutes throughout the year.

As in previous election years, the 2012 presidential race led 2012 coverage with 2,016 minutes – or about 15 percent of total news coverage. The increase in domestic political news during election years has normally come at the expense of international or foreign policy news, and 2012 was no exception, according to Tyndall.

At 461 minutes, the violence in Syria ranked second as a discrete news story, followed by Hurricane Sandy (352 mins); the Summer Olympics (246 mins), and partisan wrangling over the federal deficit (206 mins). The Libya crisis ranked eighth; Afghanistan, tenth; and the British Royals, sixteenth out of the top 20 stories, both foreign and domestic.

In addition to Hurricane Sandy, the top 20 included four other major weather stories: the slew of tornados that hit various parts of the country; the summer’s western wildfires; extreme winter weather early in the year; and Hurricane Isaac, which caused severe damage in the Caribbean and the U.S. Gulf Coast last August.

These five weather events claimed nearly 1,000 minutes of coverage on the three networks, or about seven percent of the year’s total. Yet until Sandy none of the programmes explored the question of their possible relationship to climate change.

“Only one story in the first week of Sandy addressed rising sea levels being possibly related to global warming,” Tyndall told IPS. “That was an angle of the weather stories that was woefully undercovered.”

Extreme weather events in other parts of the world, such as Europe’s harshly cold winter, major flooding in Australia, Brazil, China and the Philippines, and drought in the Sahel, received at most only peripheral coverage on the three networks.

News of ice melting more quickly than anticipated in the Arctic Ocean and Greenland received a total of nine minutes on the three programmes, according to Tyndall.

“It’s been the same for many years now,” said Dan Hallin, a communications professor at the University of California at San Diego about the lack of coverage of climate change. “Sandy produced the beginnings of some discussion of that, but in general, the issue has been glaringly absent.”

On stories with a purely international focus – that is, those that did not include an explicit U.S. foreign-policy angle – Syria ranked at the top, followed by the two British stories, and the political upheaval in Egypt (93 min), which in 2011 received over five times as much coverage.

The sixth-ranked international story last year was the foundering of an Italian cruise liner, followed by the Israel-Palestinian conflict (76 minutes focused mostly on Israel’s Gaza offensive); the aftermath of Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami (45 mins), Greek anti-austerity protests (38 mins); Iran’s nuclear programme (37 mins); and the schools-for-girls campaign in Pakistan (34 mins).

“Outside our borders, it looks either like the froth of the Olympic Games and the royals or violence,” noted Entman. “I think it’s legitimate to take note of both, but there are a lot more important substantive things.”

“The world that is presented on U.S. newscasts is an extraordinarily narrow one,” noted Peter Hart, an analyst at Fairness in Accuracy and Reporting (FAIR), a progressive press watchdog group. “The substantial attention given the British royal family last year is a pretty clear demonstration of what U.S. corporate media think of as important news from abroad.”

Air pollution control: Guanabara Bay seen from the Rio de Janeiro-Niteroi bridge. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 24 2012 (IPS)

Environmental authorities in this southeastern Brazilian city are installing more air quality control stations in the locations where competitions are to be held during the 2016 Olympic Games, so that air pollution will not hurt the athletes’ performance. The 16 new air quality monitoring stations in Rio de Janeiro, which will cost 14 million dollars, will carry out a constant check on emissions of polluting gases like carbon monoxide.

They will also transmit real-time meteorological data minute by minute to a computerised centre at the State Environmental Institute (INEA). The monitoring stations, added to the five that already exist in the city, form part of the “environmental commitment” signed by the government and the Brazilian Olympic Committee, Carlos Minc, the environment secretary for the state of Rio de Janeiro, told IPS.

“Some air pollutants affect athlete performance. Ozone is one of them,” he said. Minc’s interview with IPS took place during the installation of a monitoring centre at the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon, where rowing and other aquatic competitions will be held.

According to Minc, a very small increase in the concentration of ozone (a pollutant and respiratory hazard at ground level) is enough to prevent an athlete setting a new record in a sport such as a marathon or a swimming race.

Expansion of the monitoring network and other local government environmental policies will allow strategies for prevention and immediate action to be implemented in the Olympic areas and generally throughout the city. For instance, if air pollution is detected at the INEA centre, the authorities can make changes such as diverting bus routes, temporarily closing nearby gasoline stations or altering the operating hours of a factory, Minc said.

Build-up of pollutants to the point of air saturation will also be avoided, he said. “This is important because a big city needs a basic monitoring network in order to develop a policy to combat air pollution,” he said.

The programme is complemented by a municipal system of eight automatic monitoring stations working 24 hours a day that issue daily bulletins.

The local government is concerned about extremely densely populated areas where pollution levels are increasing due to growing traffic. At times of prolonged drought, the smog gets worse.

The system will be introduced in outlying parts of Rio de Janeiro by March, as well as in nearby municipalities such as São João de Meriti, Nova Iguaçu e Belford Roxo, São Gonçalo, and the region of Baixada Fluminense.

In some of these areas pollution is intense, particularly because of the dirt roads. Where this problem is detected, the roads will be paved, Marilene Ramos, the head of INEA, told IPS.

Besides providing the public with constantly updated information about the quality of the air that they are breathing, and detecting where the problems are, the most important thing is to arrive at solutions, she said. There are places where traffic jams continually occur, where urgent measures could be taken, she pointed out.

Ramos said “another factor is the 2016 Olympic Games, because we need to know the environmental conditions in which they will be held, and what can be done to reduce problems.”

The problem is “evidently not an easy one to solve, but knowing the facts of the situation is a step towards devising solutions,” she said.

Carlos Fonteles, head of environmental information, monitoring and oversight for the state of Rio de Janeiro, told IPS that the automatic monitoring stations transmit data instantly to a central computer “minute by minute and in real time.

“Previously we only had five automatic stations, and now we are making a great leap forward with these. We are expanding our daily coverage capacity,” he said.

With the first five stations, the local government “had very limited information in those critical areas where there were large traffic corridors and big urban concentrations,” he said. “Now I am able to monitor not only those but other areas as well, and for other purposes, like the Olympic Games,” he said.

David Rudisha, far right, trained with Kenya’s top athletes in a strict regimen of pre-Olympic training before heading off to the games in London. Credit: Brian Ngugi/IPS

By Brian Ngugi
NAIROBI, Aug 1 2012 (IPS)

On a chilly morning at the Moi International Sports Centre in Nairobi, the largest multi-purpose sports centre in Kenya, 800m world record holder David Rudisha looked like just another athlete.

At 1.90m tall, Rudisha is not diminutive. But as he trained with Kenya’s reigning Olympic and world 1,500m champion, 23-year-old Asbel Kiprop, and close to two dozen of the country’s top athletes in a strict regimen of pre-Olympic training, he appeared to be just another member of the Kenyan team.

But Rudisha and his teammates are far from average. The East African nation’s athletics team competing in this year’s summer London Olympics consists of three Olympic and four world champions. Rudisha, 23, has been tipped as a potential favourite to break his own 800m world record time of 1.41.01 at the games.

Vanity Fair called him “the best Olympic track star” yet to be discovered. The magazine said that once he takes to the track in London, Kenya’s star runner will become a global household name – just like the Olympic and world sprint record holder Usain Bolt. However, Rudisha is already a household name in Kenya, with locals nicknaming him “King David”.

Any medals he and his team mates win will really be medals also for the developing world, given that athletics is dominated by sportsmen and sportswomen from the developed world.

But when IPS met with him after his training session, he played down the adoration.

Instead, his mind was focused on winning gold.

For almost a month, the athletes trained uninterrupted and in isolation, with no visitors allowed. But the media was given access to them during one of their last training sessions on home soil before they boarded a flight for the United Kingdom on Jul. 30. The team had opted to remain at high altitude for as long as possible, deciding against training in England.

The soft-spoken athlete told IPS that he was confident of winning a gold medal at his Olympic debut in London.

“I don’t think I am going for anything less than gold. This is my first Olympics. Since I am the world record holder and the world champion, so far, I want to clinch Olympic gold. It is the only medal missing on my shelf,” Rudisha said.

He exuded optimism, buoyed by his good running times this year.

“This is my best year already and I am in the best shape of my life. So I want to go there and win,” Rudisha said.

“There are good guys out there who have processed good times this year, but I am confident because they haven’t come close to what I have done this year. I am very confident, I am in a shape of my own.”

He said spirits in the Kenyan camp were very high and the team expected to win a number of medals at the Olympics.

“We expect good results, and good things to come from this competition,” he added.

Teammate Kiprop told IPS that Kenya currently boasts the best team in middle-distance running, and that the world should expect his country to take all the medals in the 1,500m.

“We have a very strong team in the 1,500m with me, Silas Kiplagat and Nixon Kiplimo Chepseba being the three top athletes in the world at the moment. If things work well, we are surely talking of a clean sweep in the 1,500m,” Kiprop said after his training session.

Also included in the team are double world 5,000m and 10,000 champion Vivian Cheruiyot; reigning 800m Olympic champion Pamela Jelimo; former 800m world champion Janeth Jepkosgei; and world champion marathon runner Edna Kiplagat.

Ezekiel Kemboi is the reigning Olympic 3,000m steeplechase gold medallist, and Brimin Kipruto is the current 3,000m steeplechase world and Olympic champion.

Kiprop, meanwhile, played down expectations of breaking the 1,500m record. He effortlessly won the 1,500m with a world-best time of 3:28.88 at the Herculis Meeting in Monaco in July.

“At the moment I think the first priority is to win an Olympic gold medal, and then we’ll see when to attack the record. If not this year, maybe next year,” he said.

Jepkosgei, the country’s Olympic women’s 800m silver medallist, wants to bring home a gold medal.

She said that her primary focus was to make it to the finals of the 800m.

“Obviously, I want to be on the podium. The 800m is a tactical race, but I am prepared for this,” she told IPS.

Jepkosgei said she anticipated stiff competition in the heats. She singled out African champion Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi, her Kenyan compatriot Jelimo, South Africa’s Caster Semenya and Russia’s Mariya Savinova as some of her biggest threats.

She could not say if she would be able to beat Jelimo if they met in the finals. “I can’t tell if I can beat her, but am going to do my best,” she said.

Indeed Jepkosgei and her fellow athletes know that Kenyans expect nothing less than victory from them. The country’s runners are legendary and Kenya has been a fertile training ground for the development of world record-setting athletes.

Since Kenya participated in the Olympics for the first time in 1956, the country has won a total of 78 medals, mainly in athletics and boxing.

Kenyan Henry Rono is considered the greatest long-distance runner the world has known. In 1978, in less than three months he broke four world records: the 10,000m, the 5,000m, the 3,000m steeplechase, and the 3,000m. It is an achievement that no one has been able to beat.

Kipchoge Keino, a two-time Olympic gold medallist whose winning time at the 1978 Summer Olympics remained the 1,500m record for 16 years, is still a national hero.

Assistant head coach for the Kenyan Olympic team, Sammy Rono, told IPS that they would enter as many athletes as possible in the races as part of the country’s game plan to win as many medals as they could.

“It will then give us a strong base to execute their strategies in the individual races,” Rono said.

“Anything goes in these championships…There is no room for mistakes,” said Rono.

Olympic head coach, Julius Kirwa, told IPS that beyond seeking to maintain the country’s success in middle-distance running, Kenya will aim for medals in the men’s and women’s 10,000m, and in the 5,000m men’s race.

“We have trained well and are hopeful, but at the same time we are cautiously optimistic. In 2008 we had six gold medals; we hope to surpass this number,” he said. The team landed in London on Tuesday Jul. 31.

The Olympics stadium in London.

By Helen Clark
HANOI, Vietnam, Jul 27 2012 (IPS)

Agent Orange (AO), often called the ‘last legacy’ of the United States war in Vietnam (1955-1975), has popped up again thanks to its manufacturer Dow Chemical’s controversial sponsorship of the Olympic Games.

Vietnam is not boycotting the games but has made an official protest to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), with sports minister Hoang Anh Tuan conveying “profound concern” over Dow’s multi-million dollar sponsorship. Agent Orange is the code name for herbicides and defoliants used by the U.S. military as part of its herbicidal warfare programme in Vietnam.

After relations between the U.S. and Vietnam were normalised in 1995, the former earmarked funds for cleanup operations, but these were largely confined to ‘hotspots’ such as former airbases where AO was stored rather than human populations that suffered the drops over a 12-year period.

Growing cooperation between the former enemies can be seen in the three visits by U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton over the last two years. Defence secretary Leon Panetta also visited Vietnam in June.

But, the growing ties have not changed significantly the U.S. attitude in the matter of compensation for human damage caused by AO.

Nguyen Van Rinh, a retired general and head of the Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange, told IPS in an interview:  “Yes, I believe that many Vietnamese are angry with the decision of the Olympics 2012 organisers. And this is completely justified.”

AO contains dioxin, one of the most toxic substances known, and scientists estimate that as little as a few parts per billion can be damaging.

Estimates of people affected by AO range from 2.1 million to over four million, and the Vietnamese government blames it for cancers and birth defects in some 500,000 second and third generation children.

The Vietnam Red Cross has reported that as many as three million Vietnamese have been affected by AO, including at least 150,000 children born with birth defects.

U.S. scientists have however been sceptical of Vietnamese studies and estimates of human damage caused by AO, citing poor scientific research and little peer reviewing of research work.

On the other hand, compensation for suspected AO damage is paid to female U.S. war veterans, and support given to their children. Those born with spina bifida or birth defects from unknown causes, to parents who served in areas where AO was sprayed or stored, are also given support.

The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences concluded in its report, ‘Veterans and Agent Orange: Update 1996 Summary and Research Highlights,’ that “there is limited or suggestive evidence of an association between exposure to herbicides used in Vietnam and spina bifida in children of Vietnam veterans.”

For some time now, environmentalists have also been concerned that Monsanto, which supplies much of the world’s seeds, has been quietly making inroads into Vietnam. They fear a second “haunting legacy” of damage from a conglomerate that was involved in the manufacture of AO.

According to available studies the AO campaign destroyed 10 million hectares of agricultural land and some 20,000 sq km of upland and mangrove forests.

Rinh has already questioned agriculture minister Cao Duc Phat about Monsanto’s work in Vietnam during a National Assembly session.

Rinh told local media later that his questions were only vaguely answered by the minister, and that neither the questions nor the answers were recorded in the minutes of the interaction with the minister.

Chuck Searcy, a veteran of the war who returned to Vietnam over a decade ago to work with unexploded ordnance and mine removal projects, says that “it was the U.S. that started talking about lawsuits and legal issues” over AO.

That the U.S. government would agree – albeit after agitation – that herbicides had caused significant damage to its own service personnel and pay out compensation to them has long angered many in Vietnam.

Says Searcy: “It (GM crops) has started to raise serious suspicions on the part of many Vietnamese because AO was produced by the same companies that claimed that the herbicide was safe.”

A group of over 100 Vietnamese plaintiffs had taken their case to the U.S. Supreme Court, suing both Dow and Monsanto for AO damage. The case, which began in 2004, was thrown out in early March 2009 with the court ruling that there was no established link between dioxin use and birth defects in Vietnam.

Also, under U.S. law, Dow and Monsanto cannot be held responsible since they were acting under government orders.

Reacting to Vietnam’s letter of protest to the IOC, Dow told VietWeek (a weekly English language news magazine published by Thanh Nien News) that the War Production Act absolves the company given that it was compelled by the U.S. government to produce the defoliant.

“I think cooperation between the U.S. and Vietnam in finding and implementing solutions to the AO issue seems to be a little better now,” Rinh told IPS. However, he said, it was still “mostly words” and that “these behaviours constitute only a small effort and are very far from what they should be doing.”

The Olympic Games are widely viewed as a chance for countries to showcase their fastest, strongest, most skilled and disciplined athletes, a time when political, economic and cultural differences are set aside and individuals are judged on personal merit alone.

But the reality is often quite different. When athletes from around the world gather in London this summer for the 2012 Games, they won’t be competing on a level playing field.

Even after total population has been taken into account, the relationship between development and medal totals is a significant one. Credit:U.S. Army/CC BY 2.0

Not surprisingly, recent research shows that for a variety of reasons, poorer countries tend to win fewer medals in the Olympics, with a direct correlation between performance and economic well- being, particularly national infrastructure and social services.

For example, people from poor countries seldom do well in swimming since they usually don’t have access to swimming pools, and the same is true for diving.

In the 2008 Olympics, the first five winners of medals for swimming were the United States, Australia, Great Britain, Japan and Germany.

“Most sports accomplishments require a fair amount of social and financial support for training, facilities and travel,” William Orme, a spokesperson for the United Nations Development Programme Human Development Index Unit, told IPS. “This means that better off countries are usually doing better.”

It’s not just a matter of size, either – even after total population has been taken into account, the relationship between development and medal totals is a significant one.

The report, by researchers at the Institute for Democracy and Conflict Resolution (IDCR) at the University of Essex, analysed the ranking of countries on the UNDP’s Human Development Index and the number of medals handed out at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China.

The U.S. won a total of 110 medals in the 2008 Olympic Games, making it the top performer at Beijing. At the same time, the United States ranked fourth in the 2008 Human Development Index, with a high score of 0.907.

