Politicizing 2008 Olympic Games by high profile people in Britain and US is HYPOCRITE

[Rising China]

There is a very weak link between my topic and the General Military Discusion forum. However, I just want raise the issue and find out what the other members in this forum think about this issue.

British and US are hypocrite by linking China Olympics to Darfur event in Sudan. First, they should know well that Olympic games should not be politicized. Secondly, the war in Sudan is a civil war and China is only indirectly involved to a certain extend, unlike the British and US who have been directly waging wars against Afgan and Irag without UN approval resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilians being killed. Also, the British must live up to its brutal past of robbing, raping, and killing of millions of people in Africa, Middle East, India, Australia, Oceana, and China, etc. during its period colonization. British government and its people must apologize and financially compensate these countries for what their barbarian ancestors did. Also, they must return all the cultural relics stolen from China during the Opium Wars. Once the British admit their past sub-human deeds are wrong, then they can link the human right issues to Beijing 2008 Olympics. The kettle call the pot black! Hypocrite! Boycott London 2012Olympics!

:nono:

[SteelBird]

I did some search but couldn't find any direct article to the Darfur Event you mention above.

Can you provide some link to that event or provide some detail to it. Especially, what China are to blamed for the event? Thanks!

[Schumacher]

Well, it's unfortunate but Olympics has never been able to escape being politicized throughout history, unless the host is some insignificant nations that no one cares abt. :) No offence intended. And as we all know politics is always hypocritical.

As SteelBird's failure to find news on it suggests, it's not as big a deal as some groups would like. So no need to overreact.

Before just criticizing US or UK, one must note both Bush & Brown, not to mention I think abt 60 other heads of state, will attend the Olympics in Beijing which I think is a very friendly gesture.
So just criticizing US for what some small groups do is playing into their hands.

[bladerunner]

The Darfur crisis .Basically its about oil
Heres my view on it.


This crisis isn't going to fix itself. Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir rivals Iran's leader in genocide denial: He recently accused aid workers of exaggerating Darfur's crisis to preserve their jobs. Doesn't China feel qualms about propping up this ogre? Perhaps Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., who is in China along with a team of Cabinet officials and the Fed chairman today and tomorrow, might trouble to ask that question.

Usa discovered oil in Sudan by Usa in the 80s
Developed by Chevron.
Moved out because of trouble. The Southern areas of Sudan did not think that the oil wealth was even spread.
China replaced Americas presence in 1999
America retreated to Chad where it has supported the rebels and hope to regain control of oilfields.
Here is an article Blaming China written in the Washington Post December 2006
NEWSPAPERS HAVE been running harrowing ads on the genocide in Darfur. They feature images of suffering coupled with appeals to President Bush to halt it. But the key to this tragedy lies not in the killing fields of western Sudan nor even in the White House. It is to be found instead in Khartoum, Sudan's booming capital. The sleek new office towers sprouting up in the commercial district explain why Sudan's government has resisted American and European pressure to end the genocide. But they also show why Arabs and Asians -- and especially the Chinese --have the power to influence Sudan and the responsibility to use it.

Sudan has been subject to U.S. sanctions since the 1990s. It