At the other end of the spectrum was conflict-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, whose athletes left Beijing without any medals at all, and which scored 0.24 on the HDI.

The data on these and the other countries participating in the Olympics can be found on a series of web-based maps the Institute for Democracy and Conflict Resolution published on its website.

Orme, who calls the correlation “kind of obvious”, notes that most young people participate in some kind of sports, but when they can go to school, they do it in a more organised fashion. And when they are healthier, they perform better.

Some exceptions to the rule

Researchers note that the imbalance doesn’t hold true for all Olympic athletes across all events. For instance, Ethiopia ranked 157th on the HDI in 2008, with an index of 0.33, but was 29th on the 2008 medals table with seven medals.

In the field of athletics – sprinting, for example – several developing countries scored high, with Kenya ranking third, having won 14 medals, six of them gold. Jamaica came in fourth with 11 medals, and Ethiopia won seven medals.

“Ethiopia is an exception, mainly concerning the sport of running,” Thierry Graf, who served as president of the Ethiopian-Suisse development association Sport – The Bridge, told IPS.

He explained that running – which requires virtually no special equipment – is very popular throughout the country, in cities as well as the countryside.

“Running effectively does not need infrastructure and specific material and thus can be performed by anyone regardless of his or her socio-economic status,” he said.

While running and hurdling need little more than a road or track, good shoes and energy drinks can also boost performance, which might explain why the U.S. still won most of the medals in the field of athletics (a total of 23).

Graf believes that governments should put more emphasis on creating policies that give all citizens, regardless of income, an opportunity to pursue sports.

“Backed by my experience with Sport – The Bridge, I think that the development of ‘sports for all’ can achieve several goals, like social value creation, health and popularisation of a specific sport, at the same time,” he said.

For the Olympic Games to be genuinely open and democratic requires public investment not only in sports facilities, but also in health care and education.

“Having public support for sports and recreation is part of human development,” Orme said. “It’s a question of both public resources and priorities.”

Still, this might not counteract the phenomenon of “muscle drain”, in which talented athletes from poor countries are wooed by wealthy sports clubs abroad.

This practice is named after the “brain drain” in which educated high-tech and medical personnel from India, Cuba or other developing countries are hired by firms and hospitals in Europe or the United States.

The muscle-drain phenomena is most widespread in football, a sport in which the high transfer rates that European players can demand from clubs make them resort to the much cheaper alternative of importing players from developing countries.

“Young people look for a better life. Sports is a field where a huge income jump is possible, and thus they are attracted to try it,” Graf said.

Graf said it was problematic that this was a largely unregulated field, with the danger that young people, who in the end are not good enough to receive a contract on a professional level, are left on their own in the host country, become illegal migrants and are at risk of falling into poverty and criminal activities.

“It would be desirable that such international associations commit themselves to a sort of code of conduct regarding the treatment of the youngsters,” he added.

With less than two months before the London Games open on Jul. 27, 185 countries have qualified at least one athlete to compete.

However, a vast gulf remains. Haiti, still recovering from the effects of its devastating 2010 earthquake, has only qualified two athletes. The country has not won an Olympic medal since 1928.

Meanwhile, the United States currently has 183 Olympic qualifiers, and 64 Paralympic qualifiers.

In a statement, Professor Todd Landman, director of the IDCR, noted, “As we celebrate the wonder of the Olympics this year, it is important to reflect on the politics and economics that shape the games, as well as the many challenging obstacles that this year’s dedicated athletes have had to overcome to take part.

“The financial crisis, the fallout of the Arab Spring and the continued rise of the BRIC countries will certainly be at the forefront of our minds this summer. The Olympic Dream is a small window into the complex world of today.”

By IPS Correspondents
VANCOUVER, Feb 15 2010 (IPS)

The 2010 Winter Olympics opened with the largest protest convergence in the history of the Games.

Protesters gather with the 'Poverty Olympics' torch in foreground. Credit: Anthony Fenton/IPS

As throngs of activists filled the Vancouver Art Gallery – indigenous, anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, environmentalist, anarchist, anti-war, pro-civil liberty, and anti-poverty alike – speakers laid out a laundry list of grievances against the Games.

The speeches opened with homage to the Coast Salish people, on whose unceded territory the demonstration took place. The march itself was led by Native Elders, while the most prominent chant heard was “No Olympics on stolen Native land.”

Olympic Resistance Network organiser Sozan Savehilaghi said, “The Olympics are taking place on lands that have never been surrendered. The people that are going to be impacted in a negative way the most are indigenous people; they have the highest rates of poverty, of abuse, and they are highly over-represented in prisons.”

One Native spokeswoman from the Downtown Eastside, home of the country’s “poorest postal code,” told the audience to “send a prayer to people who think it’s all right to spend this kind of money while people are dying and living in poverty.”

A recent tally by the Vancouver Sun estimated that at least eight billion dollars will be spent on the Games, and there are an estimated 15,000 homeless people in British Columbia. According to a report released by University of British Columbia researchers last December, the number of homeless in Vancouver more than doubled in the years leading up to the Games.

Accordingly, the slogan “homes not games,” was found on many placards, and was a popular chant both before and during the march.

David Eby of the BC Civil Liberties Association called the intrusive role played by the police against anti-Olympic protesters in advance of the Games, “an embarrassment to the country.”

Harassment, surveillance, and attempted infiltration of the anti-Olympics movement has been part of the nearly one-billion-dollar security budget that has seen more than 15,000 police, military, and private security put the Olympic venues and surrounding areas on virtual lockdown for the duration of the Games.

“The people who’ve spoken out against the Games have been visited at their homes, at their work, by the police, as if there is something illegal about saying they do not support the spending of public money on this enterprise,” said Eby.

Christopher Shaw, member of the No Games 2010 Coalition and author of “Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games”, praised those who gathered to protest, while denouncing the “hooliganism, the boosterism, and all the false patriotism that surrounds the games.”

Speaking to the B.C. legislature on Thursday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper led what the Canadian Press called a “nationalistic charge,” unfurling a Canadian flag and pronouncing, “Patriotism, ladies and gentlemen, patriotism as Canadians should not make us feel the least bit shy or embarrassed.”

Placards carried by marchers spoke to the diversity of reasons behind the protests. “Dirty Oilympics funded by tar sands,” expressed the environmental opposition to the Games, while “End Corporate Rule” spoke to popular discontent toward the corporate sponsorship of the Games.

Council of Canadians spokesperson Harjap Grewal called the tar sands, “the biggest most destructive [industrial] project on the planet,” and listed a number of the Olympics’ corporate sponsors that are “profiting off the tar sands” and using the Games to engage in “greenwashing”.

Whereas many of the throngs of onlookers and passerby were bespeckled in the red and white colours of the Team Canada, several marchers carried the flag of the Mohawk Warrior Society, a militant Native organisation that seeks to protect indigenous land, language, and culture.

The march came to a stop on the steps of BC Place, where the opening ceremonies unfolded as scheduled. Over 200 police made a human wall to prevent protesters from reaching the site. As several police on horseback loomed behind the police line, protesters chanted, “Get those animals off those horses!”

Tensions rose as traffic pilons, water bottles, and sticks were thrown across the police line. Police commanders used the commotion to physically push the protesters back, causing a series of brief melees. Two protesters were arrested.

After a nearly two-hour standoff, organisers announced that people should go home and reconvene for additional protests throughout the Olympics.

Following the march, Savehilaghi told reporters, “We were successful in getting our message across, in coming to [BC] place and marching down here and voicing our concerns about the Olympics.”

In contrast to the relatively peaceful rally and march on Friday, early on Saturday morning, approximately 300 activists took to the streets for a march dubbed “heart attack,” which aimed to “clog the arteries of capitalism” and cause a disruption to the Games.

Although mostly a peaceful demonstration, direct action tactics were carried out by what police called a “number of anarchists…a loosely organised group of thugs.” Tactics included smashing the windows of corporate sponsors, overturning newspaper boxes, and vandalism.

Whereas on the eve of the Games, Royal Canadian Mounted Police Assistant Commander Bud Mercer told CNN that they would be overseen by “friendly security,” police on Saturday wore full riot gear as they clashed with protesters.

Saturday’s clashes with police resulted in at least seven arrests. The Vancouver Police Department issued a release denouncing “a criminal element within the legitimate protesters.”

Gord Hill of the Kwakwaka’wakw First Nation, and spokesperson for No2010.com, said “The [International Olympic Committee] and [the Vancouver Organising Committee] is the criminal element, pillaging public coffers, the effects of which we will see long after the Games.”

Hill also disagreed that the level of force used by the police was proportionate to that used by the protesters, adding, “Buildings are not made of flesh and tissue. They are made of concrete and steel.”

Sixty organisations endorsed a statement released by the Olympics Resistance Network on Saturday, which stopped short of denouncing the “heart attack” protest, stating instead “we should avoid characterisations such as ‘bad’ or ‘violent’ protesters. We respectfully request that all those in opposition to the 2010 Olympics maintain our collective and unified commitment to social justice and popular mobilisation efforts in the face of massive attempts to divide us.”

Various protests are slated to continue throughout the Games, including a protest on Monday by the local anti-war organisation, StopWar, against “Olympics security, militarisation of our city, and our country’s treacherous role in the occupations of Afghanistan and Haiti.”

Prior to the Games, Canada’s Governor-General Michaelle Jean unveiled the Olympic Truce Wall at the Olympic Village, stating, “Building peace does not mean simply laying down our weapons.”

Last week, local activist and author Derrick O’Keefe recalled in Vancouver’s Georgia Straight weekly newspaper that in 1980, Canada and the U.S. led a boycott of the Summer Olympics in Moscow due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

“Thirty years later, it is the United States, Canada, and the other NATO countries that are occupying Afghanistan. Instead of a boycott, the Vancouver 2010 Olympics are being used to promote militarism in general and Canada’s role in the occupation of Afghanistan in particular.”

*With additional reporting from the Vancouver Media Cooperative (VMC).

Excerpt:

By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Dec 30 2009 (IPS)

Restrictions on art displays and signage critical of the upcoming February 2010 Winter Olympics and the creation of a massive high-tech security network are putting a damper in some residents’ minds on what should be a celebratory sports extravaganza in Vancouver.

A group of Canadian academics issued a statement last month expressing concern that “a climate of fear, heightened security and surveillance” surrounds the upcoming event.

A spokesperson for Vancouver’s Integrated Security Unit (ISU), made up of local city police and the federal police force, defended the security blanket that is enveloping the upcoming Winter Olympics.

“V2010 ISU is committed to and will continue to uphold and respect individuals’ charter rights in accordance with Canadian law, all the while ensuring safe and secure Winter Games for Canadians and visitors to Canada,” ISU’s Sgt. Mike Cote told local media over the summer.

But critics should not be solely directing their ire at the Vancouver Organising Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympics Winter Games (VANOC), which is made up of representation of all three levels of government, said Helen Lenskyj, a professor emeritus in sociology at the University of Toronto.

Their authoritarian aspects originate with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) which imposes a series of strict conditions on the cities, including Vancouver, that have won the highly prized bid to host the Olympics, she told IPS.

The author of three books on what she calls “the Olympics industry”, Lenskyj said the IOC’s charter specifically demands that the host city prohibit political demonstrations or assembly in or near the Olympic venues.

She was referring to section 51 of the latest version of the IOC charter, which stipulates that “no kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas”.

In addition, the IOC’s contract with the current host city Vancouver includes a provision that “no propaganda or advertising is placed within the Olympic venues or outside the Olympic venues in such a manner so as to be within the view of the television cameras covering the sports at the Games or of the spectators watching the sports at the Games”.

“The IOC calls the shots and if that contravenes the human rights provisions of a country, so be it because a country forfeits the right to challenge the human rights legislation,” Lenskyj warned.

Also adversely affected are a group of young Canadian female ski jumpers who have been unsuccessful in eliminating the IOC’s ban on women’s participation in the official Olympic ski jumping competition.

In a series of “head-scratching decisions”, Canadian courts have told the women that the equality provisions in the constitutionally entrenched Charter of Rights do not apply to VANOC, said Micheal Vonn, policy director for the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association.

“VANOC is running a sports event that is deeply embedded within the governments of the city Vancouver, the government of British Columbia and the government of Canada,” she told IPS. “So, the charter should apply. Unfortunately, because VANOC is governed by the IOC, even though the charter applies, it can’t be enforced.”

She described VANOC as a highly secretive body that does not make the minutes of its meetings with government officials publicly available, and is exempt from freedom of information laws.

One bright spot, Vonn added, is that Canadian courts have overturned a law that gave the host municipalities the power to enter residences and other private property to seize signs deemed “anti-Olympic”, and allowed for fines of up to 10,000 dollars and imprisonment for up to six months for violations.

“The city caved and amended its bylaws,” she said.

On the other hand, concerns abound that Vancouver may be following in the footsteps of other Olympic host cities in purging the downtown where the Games’ venues are situated of poor people and the homeless.

Vancouver’s measures include a security zone and the passage of a law by the province of British Columbia that allows local police to force homeless people into shelters during extreme winter weather, Vonn stated.

“The idea here is if you have the ability to essentially take people off the streets, you assuredly have another tool in the tool kit to remove unsightly people,” she said.

But it is the application of military-style security technology in recent mega sporting events such as the Vancouver winter Olympics, where the budget is approaching a billion dollars – a sharp rise from the initial estimates of a little under 200 million – that is drawing considerable scrutiny in some quarters.

A raft of security measures are being implemented at the upcoming winter Olympics “to make people, places and processes visible in new ways using diverse tactics and technologies,” said Kevin Haggerty, a University of Alberta sociologist and an expert on policing surveillance technology.

In a recent report for the privacy commissioner of the neighbouring province of Alberta, Haggerty cited the adoption by VANOC and the ISU of CCTV cameras, satellite monitoring, cellular telephone monitoring, computerised background checks, biometric identification cards, toxic material scanners and detectors, traveler profiles and overhead communications/monitoring blimps, among other technologies.

“[Authorities] are capitalising on the fact that in anticipation of the Games, citizens tend to be more tolerant of intrusive security measures,” he told IPS.

However, Haggerty warned of surveillance overkill, where Olympic-style security can percolate into more mundane contexts in a relatively peaceful city like Vancouver. “The [Olympic] Games themselves provide a glimpse of a possible militarised, surveilled urban future,” he said.

In interviews with VANOC and the ISU, Haggerty said he faced an insurmountable brick wall in terms of getting a handle on their security and surveillance strategies.

One item that Haggerty could confirm is that Winter Olympic officials plan to photograph Vancouver neighbourhoods with high resolution satellite-mounted cameras.

“Satellite imaging is a fairly new and intensive way for physically dispersed audiences to view phenomena that were previously more difficult to monitor,” said Haggerty.

At the same time, Haggerty added that he does not expect Vancouver to adopt the level of security witnessed in Beijing, where about 300,000 CCTV cameras were installed in what was described as the largest CCTV network in existence.

Meanwhile, Helen Lenskyj suggested that increased security is the direct result of the need to protect valuable corporate sponsorships in the mega sports event, especially since the highly profitable 1984 Los Angeles summer games and coupled with the real potential for terrorism following the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes in the Munich Games and the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington.

“The big multinationals in the categories of IT [information technology], sportswear, bottled water, airlines, car rentals and whatever pay a huge amount of money for that privilege [of corporate sponsorship] and they get exclusive rights,” she said. “And security is actually protecting their rights from ambush marketing [from competitors].”

Albeit stretched by its Afghanistan commitment, Canada’s military will be providing possibly thousands of troops to back up efforts by the local police and the federal Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) at Vancouver’s winter Olympics.

“There will be a lot of surveillance missions as well as securing the backcountry in an alpine environment,” Captain Chris Poulton, a Canadian Forces spokesperson, told reporters recently. “They will be the ears and eyes of the RCMP.”

The role of U.S. law enforcement authorities in the neighbouring state of Washington, across the international border from Vancouver, remains a bit of a mystery, added Micheal Vonn.

Concerns have been raised by civil libertarians that information about Canadian citizens has flowed into U.S. databases, but Vonn’s organisation has no solid evidence so far to back this up.

However, “There is no doubt that there is coordination with security folks across the border,” she told IPS.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
DILI, Jul 6 2009 (IPS)

Getting around isn’t easy for Jose Noronha. With minimal use of his legs, he has opted for a red wheelchair-bicycle hybrid that he pedals with his hands, a common sight in Dili, East Timor’s capital.

In a small field with patches of grass and mounds of sand, he is out of his chair, alternating a pair of flip flops between his hands and feet as he shuffles into position.

Picking up a five kilogram shotput, he swings back and forth before unleashing a piercing growl as he launches the metal ball into the air. He watches it land five metres away.

“I enjoy doing this,” he says. “Because I can practise like this, I can be happy; I can do something.”

Part of the nation’s under-supported troop of disabled athletes, 46-year-old Noronha first started throwing shotputs in 1991 during the Indonesian occupation, which lasted for 24 years until 1999.

“I practise here four times a week, lifting and throwing,” says Noronha, who services radios and televisions when he’s not hurling shotputs.

He had been hoping to secure a spot at this month’s Lusophony Games in Portugal, but a dearth of funding opportunities means that East Timor can only send two athletes.

Manuel Marquis, 27, an ambulant athlete with an impaired leg and arm function, is one of the lucky ones. Running back and forth along the field, Marquis thunders across the grass as beads of sweat dribble off his body.

Marquis will go to Portugal to compete in three long-distance events: the 5,000 metres, 10,000 metres and a 21-kilometre mini-marathon.

“When I go to represent my country, the main thing I want to do is make a lot of effort,” he says. “Even if I don’t win any medals, at least I can try.”

Marquis and Noronha aren’t the only ones training in Dili. Near the patchy field, Juliao Soares da Silva, head of East Timor’s National Paralympics Committee, has opened up his home to the nation’s disabled athletes.

Space is limited at the family residence, where da Silva lives with his wife, five sons, six daughters and an ebullient bunch of nieces and nephews.

Da Silva went to the Asean ParaGames in Vietnam in 2003 under the flag of the United Nations. “They recommended for us to go back to our country and build a Paralympics organisation,” he says.

The National Paralympics Committee was formed in 2004 with da Silva at the helm. Since then, East Timor’s disabled athletes have been all over the world.

Pascoela Pereira, 28, was at the Arafura Games held in Darwin, Australia, this May, from which East Timor brought back 13 medals. Her skinny legs may be weak, but put a table tennis bat in her hand and she can do some damage. Pereira first got involved with the team in 2007.

“I was just walking around one time when some guy called to me to ask me to be an athlete. I asked him, ‘How Come?’ I didn’t know there was this. He told me that I could go to Mr Juliao’s house and so Mr Juliao asked if I can play table tennis,” she says.

“I said, ‘Not too much,’ but he taught me how and I liked it, so I started to play. It makes me stronger and I’m happy to move,” adds Pereira, who is now the coordinator for the women’s Paralympic team.

Pereira came home from the Arafura games with a silver and a bronze medal.

“My family says that if I’m happy, they’re happy. When I came back from the Arafura Games, my mum said I made her proud. She gave me a hug and kisses,” says Pereira, who works as a nanny for an expat couple in her spare time.

Next up for Pereira is this year’s Asean ParaGames in Malaysia, slated for August.

Despite all this hope and success, Juliao Soares da Silva says East Timor’s disabled athletes are a force in need.

“We’ve been working for about six years, but we don’t get enough support from the government or anyone else. We get support, with uniforms, tickets and hotels, only if there is a big event on,” says da Silva, who buys most of the squad’s equipment.

“We see that disabled people have a talent and we want to build that talent,” he adds.

Other sports the disabled athletes take part in include badminton, power lifting and athletics.

In da Silva’s backyard there is a hustle of activity around a ping pong table where athletes take turns to slug it out. Some use wheelchairs, one has an amputated arm and others stand on club feet or weakened legs.

Across town from da Silva’s house, down a rocky, dusty road, there is a small, sweaty shed with no air and a lot of old weightlifting equipment.

With his legs strapped to a bench, 28-year-old Jacinto Pereira bench presses a barbell in front of old wrestling posters, all under the watchful eye of Domingos Freitas, president of East Timor’s Disabled Power Lifting Federation.

Pereira says he can bench press 120 kilograms, but he doesn’t have much hope of winning any medals in the future because of a lack of decent training equipment and facilities.

August’s Asean ParaGames and the 2012 London Paralympic Games are some of the major events East Timor’s seven disabled power lifters are aiming for, but the athletes are in dire need of aid.

“If we’re going to get to London, we need more support. We need more barbells, weights, benches. We’ve had to buy all the equipment ourselves,” says Freitas.

In the meantime, people like shot-putter Noronha, runner Marquis, table-tennis star Pascoela Pereira and power lifter Jacinto Pereira will carry on with their preparations for international events.

“For all the disabled people in East Timor, I say don’t be so frustrated,” Pereira says. “You can do something for your country even though you’re disabled.”

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
BEIJING, Apr 21 2009 (IPS)

At first it was nothing out of the ordinary. A book intriguingly titled ‘China Is Not Happy’ was expected to generate a buzz because it claimed to detail the world’s most populous nation and aspiring superpower’s resentment of foreign abuses.

But, the book appears to have struck a cord with Chinese readers on a level that it was perhaps not intended to. In a surprising twist, the volume – which set out to arouse national indignation at foreign powers’ treatment of China – has burst open the Chinese people’s grievances with their own government.

Waves of commentary have filtered out of cyberspace and into the pages of some state-sanctioned media.

"Outwardly this is a book about patriotism," said commentator Chang Ping in the liberal Southern Weekend newspaper. "The problem is that it does not help China solve its problems by revealing them. On the opposite, it wants China to succeed by hating other countries and by castigating Chinese people that like other countries."

But, "Indeed, how can Chinese people be happy?" asked Chang. "Their children drink poisoned milk and get kidney stones; husbands go underground to dig coal and get buried there; petitioners who line up to complain are sent to mental hospitals. Meanwhile, even the cigarettes smoked by public officials cost a fortune."

Among the book’s defendants are some who are perceived as proponents of government views. Veteran journalist Xiong Lei – who after retiring from the official Xinhua News Agency now works as a council member for the China Society for Human Rights Studies – argued that the book could be seen as an expression of China’s dissatisfaction with the current unfair world order.

"People certainly have the right to be unhappy with such inequity," she wrote in the official China Daily. "It is understandable too, that some people demand reform of the existing political and economic systems of our global village."

"The book ‘China Is Not Happy’ is only valuable for its title," contends Song Shinan, a blogger based in Sichuan province where last year a devastating earthquake buried thousands of children in the debris of shoddily built school buildings. "All the 340,000 words in the book should be removed and replaced with only these five characters printed on the cover… These five characters will inevitably resonate with the absolute majority of the Chinese population."

The list of unhappy people provided by Song reads like an almanac of China’s social groups. They include children trafficked for slave labour, prisoners killed in detention from torture, migrant workers deprived of jobs, college students left unemployed, intellectuals accused of crimes because of their speech, and "all those Chinese people who quietly cry at night because they have been humiliated or injured." Yes, China is unhappy, he concludes.

The communist party, which has held power since 1949 faces a swell of popular discontent over rampant corruption, income disparity and its failure to prevent children’s deaths in last year’s Sichuan earthquake, and the scandalous cover up of contaminated infant milk formula that has poisoned over 300,000 babies.

Oct. 1 marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of communist China. Jun. 4 brings the 20th anniversary of pro-democracy students’ demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and their violent suppression.

The inward criticism of China’s problems generated by the book was perhaps not the foremost result the book’s authors had hoped for. Although they do vent their ire at targets at home, the authors’ biggest scorn however is reserved for the outside world’s unfair treatment of China.

A collection of loosely linked essays, ‘China Is Not Happy’ takes off from where a 1996 runaway nationalist bestseller ‘China Can Say No’ left off. Both are written by a group of intellectuals and academics that describe themselves as speakers for the emboldened Chinese public – daring to criticise and demand from its government.

While the first book was written as an outburst of anger against the West in the aftermath of the NATO bombing of China’s embassy in Yugoslavia, the second one is released as a reflection on the problems encountered by China in its year of Olympic triumph.

The book contends that protests that marred Beijing’s Olympics last year testify to a continuing foreign disdain for China while the foreign "ghosts" behind the riots in Tibetan capital Lhasa in March 2008 show the extent of the country’s "strategic encirclement by the Western world."

Liu Yang, one of the authors, argues that China "must not let the United States kidnap the world" and rebukes Chinese reformers for "blindly following the American model" instead of blazing China’s own path.

"These foreign slaves have not only transformed Chinese economy into an American appendage, they have themselves become American dependents," he writes.

Another one of the writers, Song Qiang, advocates that China should "hold up its sword" as this is the only way to build a strong nation. China should bravely protect international security as a way of clearing a path towards becoming a superpower, Song said.

The binding element of the book is a brand of disgruntled nationalism, preaching that Beijing should start wielding its clout abroad more forcefully and reject any kinds of intellectual soul-searching that distracts it from achieving the "big goal" of becoming a superpower.

Unhappy or not, the book’s authors are certainly not displeased with its sales record. Already in its eighth edition since release in mid-March, ‘China Is Not Happy’ is reported to have sold about half a million copies.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
VANCOUVER, Dec 1 2008 (IPS)

A coalition of indigenous elders, social justice activists and community organisers is voicing opposition to the upcoming Winter Olympics, promising to continue their protests up to and throughout the 2010 games.

Taking advantage of a three-day media briefing hosted by the official Olympic body in late November, the Vancouver Organising Committee (VANOC), activists and native representatives invited the local and visiting international media to an office in the heart of the what is commonly known as Canada's poorest neighbourhood, the Downtown Eastside, to hear "the other side of the Olympic story".

Rallying under the banner of "No Olympics on stolen native land", speakers representing nine native and community groups outlined connections between native poverty, dislocation and homelessness and the staging of the games in Vancouver and Whistler, 120 kms north of Vancouver.

Arthur Manuel, a former chief in the Neskonlith Indian Band of the Secwepemc nation, accused the Canadian government of attempting to whitewash the structural violations of native sovereignty. "We are the poorest people in the country," Manuel said. "Not because this country is poor, but because [the government] continues to violate the human rights of the indigenous people, by not recognising our Aboriginal title and our treaty rights."

Nearly all of the province of British Columbia – including the land on which the Vancouver-Whistler Olympics will be staged – is not subject to any treaty and the land has not been otherwise ceded or surrendered by its indigenous inhabitants, as Canada's highest court has recognised.

Manuel cited Canada's refusal to sign on to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as evidence that the government does not intend to follow the principles of international law in dealing with native sovereignty. In September 2007, the U.N. declaration was passed 143 to four, with the United States, Australia and New Zealand joining Canada in opposition.

James Louie, a member of the St'at'imc nation whose traditional lands encompass the rapidly expanding Whistler mountain and resort, said the expansion of infrastructure and development for the Olympics undermines the status of his people's case before the Organisation of American States treaty process.

"Because we have no treaty with Canada, the imposition and encroachment of Whistler – their hydro lines, their highways, their railroad, you name it, anything they do with our territory – is illegal," Louie said.

The Olympics have spurred a construction and development boom in Vancouver and Whistler in particular, and in British Columbia in general. Between July and September 2007, 843 major capital projects were planned or underway throughout British Columbia, valued at U.S. 108 billion dollars, according to the provincial government's ministry of economic development.

A VANOC budget report last year pegged the operating costs for the games at 1.32 billion dollars. The provincial and federal governments have provided an additional 468 million dollars, primarily for venue construction, including ski hill development in St'at'imc territory. The official Olympics budget does not include major infrastructural projects undertaken by the government in preparation for the February 2010 games, including the 484-million-dollar expansion of the Vancouver-to-Whistler highway.

Seislom, a Lil'wat elder who is also known as Glen Williams, addressed the legacy of the expansion around Whistler and its impact on the environment. "When my grandfather took me up Whistler mountain, the land was pure. Now it's polluted, it's desecrated. I ask myself the question: what will my grandchildren get from all of this?"

According to VANOC, 20.5 million dollars in venue construction and 95,163 dollars in non-venue contracts have been awarded to Aboriginal businesses through an incorporated native society called the Four Host First Nations Society (FHFN).

Several speakers challenged the role of FHFN in their communities.

Seislom said the FHFN "choose not to recognise traditional, hereditary chieftainships" and instead only "recognise their own chieftainships in terms of corporate development, in terms of the Department of Indian Affairs, in terms of anything to do with money and power."

Dustin Johnson, a Tsimshian activist and organiser, also questioned the legitimacy of the FHFN. "It is important to make a distinction between elected leaders under the Canadian Indian Act system and the traditional governments, the traditional leaders," he said.

Canada imposed the Indian reserve and band council system through Indian Act of 1876, nine years after the country was founded. It wasn't until 1953 that the Act was amended to allow natives to organise around a land claim, which had previously been illegal.

Johnson characterised the Four Host First Nation Society as a small group of "elite native capitalists who don't represent the majority of native people".

"They'll paint the picture that they are trying to create economic development and self sufficiency, but it's really twisting the logic of what our people stand for: a lot of our people stand for sustainable development and protecting what little we have left of our lands and resources," Johnson said.

Arthur Manuel criticised the government and the FHFN for spending millions showcasing native arts and culture while ignoring the structural causes of the poverty. "They are using that money for the purpose of disguising the violations of human rights of the indigenous people of this country."

The BC Child and Youth Advocacy Coalition last week issued a report that showed BC for the fifth-straight year has the highest rate of child poverty in Canada, at almost 22 percent. The rate for native children is 40 percent but, the report notes, "the number would be significantly higher if the data had included children living on reserve." Recent statistics from the Canadian government's Department of Indian and Northern Affairs put the number of natives in BC at 122,000; about half live on reserves.

In Vancouver, the largest urban centre to host a Winter Olympics, there is likely as many as 8,000 homeless people, according to researchers at Simon Fraser University's Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addiction, a disproportionate number of whom are native.

The rates of child poverty and homelessness continue to increase.

Laura Track, a lawyer with the Downtown Eastside's Pivot Legal Society, said that over 1,400 units of affordable housing have been lost since Vancouver was awarded the games in July 2003. Hundreds of tenants have been evicted from single-room occupancy hotels in the Downtown Eastside, as the Olympic-borne real estate development boom has deepened the homelessness crisis.

Outgoing Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan, who presided over a sharp increase in homelessness during his tenure, has called the crisis "a civic, and provincial and national shame."

Vancouver is anticipating as many as two million visitors during the XXI Winter Olympic Games to be held from Feb. 12-28, 2010. According to VANOC spokesperson Suzanne Walters, more than 10,000 members of the media are expected for the games, including 2,900 print and photo-journalists.

Excerpt:

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Aug 26 2008 (IPS)

Cuba has had a rude awakening from a three-decade dream as undisputed Olympic games leader in Latin America and the Caribbean, turning in the worst performance since Mexico City in 1968.

Cuba’s slide, down to 28th place in the overall medals count in Beijing, behind Jamaica and Brazil, could mark the low point in a decline that was already noted in the latest regional competitions, and the start of a transformation in the field of sports, whose successes have long been held up as achievements of the socialist system.

“There’s always a silver lining; these results could open the eyes of many people as to what is happening with sports in our country,” Ángel Gutiérrez, who worked as a physical education teacher for over 20 years, told IPS.

“There were obvious problems with training in some disciplines, athletes who did not reach their full potential and others who showed a lack of psychological preparation at key moments,” said Gutiérrez.

In that respect, the former phys-ed teacher concurred with a reporter at Granma, the Communist Party daily, who wrote that shortcomings in technical and tactical preparation in sports like judo and baseball, and on the psychological level in women’s volleyball, destroyed the hopes of bringing home medals in those sports.

In Beijing, Cuba won two gold, 11 silver and 11 bronze medals, the smallest number since Moscow in 1980, when it brought home 20, and the worst ranking since Mexico City in 1968, when it finished in 31st place.

The loss of ground had already been noticed at the 2006 Central American and Caribbean Games in Cartagena, Colombia, and the 2007 Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In the former, Cuba’s advantage over Mexico, its closest rival, shrank, and in the latter, Cuba took more gold medals than Brazil but less medals overall.

“We have rested on our laurels,” wrote Fidel Castro in one of his regular columns, published Monday by the press.

The ailing 82-year-old former president called for a review of “every discipline and all human and material resources that we dedicate to sports.”

Castro, who had urged Cuba’s athletes to remember the motto of the ancient Spartans: return “with your shield or on your shield,” called for an in-depth analysis and the application of “new ideas, concepts and know-how.”

Before the games, Castro had suggested a “truly democratic in-depth debate on the responsibility” of everyone involved in Cuban sports.

Cuba took part in the 29th Olympic Games with a delegation of 165 athletes competing in 16 disciplines, and the goal of ranking within the first 15 spots on the medals chart.

In his column, Castro also lashed out against the “boxing mafia” that he said managed to deceive the International Olympic Committee and “shamelessly stole the fights from two Cuban boxers in the semifinals.”

“It was a crime what they did with the young men from our boxing team, to complement the work of those who go about stealing athletes from the Third World,” wrote Castro.

Cuba’s boxers, who have traditionally brought home gold medals, returned without any this time around, although they did take four silver and four bronze medals, despite their lack of experience.

In the past two years, the Cuban boxing team lost four gold medallists from the 2004 Olympics in Athens, three of whom defected and are now professional boxers, and one of whom was punished for trying to do the same.

Fidel Castro banned professional boxing in Cuba in 1962.

Defections have also hurt sports like baseball, volleyball, judo and track and field, in which Cuba has a strong tradition.

But perhaps the most painful defeat was in baseball, this country’s most popular sport, when the national team lost 3-2 to South Korea in a decisive match, which could be the last in this discipline’s brief time in the Olympics, which began in Barcelona in 1992.

“We have to improve the quality of our National Series, review our selection and training methods, align ourselves with those who are doing better, and reduce the pressure that we all put on our players and coaches, who are questioned at every turn, every decision,” journalist Sigfredo Barros wrote in Granma.

“The sport has been mixed up in politics and that has put even more pressure on the athletes, especially our baseball players,” 63-year-old Miguel Espinosa, who played on children and youth teams in the 1950s and 1960s, told IPS.

“The glory of our country cannot depend on batting at just the right time or making a winning shot, as if each competition was a battle field,” said Espinosa. “They are athletes, not soldiers.”

Fomenting mass participation in sports was one of the first steps taken by the Cuban government after the 1959 revolution. In 1961, the government created the National Institute of Sports, Physical Education and Recreation, under the premise that “sports are a right of the people.”

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
OSLO, Aug 25 2008 (IPS)

While China’s dramatic last-minute measures to cut pollution during the Beijing Olympics grabbed headlines, a little publicised Norwegian project in Guizhou province shows just how difficult it will be to make lasting changes.

The project appears to have made some real headway in Zunyi – one of China’s most polluted cities about 1,600 km south-west of Beijing in Guizhou, one of China’s poorest provinces – but a new report shows that donor incompetence, local corruption, and China’s economic rise pose serious challenges.

Spearheaded by the Norwegian Pollution Control Authority in cooperation with the Environmental Protection Bureau (EPB) in Zunyi, the project focuses on training pollution monitors and improving information management at the EPB, as well as raising awareness among large industrial polluters.

“Zunyi has high levels of industrial activity and serious problems with pollution that need to be dealt with. It was decided to embark on this project as the local environmental authorities had very little capacity or skills to handle the problems themselves,” Hans Olav Ibrekk at Norway’s development agency Norad told IPS.

Ibrekk and two of his colleagues have written a report on the project in Zunyi, which is due to finish at the end of September following a three-year run.

“The main focus has been on training the inspectors to do a better job when examining local factories. This has involved everything from equipping them with simple measuring instruments to refocusing their attention on the production process as a whole instead of just the pollution that comes out of the pipes,” Ibrekk said.

The hope is that by pushing factories to focus on the production process, they will be able to reduce pollution more effectively than if they simply try to filter the pollutants as they are released into the sea and air.

“It’s about making better use of chemicals, saving electricity, reducing emissions, and generally making the process more effective. Norway and Europe have evolved similarly in their approaches,” he said.

The project has focused on 22 factories identified as strong polluters. Inspectors visit the factories at least once a month, while the worst offenders are examined more closely.

With the new instruments the inspectors can measure emission levels at the factories, but also pollution levels in the local air and sea, which in turn give a more complete picture of total emissions by each factory.

“The project seems to have succeeded in establishing a relatively good dialogue between the inspectors and factory owners and directors, who seem to understand that cleaning up their production processes is not so expensive, and can be economically beneficial over time,” Ibrekk explained.

Despite the progress that has been achieved, the Norad report shows that the project has also been hampered by a series of weaknesses.

One of the most serious issues relates to the lack of a proper exit strategy. Such a strategy should ensure that everything that has been learned by the environmental authorities will not simply be confined to the 20 inspectors that have been trained by Norway.

The long-term goal is that the lessons of the project will be spread further afield than Zunyi, but the inspectors in the other EPBs in Guizhou – around 50 according to the report – have only received very basic training. This is particularly problematic as the 20 inspectors that have been schooled have not been taught according to the ‘train-the-trainer’ approach, which would have made it easier for them to go on to train others in the future.

“Those we interviewed didn’t believe that any of the 20 inspectors would be able to pass on their knowledge to inspectors in EPBs in other towns around the province in an effective way. The project was not designed to include train-the-trainer, but we think that it should have been,” said Ibrekk.

One of the main aims of the project has been to ensure that it can be replicated across the country. This was meant to be the responsibility of China’s State Environmental Protection Administration, but as it has only attended high-level meetings and has not followed the day to day running of the project, Ibrekk doubts that such a national project will be possible.

“Our conclusion is that this will be a city-level, and partially provincial-level intervention, but with little effect on the central level,” Ibrekk said.

He believes that the fundamental problem is that the project is small and has been somewhat sidelined by rapidly changing national policies under the new wave of environmental awareness that has spread through the country in recent years.

Because of an outdated project plan which was finalised more than two years before the project began, as well as a rigid project framework not suited to adaptation, the initiative quickly found itself outmanoeuvred by events in the world.

“The Chinese really seem dedicated to the project even though they had to finance large parts of it themselves. This indicates that it is something they find important, so I’m sure it will have a lasting impact in Zunyi,” Ibrekk said.

“We will just have to cross our fingers and hope that some of the lessons will spread to the other EPB’s in Guizhou, and yes, pray to higher forces that they will also have some effect on a national level – which could happen if one manages to document some concrete environmental results from the project, and if we get a proper exit strategy for ensuring that more inspectors are trained.”

However, it is somewhat doubtful that the project participants will have time to prepare a proper exit strategy before the project ends next month, Ibrekk points out.

The problems are not confined to the project itself, however. Chinese corruption is also a challenge. While improved reporting mechanisms have made it easier for the inspectors in Zunyi to catch and fine those that do not comply with environmental regulations, it is unclear to what extent this is enough to make well-connected polluters clean up their act.

“There is of course a real danger here. As some of these factories are state-owned, with cosy relationships with local administrators and inspectors, it is not clear that they will be fined, or will care about it,” Ibrekk warned.

“We didn’t receive a satisfactory answer to our questions about penalties for the polluters, so there is some reason to doubt the fundamental willingness of the system to carry out measures. Having said that, the Beijing Olympics have demonstrated that when they want, the authorities are willing to make a huge effort to curb pollution, but it is questionable whether this applies way out in Zunyi.”

To minimise pollution in Beijing during this year’s Olympics, the government halved the number of cars on the road, and banned most industrial activity. While this may have had some effect in the short term, it seems likely that other measures will have to be implemented for more lasting change.

“The actions that have been taken for the Olympics are definitely not sustainable if they are to be combined with economic development. It is clear that other measures have to be taken,” Ibrekk said.

“Of course, China is in the same situation that we in the north were in a few decades ago, with high levels of industrial emissions. They will either have to implement some radically new initiatives, or solve the problem through long-term economic development, as we did. But that takes a long time, and so the question is whether we can help them to skip some of the steps we had to follow.

“I doubt it will be possible in Beijing, where one thousand new cars hit the streets every day – an enormous figure. But they have a right to do that, as we did. The question is whether it will have such serious repercussions for their own environment that they will be forced to adjust course.”

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
BEIJING, Aug 24 2008 (IPS)

As the curtain falls on the Beijing Olympics, the race is on to define the legacy of one of the most controversial games in history. For the host country, these are the "millennium games", which herald the dawn of the ‘Asian century’ where China reigns supreme.

The Olympic flame at Beijing's Bird's Nest stadium. Credit: Antoaneta Bezlova/IPS

Did China dazzle or did it not? Did the outside world see the real face of this up and coming superpower? The gap of perceptions between China and the outside world looms ever larger in the definition of these much contested games.

The tone of Chinese media has been one of utmost affirmation. "These are the millennium Olympics," declared an editorial in the China Times. "The 21st century belongs to Asia and Beijing Olympics are its most befitting symbol".

"The Olympics of China’s renaissance,’’ appraised the 21st Century Business Herald, reminding outsiders that back in 1830 China was a rich country, which accounted for one third of the world’s economic output. "The current rise of China is merely a reinstatement of the old status quo," it said.

‘The Beijing Olympic Games are a milestone in the course of the great reinvigoration of the China nation," a commentary by the government’s Xinhua News Agency concurred.

The comeback from a century of weakness and humiliation when China was referred to as the "sick man of Asia" is being portrayed here as a victory delivered to the people by the Communist party. An astounding amount of work had gone into perfecting the timing and setting of the Olympic games so as to fit the big picture of China’s rebirth as a great country.

"Everything is permeated with the idea that this rare combination of cosmic luck and national honour has been delivered to the people by their leaders,’’ says Liu Junning, an analyst with the Chinese Cultural Studies Institute in Beijing.

As rulers of a one-party state, Chinese leaders do not have to worry about their ratings of approval with the public. Yet appearances suggest that their legitimacy has been boosted with the staging of the successful games.

A billion people are estimated to have watched the Aug. 8 opening ceremony. According to the International Olympic Committee, the Beijing games have been the most watched Olympic games ever. Tourists have come and gone dazzled by the stunning Olympic venues, the superb organisation and warm reception in Beijing.

To top it all, China put a show of sporting prowess, bagging the largest number of golds in the history of its Olympic participation. For the first time too, China overtook the United States in the gold medal count. The U.S. won in the overall medal count.

Seen from here, there is little evident controversy to spoil the big China celebration. Chinese authorities revoked the visa of U.S. Olympic gold medalist Joey Cheek, a prominent critic of China’s reputed role in the humanitarian crisis in Sudan. However irked they were by the "genocide Olympics" label that Darfur-cause advocates have come up with, they managed to contain the debate on China’s role in the Darfur crises on the fringes of the Olympics.

Draconian security measures ensured that no protests marred the course of the games.

Having set up three protest zones, Beijing leaders then refused to grant any permits to people who wanted to protest. Two elderly women in their seventies were sentenced this week to a year of "re-education through labour" after they repeatedly sought a permit to demonstrate their wrongful eviction from their Beijing homes.

Journalists covering the few isolated attempts by foreigners to stage protests were roughed up and threatened. The offenders were quickly expelled and no domestic media ever mentioned the incidents.

But reminders of the controversy surrounding China’s hosting of the games kept cropping up even as the hosts marched towards their great finale.

The Dalia Lama condemned firings at Tibetan protesters that took place this week as Beijing hosted the Olympics. Speaking in France, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader said Chinese troops fired on a crowd on August 18 in the Kham region in eastern Tibet, killing and wounding protesters.

In an interview with Le Monde, the Dalai Lama said that since March 400 Tibetans have been killed in a Chinese crackdown in the Tibetan capital alone. "Killed by bullets, even though they were protesting without weapons. Their bodies were never given back to their families. If you consider the whole of Tibet, the number of victims is obviously higher," he was quoted as saying.

Unrest erupted in Lhasa in March after four days of protests against Chinese rule. China’s harsh response to it drew protests during the Olympic torch relay in many countries. In the run up to the Olympics and during their early days, militant Uighur minorities in the restive Xinjiang region carried out several attacks on government and police personnel.

But in Beijing the games proceeded behind a great wall of security.

"As we feared, the Beijing Olympic games have been a period conducive to arrests, convictions, censorship, surveillance and harassment of more than 100 journalists, bloggers and dissidents," Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Robert Ménard said in a statement.

"This repression will be remembered as one of the defining characteristics of the Beijing games", he said.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
VANCOUVER, Aug 22 2008 (IPS)

The 29th summer Olympics cast renewed light on China's treatment of ethnic minorities in Tibet, and as the games wind down, a similar, if less pronounced set of controversies will follow the torch to Canada when Vancouver hosts the 2010 winter games.

Native Warriors protest the 2010 Vancouver olympics. Credit: no2010.com

If native land claims and other grievances aren't addressed soon, the leader of the British Columbia Union of Indian Chiefs says aboriginals will turn to marches, rallies and lawsuits to draw international attention to poverty, underdevelopment and a lack of social services in native communities.

"If these processes [ongoing land negotiations with government] fail, you are going to see a lot of political activity; a manifestation of the frustrations in many native communities," Grand Chief Stewart Phillip told IPS.

Some 40 percent of Canadian aboriginal children live in poverty, mould contaminates almost half of First Nations households, and close to 100 aboriginal communities lack safe drinking water, according to a 2006 report compiled by a variety of advocacy groups titled "Oh Canada! Too Many Children in Poverty for Too Long."

As the Vancouver games draw nearer, "it is likely there will be tense confrontations between aboriginal communities and the state," says Dr. Wenran Jiang, director of the China Institute at the University of Alberta.

"There are some comparisons [between Canada and China/Tibet]. We are looking at two disadvantaged groups being dominated by the major larger group," Dr. Jiang told IPS. "The difference in Canada is that aboriginal communities were all but wiped out; it was truly an act of genocide."

The main difference between Tibet and Canada, which makes comparisons difficult, is that Canada is a democracy and China is not.

While Grand Chief Phillip doesn't think Vancouver will look like the Tibetan capital Lhasa, where ethnic Tibetans rioted earlier this year against what they see as an occupation by politically dominant Han Chinese, some aboriginal activists are willing to push the envelope of state-sanctioned protest.

In March 2007, the Native Warrior Society, a militant aboriginal organisation, donned black balaclavas and cut down the Olympic flag from Vancouver's city hall. "We stand in solidarity with all those fighting the destruction caused by the 2010 Olympic Games," said the society in a statement released to the media which concluded with the slogan: "No Olympics on Stolen Native Land."

Grand Chief Phillip is careful to note that four aboriginal nations have entered into partnerships with VANOC, the Vancouver Olympic organising committee, to collaborate on hosting the games.

Some non-native Canadians feel aboriginals receive more than their fair share of government money but spend it unwisely. In this respect, attitudes of non-natives in Canada mirror their Han Chinese counterparts. "Financial assistance [from the Chinese government] has poured into Tibet, [but] the reality is that Tibetans have been disadvantaged and so-called development has brought a mixture of feelings: most people get better living standards but they are concerned about their status and religious freedom," Dr. Jiang told IPS.

Vancouver Olympic organisers and corporate executives, both native and non-native, hope the games will attract foreign investment and new property developments to British Columbia, which bills itself as the "most beautiful place on earth". A high Canadian dollar and other factors have all but destroyed the region's logging industry, once the province's economic life blood. While most aboriginals favour increased economic development, many fear new hotels, highways and ski resorts will destroy traditional economic activities.

"The natural ecological balance will be disrupted and animal habitat will be lost as a result of huge increases in population and urban infrastructure," writes Taiaiake Alfred, director of the Indigenous Governance Program at the University of Victoria. "This will make it nearly impossible for people to use their lands for hunting, fishing and ceremonial purposes."

In May 2006, police arrested two dozen native and non-native protesters for blockading expansion work on the Sea-to-Sky Highway, a 600-million-dollar piece of Olympic infrastructure designed to ferry athletes and equipment from Vancouver to the ski resort of Whistler. Among the arrestees was 73-year old Squamish elder Harriet Nahanee who died during the prison term stemming from the protest.

Dr. Jiang, Canada's leading China expert, considers the 2010 games "a good opportunity to realise that our aboriginal policies need a better understanding and a better means of helping that entire group who is really lagging behind."

Tibetans likely believed the same thing prior to 2008 but international attention to their plight and the Chinese occupation did little to change conditions on the ground. It's doubtful their Olympic dreams have been realised. Activists here hope history won't repeat itself in 2010.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
BEIJING, Aug 20 2008 (IPS)

As China piles up gold medals, even the host nation has been watching in bewilderment. Despite popular expectations that China’s athletes would shine on home turf, the medal bonanza has surprised usually skeptical Chinese people.

Chinese athletics fan at the Bird's Nest Olympic stadium. Credit: Antoaneta Bezlova/IPS

But China has pushed its sporting boundaries to the limit, bagging 45 golds by the end of Wednesday and closing up on its closest rival, the U.S., in the overall race 83-81. With every gold taken home and with each raising of the Chinese flag at the award ceremonies, the euphoria of Chinese masses has grown too.

The Olympic fatigue that had gripped many capital residents – irked by traffic restrictions and security regulations before the opening of the games – is gone. On public buses and in bars, in restaurants and offices the talk of the town has been China’s rise to sporting prowess. Slowly but steadily expectations are building up and now even the most disbelieving are allowing themselves to dream of China becoming number one.

"Look at all those medals in sports that China had never excelled in before," says Steven Yang, an advertising sales agent. "We have won golds in swimming, in archery, fencing and even yachting! Surely, it must mean an overall advancement in sports and not just a temporary leap!"

The U.S. topped the table in golds and total medals won at the past three Olympics. But in the gold count alone, China has been steadily catching up. In Athens, the two were separated by only four gold medals, with the U.S. bagging a total of 36.

An editorial in the national newspaper China Daily attributed the gold rush to China’s "open and pluralistic social ambience", created by the last 30 years of economic reforms.

"An increasing number of gold medals for Chinese athletes in an increasingly wider range of sports is because more Chinese have developed an interest in the sports that they did not have chances to take part in before," it said.

Chinese Olympic officials have tried to downplay the significance of the gold medals bonanza. "It is a very good performance but still far from an outstanding one," says Wei Jizhong, member of the Beijing Olympic Committee. "If China wants to be a real sport power, we need sustained breakthroughs in the sports that we don’t consider as our traditional strength".

Even the shock withdrawal of star hurdler Liu Xiang – China’s best hope at winning a gold in athletics – has not managed to dampen the country’s sweet anticipation of Olympic victory. Revelations of the enormous pressure that Liu had suffered in the run-up to the games has made Chinese athletes’ march towards victory even more awesome in the eyes of many.

"I do feel for him," says Guo Tian, a young woman attending one of the 110-metre hurdles heats this week. "His setback has made me realise that competing for your country is much more difficult than just defending your personal record. The pressure seems to be unbearable.''

Liu shocked his fans by pulling out of the games Monday because of a foot injury. The China Daily described the effect of his surprise exit as one that "shattered billions of people’s dreams".

The 25-year-old became a national hero after winning China’s first Olympic gold in athletics with a victory in the 110m hurdles at the 2004 Athens games. The past four years of advertising hype and national admiration have transformed him into China’s most beloved sport icon.

So it came as a shock when Liu admitted to the massive pressure he had experienced as a sporting hero. "As I won more and more titles, and as more and more people gave me attention and support, I endured more and more pressure," he said in a letter released to his fans on the website of China’s athletic team this week.

"I can’t easily go out and party with friends like people of my age, and I feel the expectations from the whole country at all times".

Several weeks before the Olympic games began, Liu Xiang’s coach had given another glimpse of the pressure on athletes from above. "Officials from the State General Administration of Sport once told us that if Liu cannot win another gold medal in Beijing, all of his previous achievements will become meaningless," he told the China Daily.

China’s sports establishment is often criticised for its merciless training routines and mass mobilisation methods, which see talented children separated from their parents at an early age and trained in elite sports schools with the goal of defending China’s sports titles.

But Wei Jizhong says the pain Chinese athletes go through is necessary. "China is not yet at a stage of its development that it can afford to train all children in sports and we must select those that are the best at representing the country.’’

Given its enormous human pool, China’s rise to sporting glory is perhaps not that surprising after all. "If China wins over the U.S., it would be because of the bigger population," reckons Tang, the guard.

END/IPS/AP/IP/DV/HD/OL/CR/DV/AB/RDR/08)

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
BEIJING, Aug 18 2008 (IPS)

Is the Peking duck winning the contest? The jury is out on which Chinese specialty is going to be crowned as the Beijing Olympics’ most favorite local product.

Qianmen street by night. Credit: Antoaneta Bezlova/IPS

They have been sampling the fine brews of Chinese tea under the shades of long-eave roofs of former Manchu mansions in the old city. They have been thronging the stalls at Beijing’s Silk Street Market bagging Chinese cheongsams (or qipao) and pairs of miniature silk slippers. The more daring have opted for a true China experience by downing copious amounts of "bai jiu" – the fiery Chinese alcohol made of sorghum.

Yet the obligatory rite of passage for every visitor to Beijing – Olympic or not – remains the classic feast of Peking duck. Once an imperial dish prepared solely for the rulers of the Yuan dynasty, the treat is now one of the most popular national dishes. The succulent duck portions – roasted, glazed and wrapped in thin Mandarin pancakes – are served to equal appreciation at small eateries tucked in narrow Beijing lanes and upscale restaurants.

On the weekend it appeared that Beijing’s landmark dish was winning medals of popularity with the same ease that Chinese athletes were scooping up heaps of Olympic gold. Beijing games organisers announced they have had to double the athletes’ village supply of the famous bird to meet popular demand.

"We have increased the supply of Peking ducks from 300 to 600 a day," Deng Yaping, the four time Olympic gold medalist in table tennis and Olympic village deputy director said. "To be able to eat a typical Peking duck gives the athletes the most enjoyment," she told reporters proudly.

In line with the earnest attitude taken by Beijing hosts in matters related to the country’s image, the rise of Peking duck was duly noted by the official news agency Xinhua. "The famed Beijing duck is a hot gold medal contender for the most popular food in the host city of the ongoing Olympic Games," a report bragged.

Long before the games arrived in the capital, organisers had begun devising strategies to use the Olympics as a platform to "export" China’s famous products. They had studied the role of 1964 Tokyo Olympics in transforming Japanese sushi into a worldwide dining experience. They had also noted how South Korea successfully exploited the 1988 Seoul games to "package" its local kimchi as an international delicacy.

"Finally it is China’s turn," says Yang Guang, adviser with Zhengyitang Strategic Consultancy. "When foreigners arrive in Beijing they would want to do what Beijingers do. They would listen to what local people praise and introduce. This would be a most precious opportunity for us to propagate Chinese products".

Scholars of Chinese culture have resisted the urge to label a single "China specialty" as favourite emissary to epitomise the country’s finest traditions during the Olympics. Some have argued that unlike Japan and South Korea, which represent relatively unitary cultures, China is a multi-ethnic country with great variety of cultural gems on offer.

"The right attitude would be to ‘let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend’," says folk customs expert Cui Puquan, citing an old line of Chinese wisdom. "China has such a rich and enduring culture that it would be a pity to promote some traditional products at the expense of others."

But with so much on offer the difficulties of mounting a successful marketing campaign of the perfect China specialty have multiplied, says consultant Yang Guang. From high-brand teas and fine porcelain to sandalwood fans and silk dresses Beijing is like a treasure trove of intricate Chinese handicrafts.

Aware that "made in China" is associated with low-end manufacturing products in many parts of the world, city leaders have opted to use the Olympics to showcase some of the country’s old traditional brands, says Yang, whose consultancy advised some of those companies.

"The popularisation of ‘laozihao’, or time-honoured brands, has been at the centre of our marketing campaign," he says.

The desire to globalise China’s traditional products and brands underpins a 300 million US dollar facelift given to Qianmen Street, one of the three landmarks of Beijing alongside the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Gate.

Qianmen, or "front gate", was once home to the empire’s most esteemed vendors of clothing, haute cuisine, tea and herbal medicine. A century ago more than 100 "laozihao", or time-honoured brands, thrived on the street, making Qianmen the busiest commercial and most prosperous area in the imperial city.

Those included Ruifuxiang – the silk store that made clothes for the mandarins in the imperial court and which created the first flag of the People’s Republic, ‘Tongrentang’ – the imperial court’s exclusive supplier of herbal medicine since 1723, and ‘Quanjude’, the doyen of Peking duck eateries.

Dereliction and destruction brought by the radical political campaigns of the late 1960s have combined to draw the curtain on the once famous commercial centre. But the choice of Beijing as an Olympic host in 2001 has made the city fathers realise the opportunities that an influx of tourists could help revive China’s traditional brands.

Totally revamped, Qianmen street was unveiled to a great fanfare on the eve of Beijing Olympic games. Developers said they wanted to capitalise on visitors’ desire to search for the "China element".

"Foreign tourists can buy famous silk products in century-old Ruifuxiang silk shop," offered Wang Chengguo, official with the Beijing Chongwen district where Qianmen is located. "Or they can look for a pair of embroidered shoes in Neiliansheng shoes shop, one of our most noted traditional shoemakers".

With its rows of bright traditional buildings, birdcage-style street lamps and the return of Beijing’s famed 1920s electric trams, the street is an attraction in itself that has proven a great magnet for the crowds. But the verdict on the shopping experience and authenticity of its ambience has been less ecstatic.

"It is fake," cuts Liang Chunrong. The image she has preserved of the old street from her parents’ tales is of an exhilarating mish-mash of tea houses, noodle shops and brisk sellers. "Nothing like the manicured buildings here," she says.

French tourist Amelie Bernard says she enjoyed the stroll along Qianmen but for shopping she prefers Street Silk Market. "This here feels a bit like a museum of Chinese things. There at the market you have the real bargain and the real choice".

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
BEIJING, Aug 13 2008 (IPS)

China’s success in eliminating clusters of Muslim insurgencies in the western province of Xinjiang may have pushed an alleged separatist movement across the border into Pakistan and Afghanistan, exposing it to greater influences by jihadist groups in those countries.

Uighurs claim the development of the railways was aimed at increasing the exploitation of Xinjiang province by China. Credit: World Uighur Network News

"Since the beginning of this year we have seen the deployment of some new tactics by insurgents," says Prof. Chu Shulong, head of the Institute for International Strategic Studies at Qinghua University. "They are no longer targeting civilians by planting bombs on buses as they did in the 1990s but attacking government personnel, army and the police. This is aimed at winning the general population on their side."

While difficult to be independently verified, the incidents showed a high-level of coordination, creating a thread of unrest in southern Xinjiang through a series of bombings and armed assaults. In one incident two attackers rammed a truck into a group of police in the city of Kashgar and then attacked them with knives and homemade grenades, killing 16. Another attack followed several days later, with bombers hitting 17 targets, including a police station and a government building in the city of Kuqa.

No group has claimed responsibility. Li Wei, China authority on terrorism issues, has blamed the attacks on the East Turkestan movement, a group that China alleges is engaged in separatist activities seeking to establish an independent state. But the online appearance of two videotaped threats against the Beijing Olympics has been linked to the Turkestan Islamic Party – a group experts say is an offshoot of the secessionist movement with ties to al-Qaeda.

Resentment against Chinese rule in Xinjiang has flared for years. Many among China’s eight million Uighurs – Turkic people that make up the biggest Muslim group in the region – dream of recreating a fabled "Kashgaria". The short-lived kingdom sprang up after a prolonged Muslim rebellion against the Qing Dynsaty in the mid-19th century. China’s Manchu rulers eventually reconquered the region and in 1884 created Xinjiang (new frontier) province.

Except during the brief existence of the two East Turkestan republics – in mid-1930s and after the end of world war two – the Uighurs have continuously struggled in their quest for national identity, for most part away from the world’s gaze.

But after Sep. 11, China claimed that the al-Qaeda had trained more than 1,000 members of the East Turkestan Independence Movement. Beijing succeeded in placing the group on the terrorist lists of the United States and United Nations and resorted to a hard-line policy aimed at stifling unrest.

Through propaganda and extended security crackdowns the authorities have managed to put a lid on simmering ethnic resentment but recent attacks have sparked fears that tough measures and omnipresent control may have driven more disaffected into joining the ranks of the global Jihad movement.

"China’s success in fighting those terrorists at home has made it impossible for them to survive underground and many are now training abroad," says Chu.

"In 2001 it may have been premature to say that the East Turkestan Independence Movement was part of the global jihad but by now many of its elements have spent so much time in the tribal border areas of Pakistan that we can’t really say for sure what cause they stand for," says John Harrison of the Singapore-based International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research.

However, the coordinated targeting of symbols of the Chinese government in recent attacks shows a shift to tactics used by more traditional insurgent group. "I would say there is less radicalisation than before, " Harrison suggests. "They are trying to show that their actions are aimed at whom they view as their main opponent – the Chinese government".

The continuous violence underscores China’s undying problem with its restive ethnic minorities in far-flung regions like Xinijang and Tibet.

Chinese leaders like to take credit for developing the border regions but Beijing’s increasingly tight control on all aspects of life of minorities, including religious belief and cultural identity, have bred resentment.

China’s most recent drive to assert control over the resource-rich Xinjiang region, through the "Go West" campaign, has spurred new investment and a wave of Han Chinese immigration, which has alienated the Uighurs. In 1949 when the communist party came to power, the Uighurs were 90 percent of the population of Xinjiang. Today they account for less than half.

This week, the government defended its record in the province. Mu Tielifuhasimu, commissioner of the region’s administration, said the majority of Uighurs are happy in Xinjiang and enjoy the freedom to practice their religion. "The overall situation is extremely good," he told a press conference.

Meanwhile in Beijing, state councilor Meng Jianzhu was meeting with Rehman Malik, adviser to the Pakistani prime minister on interior affairs and asking for more support from Islamabad in fighting terrorism. President Musharraf had admitted earlier that there were a number of Uighur rebels from Xinjiang undergoing terrorist training in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
BANGKOK, Aug 11 2008 (IPS)

Say goodbye to the usual slogan-shouting and banner-carrying protest actions, because one does not even have to be anywhere near China to push a mix of causes – from Tibet and Burma to Darfur. Online creativity is the name of the game.

Beijing's Ritan Park, designated for protests with official permission, saw no banners or slogan shouting. Credit: Antoaneta Bezlova/IPS

One such group is the Candle4Tibet.org (www.Candle4Tibet.org), an online campaign that encouraged people to light a candle for Tibet in homes or in public places on Aug. 7 at 9 p.m. The campaign began in India and went around the world until the evening of Aug. 8, the opening of the Beijing Olympics.

Organiser David Califa said, in a telephone interview from Israel, where he is based, that there were more than 500,000 responses to the call. More than 3,900 people have also registered for Candle4Tibet's social networking site (www.Candle4Tibet.ning.com), an online support group for members.

These are the same people, Califa said, who invited "more than 100,000,000 to join the vigil worldwide".

"All this started from zero. It's not an organised campaign and we have no funds to speak of. This is really a people's protest, because it's from the people themselves, which makes it all the more special," the retired investment banker said in a phone interview.

About four months ago, Califa was just one among the 75 million members of the popular social networking site Facebook. Then, Califa thought of rallying people to support the call of freedom for Tibet, which the Chinese state has occupied since 1951 despite campaigns for autonomy or independence.

From a sprinkling of fellow Facebook contacts, word got out quickly and spread even outside Facebook. Califa then worked on creating a dedicated website for this campaign.

More than 150 countries are represented on the site, mainly the United States, India, Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Australia and South America. A quick check of the site also reveals a sprinkling of members from Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, and a few more from Taiwan and Japan.

Asked about the seemingly small number of Asian countries figuring on the site, Califa said, "It could be a language problem, Internet access, or the circles of social network are not big enough."

There is, however, a Japanese group in the network that helped out in translating all materials into Japanese.

"I think one of the reasons why not a lot of Asians seem to be paying attention to this campaign is because China is a 'big brother' of sorts in this region," said a Thai activist who gave her name as Arsure. Open opposition to China would be to invite 'economic disaster' for any country, she added.

Human rights advocates have criticised other countries' seeming inaction and unwillingness to question China's policies on Darfur, Burma and Tibet.

Two other websites that have also launched protests against the Chinese government are the French-based Reporters Without Borders’ (www.rsf.org) and Darfur Olympics (www.darfurolympics.org/).

A few hours before the start of the Olympics, RSF launched a virtual demonstration site complete with a choice of placards. This, the group said, is to protest against the repression of press freedom and to demand the release of around 100 journalists, cyber dissidents and bloggers. As of Aug 9, cyber-demonstrators numbered to more than 13,500.

A person who decides to participate in virtual protest is taken to an image of China's famed Bird's Nest Olympic stadium online, and invited add his protest with the aid of slogans such as 'Yes to sport, no to oppression', 'No Olympic Games without freedom', and 'I boycott the Olympic opening ceremony!'

The Darfur Olympics site, meanwhile, is a week-long protest that is aimed at keeping the Darfur issue afloat during the Games. Its call is simple: for China to "stop sponsoring the genocide in Darfur".

More than 400,000 people have been killed and more than 2.5 million have been displaced by Sudan, which enjoys close trade relations with China. Critics have continuously condemned China's oil purchases, the earnings of which, they say, are used to fund the Janjaweed militia and buy weapons again from China.

Among the site's features is an alternative opening ceremony to the Beijing Olympics featuring images of Darfur's children in refugee camps, a week-long webcast by leading Darfur activist and Dream-for-Darfur chair Mia Farrow. It appeals to Olympic viewers to change channels whenever they broadcast commercials by the 15 corporate Olympic sponsors that refused to speak up about the Darfur situation.

"I hope people will watch our daily broadcasts to hear from the people of Darfur who have suffered for so long," said Farrow in a statement.

In a slightly different take on the protest actions, the global web movement Avaaz.org launched yet another campaign for peace and freedom through its 'Olympics Handshake' online campaign.

Echoing the constant message of the 14th Dalai Lama about meaningful dialogue, Avaaz – which means 'voice' in many Asian, Middle Eastern and Eastern European languages – goes a step further by encouraging people to virtually shake hands with everyone worldwide.

Inspired by the handshake that the Dalai Lama gave to every person he met during one of his visits to London, the handshake campaign now has more than 94,900 supporters, only two days after it was posted.

The campaign's goal is for the Beijing Olympics to encourage China to open a meaningful dialogue on Tibet, as well as to deal with the Burma and Darfur issues. They also want to emphasise that these ongoing campaigns are not 'anti-Chinese', something that Califa also agrees with.

"We are not against the people of China and the Olympics. Some of us even have compassion for the leaders of China," said Califa.

For Califa and other protesters, it is all about the very basic right of freedom, including freedom from fear. "There are a lot of people in the free world who are afraid of China. A lot of companies are afraid of China. They put profit first before values, and it's absurd," he said. "But we are not afraid and this is just the beginning."

(*This story was written for the Asia Media Forum coordinated by IPS Asia-Pacific)

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
HONG KONG, Aug 9 2008 (IPS)

While the whole world tuned in on the spectacular Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing, there was little excitement in this former British colony that was returned to China in 1997.

Fuwas gambol at the Olympic Piazza set up in Hong Kong. Credit: Jacqui Lau/IPS

A part-time cab driver for over ten years, Lee is unimpressed by the Olympics.

"I was hard-working before," he told IPS, gesturing as he sped the red cab off the entrance ramp. "I think the Olympics are a good thing for China but for me, if it’s not on, it’s not on. If it is, it is. I don’t care… Hong Kong isn’t really involved."

It is a common viewpoint in this autonomous city. One young graphic designer described the Special Administrative Region’s role in the Olympics as that of a "sidekick" rather than a partner or real participant.

Hong Kong is hosting the equestrian events mainly because of outbreaks of equine diseases on the mainland and inadequate quarantine facilities there. Also, the territory is home to a vibrant horse racing culture, a legacy of British colonial rule.

But beyond the big, glossy posters featuring the city’s equestrian team astride horses, public interest has so far been low. Pictures of Fuwa mascots are common, but not overwhelming.

People do gather at the Olympic Piazza set up at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre in Tsim Sha Tsui where life-size Fuwas gambol about on a stage. But the piazza, designed to beam dynamic entertainment and information from Olympic competition sites onto giant plasma screens, seems more popular with foreign tourists than locals.

Hong Kong’s initial disinterest may, however, change with the medal count. ‘’I think Kong Hong people are funny," says Nikki Lau, 28, a film translator who has divided her time between the United States and Hong Kong since her teens. "An earthquake, an international accomplishment then we're all Chinese together. But the rest of the time they're very, very careful to define themselves as from Hong Kong."

"There's certainly a feeling for China. There was such sympathy after the earthquake," a labour rights activist told IPS at a vegetarian dim sum restaurant near Sheung Wan station – a popular area for foreign NGOs and other organisations banned in China. "There were collections held at this restaurant."

The 35-athlete strong team that Hong Kong has fielded for the Beijing Olympics has medal hopes in cycling, table tennis, windsurfing and badminton. In all, the territory is participating in 11 sports including equestrian, swimming, track and field, fencing, shooting, rowing and triathlon.

Though Hong Kong has always ensured freedom of speech and democracy, there have been reports that it has tightened security during the sporting event, refusing entry to three pro-democracy activists prior to the opening ceremony.

A student was removed from the equestrian venue, Saturday, for displaying a Tibetan flag, though flags of nations not competing are banned from events. Pro-Tibet activists were also refused entry in May, during the Olympic torch’s stay in the city.

A few days prior to these events the Hong Kong Association of Falun Dafa had set up what is a regular ‘clarification spot’ near Causeway Bay station. Adherents of the religious group, which is banned on the mainland, handed out leaflets detailing abuses and torture by the Chinese government.

Overshadowed by giant billboards depicting cosmetic brand Shiseido’s latest ad campaign, only a few people stopped to read their placards, but none showed any hostility.

"In Hong Kong we can do this. In China, no," says one leaflet distributor in faltering English.

Spokeswoman for the group, Yee-han Hui, told IPS that "the government has tried administrative measures to limit our activities or our space, but there are no laws.’’

"There’s definitely more freedom in Hong Kong," says Mui Chi Yam who moved from mainland China to Hong Kong 15 years ago. He works as a doorman and security guard in an apartment complex. Unlike native-born Hong Kongers he is excited by the Olympics and thinks not enough of a gap has been bridged since the handover. "I think the Olympics are good, really good," he says. "But we’re better together as one, like one big family. Hong Kong couldn’t survive without China."

"I'm not such a sports fan but I feel that there are a lot of changes for people in Hong Kong and China," said web designer Henry Chu from behind his laptop at a Starbuck’s outlet. "There are such high expectations, everyone's scared something might go wrong."

But not everybody vacillated between indifference and worry. "I just feel good about it (the Olympics)," said Tawa, a shop assistant at a low-cost clothing store. She did not elaborate.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
BEIJING, Aug 8 2008 (IPS)

All the world is a stage and for a few mesmerising hours on Friday night that stage was China’s. Doubts over China as Olympic host faded away, at least temporarily, as the organisers delivered a fitting tribute to the mystery and sophistication of Chinese civilisation.

Art performance at Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. Credit: Chinese Gov't Official Site

The ceremony is a deeply felt celebration of China’s renaissance, says Prof. Jin Yuanpu, president of the humanistic Olympic studies center at Renmin University. It had poetry and romantic charm unseen in any previous Olympic ceremonies. I can confidently say there has never been a more successful attempt to express the essence of Chinese culture to the outside world."

For months before the beginning of the games the opening ceremony had been a focal point of strife about China’s credentials as an Olympics host. Human rights activists had called on political leaders to boycott the party as an expression of condemnation of China’s alleged human right abuses. Celebrated U.S. director Steven Spielberg resigned as an artistic adviser to the ceremony in protest over China’s record in the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Sudan’s Darfur.

I believe that beside the Darfur element there was also Spielberg’s reluctance to endorse a piece of what many predicted would be an artful propaganda about China’s rise and its imposed national unity, said one foreign media relations advisor to the Olympics who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Skeptics have predicted a hotchpotch of well worn cliché symbols of Chinese culture mixed with an obligatory display of joyful dances by the country’s 56 ethnic groups. Such shows are often performed in the country to illustrate China’s success at achieving national harmony.

The perception of the games as a political showcase has not been helped by the fact that Chinese leaders were the first to infuse hosting the Olympic games with political significance. They have made no secret of their desire to use the Olympics as an endorsement of the ruling communist party’s achievements in modernising and transforming China into a significant world player over the last 30 years.

When China was awarded the games in 2001, the official news agency Xinhua hailed the move as recognition of the "renaissance" that occurred after the late patriarch Deng Xiaoping imposed his vision of a market-led economy. Conveniently enough, the Beijing Olympics coincide with the 30th anniversary of Deng’s reforms and has provided the leadership with an opportunity to stoke enthusiasm for its rule.

Through the Olympics Chinese rulers are seeking to prove to their subjects that this is the dawn of a new golden age for China, says Liu Junning, an analyst with the Chinese Cultural Studies Institute in Beijing. ‘’To the outside world they want to say: pay attention because a new superpower has arrived.’’

Despite expectations that the opening ceremony might dwell on China’s victimisation by foreign powers in the past and seek validation of the country’s rapid rise as a world player, what enfolded in reality was different. The show delivered a surprise, scoring points unexpected perhaps even by the games organisers who have for months tried with mixed results, to put China’s best foot forward.

The extravaganza dwelled on China’s high points of ancient civilisation as never seen before. From the enormous mass scenes and rich elaborate costumes down to the smallest details of calligraphy strokes everything bore the signature mark of China’s most famous director Zhang Yimou.

Eschewing convention and defying gravity, Zhang staged a show where people flew to the stars and the stars descended to earth. Every move, colour and musical note was imbued with Chinese essence.

It began with the spellbinding sound of 2008 Chinese drums filling the bird’s nest-shaped National Stadium and spilling over its brim. Volcanoes of gold and red fireworks erupted. A shimmering ancient scroll unfolded and a journey through 5,000 years of history began.

Dancers dressed in black slid along the canvass imitating the strokes of Chinese calligraphy. Images of China’s "four great inventions" – paper, printing, compass and gunpowder – followed. A scholarly regiment of 3,000 pupils of Confucius chanted from the sage’s analects while fast-flashing images of Chinese characters’ transformation through the years followed.

The character ‘he’, which means both harmony and peace in Chinese, dominated a dance of wooden blocks used in early forms of printing in China. But before anyone even noticed the printing blocks were gone, replaced by segments depicting China’s journey to the West through the Silk Road and its exploits at sea by the 15th-centry Chinese seafarer Zheng He.

Previous Chinese galas had tried to embrace the enormity and complexity of the Chinese nation by presenting mosaics of its different ethnic cultures. By opting for a journey trough time Zhang Yimou was able to pick and emphasise the best in Chinese history. There were no episodes of recrimination against foreign powers and pointedly no combative scenes of China’s revolutionary past.

The transformation of modern China was played against the magical tunes of China’s most famous pianist Lang Lang. His centre-stage white piano was replaced by the rising sphere of planet earth scaled by acrobats. Positioned on top of it, British musical star Sarah Brightman and Chinese singer Liu Huan sang the Beijing Olympics theme song, ‘You and me’.

On the day of the opening ceremony the official newspaper China Daily had taken a bold guess. The Zhang Yimou brand of ‘Chineseness’ may or may not appeal to every Chinese, an editorial said. But one thing is for sure, the show tonight will find its way into the annals of contemporary China.

Excerpt:

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Aug 7 2008 (IPS)

Cuba’s prestige among the global sports élite for the past three decades testifies to the effectiveness of a mass, free physical education system which the government has supported through the ups and downs of the national economy.

This Caribbean island nation of 11.2 million people has led Latin America and the Caribbean since the 1970s at the Olympic, Pan-American and Central American Games, distinguishing itself ahead of countries with much larger populations and higher levels of economic development, as well as sending thousands of instructors on cooperation missions to contribute to the progress of sports in dozens of countries.

“In Cuba, anyone can become an athlete, whether he or she is born in Havana or in the most remote village in Guantánamo,” Ángel Gutiérrez, a retired physical education teacher who taught at primary schools for over 20 years, told IPS.

In fact, none of the present Cuban record holders started their athletics careers in Havana. Dayron Robles, the 110-metre hurdles champion, is from the country’s easternmost province of Guantánamo, while javelin thrower Osleydis Menéndez and high jumper Javier Sotomayor were born in Matanzas, more than 100 kilometres east of the Cuban capital.

This socialist country has a well-organised talent spotting and training system that begins with the Sports Initiation Schools (EIDE), which send promising athletes to the annual National School Games, the first competitive event for most of the members of Cuba’s Olympic teams.

The aspiring athletes later attend the Higher Schools for Athletic Improvement (ESPA) and finally the National High Performance Centres, where teams are trained for international competitions.

But the thousands of sports facilities are not exempt from the effects of the country’s economic crisis and shortcomings in management by the sports authorities, aggravated by the impact of the decades-old U.S. embargo which hinders purchases of sports equipment.

The boxing training centre, located on the outskirts of Havana, was partially closed two years ago because of appalling conditions in the training area and dormitories. Meanwhile, swimming is being held back because of the dire state of swimming pools on the island.

Physical education is an obligatory subject at all levels of education. It is taught by about 40,000 teachers trained since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, when phys ed teachers numbered less than 1,000.

Figures from the National Statistics Office (ONE) indicate that close to 4.4 million people regularly practiced sports in Cuba in 2007, although only 163,396 of them did so at a high performance level.

Mass physical education is one of the government’s oldest policies, reflected in its creation of the National Institute for Sports, Physical Education and Recreation (INDER) in 1961, on the principle that “sports are the people’s right.”

This approach bore fruit at the Central American and Caribbean Games in 1970, in Panama, where Cuba won by far the most medals. A year later it took second place behind the United States in the Pan-American Games held in Cali, Colombia, a position it has held ever since.

Cuba hosted the Central American and Caribbean Games in 1982, and the Pan-American Games in 1991, an occasion on which, for the first and only time, it won more gold medals than the United States.

As for the Olympic Games, Cuba holds more gold medals than the rest of the countries of Latin American and the Caribbean combined, and up to the Athens Olympics in 2004 it was ranked 14th in the world. It began to stand out as an Olympic leader in the region in 1972 in Munich, where it took three gold medals in boxing.

The Cuban delegation to the Beijing games is made up of 165 athletes, most of them without previous Olympic experience. Their goal is to be ranked among the first 15 countries, and to maintain their supremacy in Latin America and the Caribbean.

However, Cuba’s performance at several competitions within the last five years has been declining.

At the Pan-American Games in Santo Domingo in 2003, the island captured 72 gold medals, while last year in Rio de Janeiro it took only 59, seven more than Brazil. In 2006, at the Central American Games in the Colombian city of Cartagena, it won only 31 medals more than Mexico, the runner-up, whereas on the previous occasion Cuba was 130 medals ahead of Mexico.

One of the causes of this decline might be the continual emigration of athletes who abandon their national teams or sports cooperation missions – one of the pillars of Cuban foreign policy – in many Latin American countries and elsewhere.

Defections by athletes, who are then regarded as “traitors” by the authorities, have hurt sports like boxing, baseball, volleyball, basketball and football.

Football alone lost seven players in the pre-Olympic tournament held in Tampa, Florida in the United States, and the volleyball squad had to be renewed twice, for similar reasons.

In only two years the Cuban boxing team, formerly invincible in international competitions, saw four of its best members, Olympic and world champions, leave the team for professional boxing, banned in 1962 by former President Fidel Castro.

“Cuban sports policy creates the conditions for excellent training and development, but sometimes it can be a barrier by not allowing sports practitioners to join professional leagues, or by regarding athletes who decide to turn professional abroad as unpatriotic traitors who are not allowed to compete for this country,” a sports commentator who requested anonymity told IPS.

Fidel Castro, who called on the Cuban delegation to “come back with their shield or on it,” as in classical Sparta, wrote in one of his regular Reflections newspaper columns that “we should never allow the traitors to visit the country showing off the luxury obtained through infamy.”

Excerpt:

By Omid Memarian
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 7 2008 (IPS)

Though human rights and environmental issues – such as censorship and pollution in Beijing – have been the two major focuses of criticism levelled against the Chinese government during the lead up to the Olympic games, Achim Steiner, the Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), is expected to address some of Beijing’s environmental successes during the opening ceremonies.

Achim Steiner briefs correspondents at UN Headquarters. Credit: UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras

Steiner "will definitely address all the environmental issues, Theodore Oben, UNEP chief of sports and the environment, told IPS in a telephone interview from Beijing. "We have to see after the Games," Oben said, when asked about the environmental impact of the games.

The Games will have a positive environmental legacy if the new environmental standards and measures taken for Beijing are adopted countrywide, according to UNEP.

"I have been monitoring the press reports on Chinese government’s effort on making the Beijing Olympics Games environmentally friendly," said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project and adjunct professor at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. "I actually think the government made huge efforts," Xiao told IPS.

"Some efforts and investments are very positive, but some other efforts are purely administrative and cosmetic measures, such as closing many heavy polluters [factories] around Beijing just for Olympics," explained Xiao, who is also the founder and editor-in-chief of the on-line news portal ‘China Digital Times: covering China from cyberspace’.

The use of a facemask by some of the athletes has been a major slap in the face of organisers who strived to portray Beijing as a green city, at least during the games. Shutting down factories and restricting automobile travel have been two methods adopted by the government in order to decrease the pollution.

Among the 596 members of the American delegation to the games, Mike Friedman, Bobby Lea, Sarah Hammer and Jennie Reed were among about 200 athletes who wore masks to avoid exposure to airborne pollution in Beijing.

UNEP has been working with the Beijing Olympic Committee for the last three years in an effort to make the summer games environmentally friendly.

In 2007, following an agreement with the International Olympic Committee (IOC), UNEP measured the Beijing Games’ performance against the environmental commitments outlined in their bid. The report cited the 17 billion dollars Beijing spent on a large-scale green drive ahead of the games, including a series of long-term environmental improvements for the city. As part of this, the city has introduced tougher standards for vehicle emissions and phased out ozone-depleting substances. The authorities have also expanded Beijing's public transport network with three new subway lines and the introduction of some 3,800 compressed natural gas buses – one of the largest fleets of in any city in the world.

The Olympic venues themselves have incorporated many green features: 20 percent of their energy comes from clean wind sources, solar power features prominently in the Olympic Village, and the Bird's Nest stadium has an advanced rainwater recycling system.

The UNEP report also noted that there is room for improvement in areas such as air quality, offsetting of greenhouse gas emissions and public awareness- raising.

Steiner will visit several of the green facilities built for the Olympics – including Beijing's newly inaugurated subway lines and the Solar Wall, 2,000 square metres of solar panels.

In the second half of 2008, UNEP will produce a Post-Games Environmental Report in order to assess the successes and challenges of the environmental measures taken by Beijing for the 2008 games.

There remain concerns that protests organised by environmental and human rights activists will face harsh reactions from the Chinese government.

There is continued censorship of certain websites, bringing the Chinese government’s promises to provide free access to the internet into question.

Kevan Gosper, press commission chairman of the IOC, issued a public apology on Jul. 30, admitting that IOC officials had agreed with the Chinese government’s plans to censor certain websites during the 2008 Games. This occurred despite the IOC’s many pledges since 2001 that the media would have "full, open and free internet access during the Games."

According to Human Rights Watch, the IOC’s admission that it consented to Chinese government censorship of certain websites ends the debate over whether the Olympics will promote rights in China.

On the other hand, the U.N. refugee agency and the IOC launched the "Giving is Winning" Campaign in the Olympic Village last week to encourage athletes and national Olympic Committees to recycle surplus sportswear for use by refugees in Asia.

"Refugee youth have often suffered terribly and witnessed war first hand," said António Guterres, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). "Some refugees are born in camps; others grow up in camps, which can mean a lifetime with little or no access to sport or recreation. The gift of sportswear from Olympic athletes around the globe inspires refugees and connects them to the world of sports. Beyond happiness it brings them hope," he explained.

During the past year, in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, the initial goal of collecting 50,000 items of sports clothing has nearly been met. The items collected so far have been distributed to refugees in Rwanda, Tanzania, Chad, Moldova, Georgia and Panama.

"I am thrilled by this success and the strong support of the Olympic Family so far," IOC President Jacques Rogge said. "Of course we want to go much higher now – the bigger impact we can make with this campaign, the better. I am convinced that with our common efforts we can collect many more items."

Former Ukrainian pole vaulter Sergey Bubka, now chairman of the IOC Athletes Commission said it should be easy to meet the goal, with more than 10,000 athletes participating in the Games.

"I am confident that many of my colleagues will recognise the value of this project and be eager to contribute," Bubka said. "It really is so easy to participate. Sport has given a lot to all of us and it is great to be able to give back a bit by bringing joy to refugees."

Far too many young refugees spend years languishing in bleak camps around the world, UNHCR's Regional Representative for China and Mongolia, Veerapong Vongvarotai said. The "Giving is Winning" recycling initiative was first established at the Athens Olympics in 2004 when more than 30,000 items were collected to support sports among young refugees in Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Eritrea, Kosovo and Tanzania.

Excerpt:

By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Aug 7 2008 (IPS)

They make attractive mementos for the thousands of visitors to Beijing for the Summer Olympics. But souvenirs and jewellery made out of prized jade from Burma are ridden with a history of abuse and blood, say activists from the military-ruled country.

Burmese jade jewellery on display at a shop in Ruli, a Chinese border town. Credit: AKSYU

Close to 90 percent of jadeite (a variety of jade) on sale in China comes from Burmese mines, in Hpakant, in the Kachin state, along the Burmese-Chinese border, according to the report, ‘Blood Jade: Burmese Gemstones and the Beijing Games’.

‘’In addition to being a major source of foreign currency, the military-controlled industry is plagued with deplorable working conditions, and HIV/AIDS epidemic, and environmental destruction,’’ added the report brought out by AKSYU, representing the Kachin ethnic community from northern Burma, and another pro-democracy Burmese group based in New York. ‘’Thousands have lost their land due to the expansion of mining areas. Deaths from pit collapses and company vigilantism are commonplace.’’

‘’We realised that the Chinese were buying more and more jade from Burma for Olympics souvenirs about two to three years ago,’’ Naw Law, a researcher with AKSYU, told IPS. ‘’They were going to use the jade for souvenirs, jewellery, rings.’’

The workers in these open-pit mines are badly paid, some getting about one US dollar a day, and ‘’they have to work 12-hour shifts or longer, sometimes at night, and with little breaks,’’ added Naw Law. ‘’The mining companies belong to cronies of the junta. They care little about abusing the people, their rights, and even destroying the environment.’’

Other groups that have monitored the gem and jade industry in Burma offer as disturbing a picture. ‘’The working conditions in the mines are dreadful,’’ David Scott Mathieson, Burma consultant for the global rights lobby Human Rights Watch (HRW), told IPS. ‘’Jade has been used as a war commodity for years in Burma to finance wars in that part of the country, first by the Kachin rebel groups and now by the Burmese regime.’’

Burma is known for its ‘’imperial jade,’’ a ‘’gem-quality’’ jade with a colour that ranges from a white to moss green, stated HRW in a report early this year on the gem and jade trade that has helped to keep afloat the country’s repressive military regime. ‘’The (junta) has a direct stake in many mines, in some cases through joint ventures with private entrepreneurs.’’

‘’Burma’s mines are ruled with an iron hand by military authorities and mining companies,’’ the HRW report added. ‘’Deplorable conditions at the mines reportedly include rampant land confiscation, extortion, forced labour, child labour, environmental pollution, and unsafe working conditions for miners.’’

Precise figures of how much the junta earns from the sales of gems and jade are not available, although official export figures place them as the third highest foreign exchange earner after export of natural gas and agriculture products. ‘’The trade in Burma’s gems and jewellery was valued at 647 million US dollars in fiscal year 2007-2008 (April 2007 through March 2008),’’ states HRW, quoting figures from the country’s ministry of commerce.

‘’Customs figures cited elsewhere, however, gave the value of gem exports during the calendar year 2007 as 651 million US dollars,’’ added HRW. ‘’Either figure, if accurate would represent a marked increase in exports of Burmese gems, since declared gem earnings in fiscal year 2006-2007 stood at 297 million US dollars.’’

According to the AKSYU Burma’s military regime may be earning 300 million dollars annually from jade exports, mainly to China.

China’s interest in Burmese jade began in the mid-1990s, after the Burmese junta signed a peace deal with a Kachin separatist group. It coincided with the year – 1995 – when Beijing officially recognised the new military rulers in Rangoon. That year, after the junta opened the doors for gem and jade traders from many foreign countries, the Chinese made their presence felt, accounting for nearly a third of the exports.

Chinese presence at the regular gem and jade auctions in Rangoon has grown dramatically in the years since. Early this year, a visiting Asian buyer was struck by the dominance of Chinese at a recent sale of Burmese jade.

‘’Almost all the buyers of some 300 people were Chinese. Most of them were from the mainland, with a few from Hong Kong and Taiwan,’’ the buyer told IPS. ‘’This was for two hours, towards the end of a day’s auction.’’

For that jade auction, there were large, uncut slabs of rough jade. ‘’One was the size of a car and another the size of a big table and these were what the Chinese buyers were attracted to,’’ the buyer said. ‘’The initial auction price for a chunk of rough jade the size of a chair was one million Euros (1,546,770 dollars). The average prices of the smaller pieces were about 300,000 to 500,000 Euros (464,031 – 773,385 dollars).’’

At this rate of exploitation, activists like Naw La are left with little choice but appeal to the Olympics tourists in Beijing to help make a dent in the demand for jade by refusing to buy products made out of the precious mineral.

‘’Our mountains have disappeared and our youth are dying. The generals are letting their cronies mine away our future,’’ he says. ‘We urge people not to buy blood jade from Burma.’’

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
BEIJING, Aug 6 2008 (IPS)

One hundred years ago Chinese athletes had neither money nor government support to compete in the Olympics. An invitation by the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, to Qing dynasty rulers to send a national team of athletes went unanswered.

Spectators throng the 'Bird's Nest' stadium for Tuesday's rehearsals. Credit: Chinese Gov't Official Website

On Friday, Chinese communist rulers will bask in the glory of having delivered on their nation’s century-old dream. When Olympic teams parade under the fiery-red glow of fireworks on Beijing Games opening night, the Chinese team would be the biggest among all nations and perhaps the most ambitious of all.

“To achieve Olympic glory for the motherland is the sacred mission assigned by the Communist party central,” sports minister Liu Peng said when he announced members of the team this month. “We have to fulfil our historic responsibility”.

Top Chinese leaders have exhorted their athletes to “win glory and respect” for the motherland. The team of 639 athletes – the largest in the country’s history – is relied on to bring not only Olympic gold to the nation but also bolster the government’s image abroad and at home.

Worried about problems of economic balance, social harmony and deteriorating environment, Chinese leaders see winning gold as a tremendous opportunity to shore up their political legitimacy at home. And they see sports victories as yet another demonstration to the outside world of the arrival of a new superpower.

Among sports officials and the public alike there is a belief that China has to win the gold count in medals not only because it hosts the games but to make up for the time it lost in the last century when it was embroiled in civil wars and radical political campaigns.

“We have had a much later start in Olympic sports than other big nations,” muses Huang Zhi, a heating engineer and avid sports fan. “Imagine what we could have done if we were given the same opportunities as the United States. But even so, we have modernised faster than many nations and we can gain in sports faster than them too”.

According to Susan Brownell, an American athlete and author of “Beijing’s Games: What the Olympics Mean to China”, the story of the Olympic games and China is “a narrative of China’s relationship with the outside world”. “They are collective redemption for the national suffering of the past century,” she says.

China established a Soviet-style sports machine in the 1950s but the following decades were lost for national athletes as the country languished in diplomatic isolation. China won its first gold medal in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and since 2000 Olympics games in Sydney has accelerated its run for gold.

After 2000 Chinese sports authorities unveiled Project 119 (named after the number of golds offered in medal-rich sports like track and field, swimming and rowing), aimed at boosting the country’s medal haul. Money, manpower and talent were invested into the pursuit of nationalist glory.

In Athens, four years ago, China finished with 32 golds – second only to the U.S., in what became the country’s best medal haul in its Olympic history. This time around with Beijing playing the host, expectations are even higher and an audience of 1.3 billion wants to see China go one better and top the medal count.

“We do have a target: that is to rank among the top in the medals table,” Zhang Haifeng, spokesman for the Chinese Olympic team, said at a press conference. “We managed that with 32 gold medals in Athens and we hope to do better in Beijing”.

“We must not be complacent and take nothing for granted until gold medals fill our bags,” sports minister Liu Peng added.

There has been no let up among the sports icons filling China’s Olympic team like NBA center Yao Ming, hurdler champion Liu Xiang and diving star Guo Jingjing. Liu Xiang, who in 2004 became a household name after winning China’s first-ever Olympic gold in men’s athletics, sounded confident.

“All I have to do on the Olympic track is to beat myself,” he said at the press conference at the launch of China’s delegation to the games.

But there have been also leaked commentaries of pain and overstress by Chinese athletes that have come to reveal the duress of the country’s sports system. Female marathon runner Zhou Chunxiu who claimed the London Marathon title last year admitted in a recent interview that she has “never felt such pressure before”. “Hosting the Olympic games has put a lot of pressure on all of us,” she said in an interview.

Compelled by a state athletic system, which emphasises personal sacrifice in the name of national glory, some athletes have been made to compete with serious injuries.

Celebrated diver Hu Jia for instance, who detached a retina after winning a gold medal in the 2004 Sydney Olympics and continued training even after he injured the other one, was left out of the current Olympic team. Chinese sports commentators have speculated he was deemed too old and was replaced by a younger athlete.

There has been open criticism at home of China’s drive to score political points through sporting triumphs. Environmental activist and author Dai Qing was among those who dared suggest that hosting the Olympics amounted to a mere public relations exercise for China.

“All the billions the state spent on preparing and hosting the games should have been spent on providing more sports facilities and opportunities for ordinary people,” she says. “China is a developing country after all and only a fraction of its population participates in any sports”.

Excerpt:

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 6 2008 (IPS)

As China tries to boost its international image, playing host to a summer Olympic games, the government in Beijing is being singled out as a key arms supplier to some of the world’s worst human rights abusers, according to a new study released here.

Although China controls only 2 percent of the global arms market, Beijing’s impact “is measured less by the value of its sales than by the character of its clients,” says William D. Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. A brief by the Washington-based non-profit public policy institute, released Wednesday, points out that China is currently “an arms supplier of last resort for dictators and human rights abusers”, including Sudan, Zimbabwe and Myanmar (Burma).

“China’s domestic policies have come under much-deserved scrutiny in the run-up to the Olympics,” noted Hartung, author of the study, who says Beijing’s clients include politically repressive regimes.

“We shouldn’t forget that the Chinese government’s most egregious act has been its role as an enabler of mass murder in Darfur,” he said.

Without Chinese support, he argued, the ability of the Sudanese government and its allies to kill, maim, and intimidate the people of Darfur would be greatly diminished.

Asked whether Western nations are equally guilty in their arms sales policies, Hartung told IPS that major suppliers like the United States, Britain and France all supply dictatorships and human rights abusers.

But he pointed out that China’s markets include the few repressive regimes that these major exporters have chosen not to supply.

For example, in the case of the U.S., 17 of its 25 largest recipients of weapons in the developing world in 2007 were designated as major human rights abusers or undemocratic regimes by its own State Department.

“Under various laws and political commitments [not formal treaties], major suppliers are committed to limiting sales to regions of conflict and major human rights abusers,” according to Hartung.

But in practice, he said, these rules are violated more often than they are observed, generally on grounds of “national interest”, which could mean anything from exporting to major oil producing countries to supporting nations in “strategic locations”.

In order to address the hypocrisy of current arms export rules, such as they are, Amnesty International, Oxfam, and scores of other groups are promoting the concept of a global Arms Trade Treaty that would make these loose promises to avoid arming dictators and human rights abusers into formal legal commitments, he added.

In a statement released Wednesday, Human Rights First and the Save Darfur Coalition said the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) recent efforts to charge Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir with genocide puts the world’s governments on notice that war crimes may well be occurring in Darfur.

Countries such as China and Russia are bound by the Genocide Convention to take all possible action – including immediately suspending arms sales to Sudan – the two non-governmental organisations (NGOs) said.

At a meeting of the Security Council last week, Chinese Ambassador Wang Guangya spoke against the recent ICC indictment of Al-Bashir on charges of genocide in Darfur. “China supports the reasonable request by the African Union and other organisations for the Security Council to take early action to suspend the indictment of the Sudanese leader by the ICC, in accordance with the relevant provisions” of the Rome Statute that created the ICC.

Under Article 16 of the Rome Statute, the 15-member Security Council has the power to suspend any indictment of Al-Bashir – under a “deferral of investigation and prosecution” clause.

Hartung said that China has been the most egregious violator of the global arms embargo on Sudan, providing everything from guns and ammunition to arms manufacturing facilities.

Since 2004, the vast majority of Sudan’s small arms and light weapons have come from China – and many of them have found their way into the hands of the notorious Janjaweed militias in Darfur.

The arming of Sudan is “just the most damning example of a Chinese policy that has resulted in major weapons exports to repressive regimes in Zimbabwe and Myanmar, as well as sales of missile technology to Iran and Pakistan,” Hartung said.

China is essentially “bartering arms and political support for access to Sudan’s oil resources,” Hartung explains.

China has also sold combat aircraft to Myanmar, Sudan, and Zimbabwe, as well as air-to-air missiles to Sudan.

Asked to detail some of the Chinese weapons sales, Hartung told IPS that shipments to Myanmar include 12 F-7 fighter aircraft; 40 PLA-2A short- range air-to-air missiles; 40 PLA-2B short-range air-to-air missiles; and 12 K-8 aircraft, which can be used for training or for combat.

The arms shipments to Sudan include 3 A-5C Fantan fighter/ground attack aircraft and 12 K-8 trainer/combat aircraft, along with 10 Type-85 IIAP tanks and 10 WZ-551 armoured personnel carriers.

The sales to Zimbabwe include 12 K-8 trainer/combat aircraft, plus small arms and ammunition.

Excerpt:

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Aug 6 2008 (IPS)

Financial support for Argentine athletes has traditionally been meagre, but it has increased ahead of the Beijing Olympic games. However, several experts warn that more money alone is not enough to give a real boost to sports.

The Sports Secretariat budget has risen from 26 million pesos (8.5 million dollars) to 107 million pesos (35.6 million dollars) a year since 2003, according to official figures. Most of it is spent on competitions and scholarships or bursaries for more than 600 athletes.

But above and beyond the question of whether the funding is sufficient, experts say that a greater political will to invest in sports, a better financial plan involving public/private partnerships, and more professional management of the federations that represent each discipline are needed.

This year’s delegation to Beijing is made up of 138 athletes in 20 disciplines. It is smaller than the delegation that went to Athens in 2004, but the Secretariat said that this was not due to budget constraints but to fewer athletes qualifying for the 2008 Olympics.

“The state does not decide how many athletes go. Those who qualify, go. No athlete who has met the qualifying standard has been left behind,” the national director of sports training, Osvaldo Arsenio, told IPS.

Arsenio emphasised the expanded sports budget, but admitted that it is still not big enough. “There is an upward trend, but of course there are countries in the region, such as Brazil, Cuba and Venezuela, where more support is given,” he said.

In sports other than football and basketball, which enjoy more private funding, the state contributes 80 percent of the budget, said Arsenio. “Without this support, the federations would not exist,” the official added. However, he said that the ideal would be a balance of public and private funding.

In an interview with IPS, former Olympic athlete and ex sports secretary (1999-2001) Marcelo Garraffo said “those who qualify are sent, not those who have money,” to an event like the Olympics. Nevertheless, if the state invested more, greater numbers of athletes would achieve the competition standards, he said.

To say that the budget has grown is “relative,” Garraffo said. “Most of the money in high performance sports is spent in dollars, because it is used for international flights and competitions. Rather than an increase, there has been an update” in terms of the exchange rate, he said. When he was sports secretary the spending level was about 27 million dollars a year.

Argentina “has a sports policy, but what it lacks is the political will to really support sports, such as a plan to spend 100 or 200 million dollars a year for four to eight years,” he said. This level of investment has not occurred since the mid-20th century, during the government of the late Juan Domingo Perón (1946-1955 and 1973-1974).

The work of the sports federations is another issue that observers regard as crucial to the improvement of athletes’ performance. In an attempt to make their management more transparent, the Sports Secretariat decided a few years ago not to renew subsidies for federations that do not submit proper accounts.

“Apart from football, most federations are amateur, so they are managed by volunteers who may or may not have a track record in the sport. They carry out their duties after their paid jobs and they do what they can, usually without much aptitude,” Garraffo said.

In his view, if federation management is not in the hands of professionals the results will always be disappointing. “Nowadays sports need marketing and publicity, and therefore sports managers,” he said. Otherwise funds are misspent, and if the Sports Secretariat does not renew the subsidies, the athletes are the ones who suffer.

According to sports reporter Sergio Danishewsky, who covered the Olympic games in Athens in 2004, former footballer Claudio Morresi is doing a good job as sports secretary. Federations that do not present their accounts have not had their state funding renewed, but they have done nothing to improve matters, he told IPS.

Garraffo, who took part in three Olympic games and was the Argentine flagbearer at the opening ceremony in Barcelona in 1992, also said that if the state had a well-defined programme, like Spain’s, involving public and private funds, it could build a structure of long-term support that would develop sports for the upcoming generations.

Arsenio agreed that a plan like that of Spain’s Olympic Sports Association (ADO) would strengthen sports.

In Garraffo’s view, the Spanish plan “was a watershed” in his discipline, field hockey, and he attributed Spain’s strong performance in sports to the investment that it has made since 1992 under the ADO programme.

The former sports secretary and Olympic hockey player said that players today are tempted to go abroad, in professional sports like football and basketball, but also in others like rugby, volleyball and hockey.

“In Europe, players earn at least five times what they earn here, so it’s logical that they want to leave, but it’s a pity because stars who are role models for the youngest players go, and trainers also leave,” Garraffo said.

In Argentina, scholarships range from 425 to 2,300 pesos a month (141 to 766 dollars) with a few exceptions, like athletes in wheelchairs, who receive the equivalent of 1,200 dollars a month.

The sole boxer in the Argentine delegation to Beijing, Ezequiel Maderna, is a case in point. “The level of Sports Secretariat support is low. I receive 450 pesos (150 dollars) a month, and I have to support a wife and daughter. Next year I’ll have to start boxing professionally,” he complained.

Boxing is the sport that has brought Argentina the most Olympic medals so far. Out of the 60 gold medals the country has won for different disciplines, 24 went to boxers. But this strong performance has declined in recent years. “There has been less travel to competitions, which has meant fewer opportunities for boxers to build experience,” Maderna said.

Arsenio, however, said the situation was more complex. “Argentina has a great Olympic boxing tradition, but in the past the athletes would go to the games when they were 26, with 150 fights behind them. In contrast, nowadays an 18-year-old boxer who has won two or three fights is already lured into a professional career.”

Boxing regulations ban professional fighters from taking part in the Olympics. “We had a great young boxer, Marcos Maidana, on a scholarship. Now he’s going for a world title, because the promoters offered him a professional contract and he chose to seek his future with them,” Arsenio said.

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By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Aug 6 2008 (IPS)

An electronic paper trail indicates that one of Australia’s leading television networks may be involved in dissuading foreign media in China against covering “forbidden” topics.

The contents of an e-mail sent in March of this year by the chief operating officer of the Beijing Media Centre (BMC) to Australian television’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) – revealed recently by SBS’s Dateline programme – appears to show that BMC explicitly warned foreign journalists not to report on sensitive topics.

“As I’m sure that you are aware, there are guidelines that have been put in place for international media coming to Beijing/China in 2008 and there are politically sensitive topics that the Government has asked the foreign media not to cover,” says the e-mail’s author, whose identity is yet to be confirmed, but who is being reported in Australian media to be BMC’s current chief operating officer, Gavin Romanis.

BMC is a joint-venture between Australia’s Seven Network Australia – one of Australia’s leading media companies and this country’s largest commercial television network -and the Beijing City government.

The Seven Network was well-positioned to enter into the joint venture given that the company’s chairman, Kerry Stokes, has been involved in operations in China since the 1990s.

BMC is located in Beijing’s Pangu Plaza, a prime position from which to broadcast as it overlooks Olympic venues such as the main “bird’s nest” stadium and “water cube” swimming centre. Media outlets such as CNN, the BBC and the European Broadcasting Union will utilise its facilities.

The BMC company was established due to the city government’s desire to use foreign broadcasting expertise.

The e-mail from the chief officer, dated March 4, notes that BMC “is a company that has as its majority shareholder as the Beijing Government” and “relies on the support and assistance of many [Chinese] government departments”.

The BMC chief officer writes that “if BMC was seen to be supporting an international programme whose intentions were to cover any of the 5 forbidden topics, the repercussions for BMC and its clients could be disastrous for the Olympic project and any further support for the remaining 26 years of the joint venture’’.

The e-mail also says that media wishing to use BMC’s facilities to report on sensitive issues will be denied access.

“Should you be coming to Beijing to cover Olympic related topics then we would be only too happy to assist you with your requirements, but should you be coming to Beijing to produce segments and stories on any of the forbidden topics, then I’m sorry, but we are not going to be able to offer our support this time around,” writes the company’s chief operating officer.

IPS contacted the alleged author of the e-mail to discuss the “forbidden topics” but Romanis refused to be interviewed, instead referring IPS to Seven Network’s spokesman, Simon Francis.

In an e-mail on Jul.31 to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Francis denied that the Seven Network was involved in censorship. “We are purely in a partnership as a facilities provider and facilitator in China,” he said.

In a follow-up e-mail to the ABC on Aug.1, Francis claimed ignorance regarding any forbidden topics. “We can only reiterate that we don’t know the ‘five forbidden topics.’ I suspect we didn’t know them when the e-mail was sent five months [ago] and we still don’t know,” wrote Francis.

Earlier, a co-director of BMC, Doug Fraser, also denied knowledge of the forbidden topics or that the company was involved in censoring stories. “Our broadcast base here is an independent broadcast base. We don’t provide any assistance on what stories you might want to cover. It’s up to the journalists themselves,” said Fraser.

Despite these denials from the Seven Network and BMC, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has expressed concern about the warning to foreign media against covering sensitive topics in China.

Projects director at the IFJ Asia-Pacific, Sam Grunhard, told IPS “that the reporting regulations issued in 2007 for all foreign journalists coming to report on the Games expressly allowed freedom for foreign journalists to report on any matters they saw as necessary to be reported on’’.

Grunhard says that “this suggestion [against covering sensitive topics] does fly in the face of those policies that the Chinese government has been making, in fact, right back to when the Olympic Games were granted’’.

In 2001, the Secretary-General of the Beijing Olympic Bid Committee, Wang Wei, said: ‘’We will give the media complete freedom to report when they come to China.”

But BMC’s e-mail is just one in a series of incidents which appear to indicate that foreign journalists do not have “complete freedom to report” in China.

Last week it was revealed that access to some internet sites were being blocked to journalists at the main media centre in Beijing, apparently due to a deal struck between the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Beijing Olympics Organising Committee (BOCOG).

The deal was a major embarrassment to the chairman of the IOC’s press commission, Kevan Gosper, who had said in March that journalists would be as free to operate in Beijing as they were at the Sydney Olympics in 2000.

More recently, two Japanese journalists were allegedly assaulted by Chinese police after they went to report on this week’s attack which left 16 police dead in the far-western city of Kashgar in China’s restive Xinjiang province.

And a report released in late July by Amnesty International (AI) expresses concern regarding media freedom “despite the introduction of new media regulations increasing the freedom of foreign reporters to cover news stories in China.”

AI says that “concerns remain that authorities may seek to block broadcasting of anything deemed sensitive or inappropriate during the Olympic Games’’.

Cases of interference in the work of foreign journalists by authorities in China have been documented by the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC). The club says that there have been 270 cases of interference since Jan.1, 2007, when the regulation pertaining to “free reporting” of the Olympics took effect.

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By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Aug 5 2008 (IPS)

Some 1,200 athletes from Latin America and the Caribbean will be taking part in the Olympic games in Beijing, but only a handful stand a real chance of landing a medal, to judge from their past performance and their own expectations.

Medals may be in the offing in team sports like football, baseball, volleyball or field hockey. But in disciplines based on individual performance, the region is not expected to shine, with the exception of a few realistic contenders from Cuba, Jamaica and other Caribbean nations.

“All of the medals won by Latin America and the Caribbean combined will be less than those taken by major powers like the United States or China,” Venezuelan sports journalist Cándido Pérez told IPS. “You can see the North-South gap in sports achievement, which is one of resources, technology and organisation.”

In the history of the modern Olympic games, from Athens in 1896 to Athens in 2004, athletes from Latin America and the Caribbean have won 490 medals, a mere 3.9 percent of the 12,550 awarded. And Cuba alone accounted for 63 of the region’s 126 gold medals.

But Cuba, where promoting sports has been the socialist government’s policy since the 1959 revolution, is now “experiencing a decline because of limited availability of resources compared to its industrialised rivals, the retirement of athletes who have not been replaced by strong successors, and the departure from the island of other athletes,” said Pérez.

Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, other strong performers in the past, have modest to optimistic expectations and chances.

For Brazil, Beijing is a springboard for pushing its bid to host the 2016 games in Rio de Janeiro, a privilege only enjoyed so far in the region by Mexico, in 1968.

Brazil expects to take home medals in volleyball, because of its international stature in the sport, and the fact that for decades it has been the best managed sport in Brazil, to the point that its leading light, Carlos Nuzman, is president of the Brazilian Olympic Committee.

But what fans are most hoping for is the gold medal in men’s football, the only prize not yet achieved by Brazilian football, which has won five FIFA World Cup titles.

Brazilians will be keeping a close eye on Ronaldinho Gaúcho, who was named FIFA World Player of the Year in 2004 and 2005. Brazil’s hopes of joining Argentina, which won the gold medal in football in 2004 in Athens, and Uruguay, the champion in 1924 in Paris and 1928 in Amsterdam, would seem to be pinned on Ronaldinho’s extraordinary talent.

For the last two decades, Brazil has had a well-defined sports promotion policy, with a Ministry of Sports, “Olympic villages” – programmes for slum children – and a government system of scholarships that has been accompanied by the growth of sports sponsorship by the private sector.

In Beijing, 277 athletes from South America’s giant will take part in 32 disciplines, and their highest hopes are focused on track and field, judo, men’s and women’s football, volleyball, beach volleyball and sailing.

Argentina, which is sending 136 athletes to compete in 20 disciplines, took gold in Athens in men’s football and basketball.

In football, Argentina has a star of its own to compete with Ronaldinho – his young former teammate Lionel Messi, who is awaiting a final ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), expected Wednesday, on whether or not he will be allowed to travel to China despite the resistance of his club, FC Barcelona.

But in basketball, Argentina “is now a step behind” where it was, veteran sports reporter Sergio Danishewsky told IPS. “It has the same team” that won Argentine basketball’s first-ever gold medal in Athens, “while others, like the United States, Spain or Lithuania, have improved greatly,” he said.

In women’s hockey, however, the expert said there is not only a new generation of players, but also a change in technique. The young women, who won the Women’s Hockey World Cup in 2002 in Australia, hope to do better than the bronze medal that they earned four years ago.

Argentina may also capture medals in rowing, sailing and tennis, depending on how well recovery goes for David Nalbandián, the country’s top tennis player, who has suffered from a hernia and hip problems.

The 85 athletes who will participate in 22 disciplines for Mexico, by contrast, will not have much of a presence in team sports, except beach volleyball. The president of the local Olympic committee, Felipe Muñoz, said he was hoping for eight medals: in track and field, boxing, canoeing, diving, weightlifting, Taekwondo, archery and sailing.

Among its strongest contenders are archer Juan René Serrano, Paola Espinosa in diving, race walker Eder Sánchez, María Espinoza in Taekwondo, and Tania Calles in sailing.

In the field of sports, Mexico is suffering divisions. In track and field, the presidents of two federations, neither of which is recognised by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), are travelling to Beijing. And former champion sprinter Ana Guevara, who took silver in Athens, has refused to compete for her country because of corruption and cronyism.

Like in other countries, winners will receive cash incentives. The Mexican telephone company, Telmex, which belongs to magnate Carlos Slim, offered 230,000 dollars over the space of four years to gold medal winners.

Several stars from Cuba are flying to China: hurdler Dayron Robles and three women athletes – Yargelis Savigne (triple jump), Osleydis Menéndez (javelin), and Yipsi Moreno (hammer throw). The Dominican Republic is sending 400m hurdler Félix Sánchez. And Panama will be represented in the long jump by Irving Saladino, nicknamed “the Panamanian kangaroo”.

Renowned track and field competitors are also heading to Beijing from the English-speaking Caribbean, a well-known source of top athletes, who benefit from close ties to universities and clubs in the United States and Canada.

Jamaica will participate with sprinter Usain Bolt, the current 100m world record holder (9.72 s), Asafa Powell, the former 100m world record holder (9.74 s), and the current Olympic 200m and world 100m champion, Veronica Campbell-Brown.

The Bahamas, meanwhile, boasts high jumper Donald Thomas, while other athletes from the Caribbean have a realistic chance of winning medals in the relay races.

The Andean region, on the other hand, has low expectations. Many of the 68 participating Colombians, 27 Chileans, 25 Ecuadoreans, 12 Peruvians and six Bolivians are athletes who qualified for the Olympics merely by meeting the IAAF “B” standard, rather than the “A” standard.

Venezuela is an exception among the Andean nations, because of the heavy injection of windfall oil profits ahead of Beijing – 300 million dollars – and President Hugo Chávez’s determination to send a record number of competitors to this year’s games: 109, compared to the 48 who went to Athens.

The oil-rich nation “is growing fast towards becoming part of the elite of the sports world. It’ll take us two Olympic cycles, in order to take 150 competitors in 2012 and 200 in 2016,” said the president of Venezuela’s Olympic Committee, former sports minister Eduardo Álvarez.

As part of its payment for Venezuelan oil, Cuba has sent hundreds of sports trainers to the country in the last few years.

Women’s and men’s volleyball, and women’s softball, which could bring a medal, have increased the chances of a decent performance by the delegation, which also includes swimmers, gymnasts, weightlifters and competitors in combat sports, in which Caribbean nations have always stood out. Latin America’s first gold medal was won in Paris in 1900 by Cuban fencer Ramón Fonst.

Pérez, however, said Venezuela’s “delegation is large, but at the cost of taking second-tier athletes who can’t aspire to reaching the podium, and the Cuban and Venezuelan trainers know that.”

Álvarez hopes his country will take home medals in boxing, fencing, Taekwondo and softball.

But his predecessor, Fernando Romero, remarked that “I think that’s an over-exaggeration. It’s more likely for one of our writers to win the Nobel Prize for literature.”

Moved by passion or politics, Latin Americans are heading to Beijing with enthusiasm, even though they have little hopes of making headway among the traditional sports powers like the United States, Europe, countries of the former Soviet Union, or the host country, China.

*With additional reporting by Marcela Valente in Argentina, Mario Osava in Brazil and Emilio Godoy in Mexico.

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By IPS Correspondents
BEIJING, Aug 1 2008 (IPS)

A gathering storm of international criticism over China’s security crackdown and limits on free speech while hosting the Olympic games this month has prompted Chinese president and communist party chief Hu Jintao to step in with a plea not to politicise the sporting event.

President Hu Jintao with foreign journalists a week before the start of the Beijing Olympics. Credit: Chinese Official Web Portal

As a leader who has worked to promote a model of “social harmony”, Hu stroke a conciliatory note addressing mounting international criticism of China’s human rights record on issues such as Tibet, Darfur and free speech. “It is only inevitable that people from different countries and regions may not see eye-to-eye with one another on different issues,” he said.

He said politicising the games ran counter to the Olympic spirit and to the shared hopes of people across the world. “We should enter into consultations on an equal footing to narrow our differences and expand our common ground on the basis of mutual respect.’’

Bu Hu’s peace-making overtures were in contrast to Beijing’s sharp rejection of U.S. political criticism this week after the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution urging China to honour its pledge to improve human rights before the games.

Liu Jianchao, a foreign ministry spokesman, condemned the House measure as “odious conduct” and said the U.S. should stop “making use of so-called religious and human rights” issues to score political points.

Members of the U.S. House voted 419 to 1 to endorse a resolution asking China to “immediately end abuses of the human rights of its citizens, to cease repression of Tibetan and Uygur citizens, and to end its support for the governments of Sudan and Burma”. Such action would “ensure that the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games take place in an atmosphere that honours the Olympic traditions of freedom and openness”, the House statement said.

The resolution also called on U.S. president George W. Bush to make a strong public statement on China’s human rights situation during his upcoming visit to Beijing to attend the opening ceremony of the games. It came a day after Bush held talks with five prominent Chinese dissidents at the White House – Harry Wu, Wei Jingsheng, Rebiya Kadeer, Sasha Gong and Bob Fu. All of them are long-time critics of the Chinese government’s alleged human rights abuses.

Liu described the meeting as “rude interference” in the country’s internal affairs. “The arrangement of a U.S. leader to meet with them, and to make irresponsible comments on China’s human rights and religious situation, has rudely interfered with China’s internal affairs,” he said at a regular press briefing.

The angry exchanges occur as scrutiny grows over how China is treating its people and the visiting news media. As an Olympic host, Beijing has committed to a series of reforms of its tight, top-down political system to ensure openness, free speech and unfettered access to information during the games.

In 2001, when China was granted the hosting of the 2008 Olympic Games, Wang Wei, Secretary General of the Beijing Olympic Bid Committee said: “We will give the media complete freedom to report when they come to China. We are confident that the Games coming to China will not only promote our economy but also enhance all social conditions, including… human rights.”

But in the run up to the games, Beijing’s draconian security measures have muzzled up the media along with government critics. Beijing-based human rights activists have been warned not to speak with the foreign media. People seen as potential “troublemakers” during the games have been shipped out of town.

“These measures unfortunately recall those adopted by the Soviet police during the 1980 Olympics Games, when dissidents were forced to leave Moscow,” Reporters Without Borders, which monitors press freedom said in a statement on Friday.

An escalating row between Beijing games organisers and the foreign media over the country’s failure to fulfil its longstanding pledge to provide reporters with unfettered access to Internet was partly defused Friday. Some sites that had been blocked in Olympic media centres – such as that of rights group Amnesty International – became accessible.

But another Olympic pledge by Beijing, to allow protests within designated demonstration zones in the city, remains under scrutiny after several attempts by petitioners to obtain permission this week were blocked.

Chinese citizens have a legal right to protest, but they must first apply for permission from their local Public Security Bureau. Such requests are rarely granted and when protests occur they are almost never officially sanctioned. Human rights activists have expressed concerns that such protest zones would be merely a public relations ploy with no real function.

Reports in the Hong Kong media said attempts by property owners in the eastern city of Suzhou to apply for a permission to protest over a land dispute were foiled in Beijing and petitioners were made to go back.

Brushing off media scepticism, President Hu promised in his address that bolder political reforms would emerge from the international spotlight on the Beijing games. Comprehensive reforms – both economic and political – would continue after the Olympics, he told foreign journalists.

“The current dream of the Chinese people is to accelerate building a modern country and realise the great renaissance of the Chinese nation,” Hu said.

CHINA: Pledges on Rights, Environment Unmet – Critics

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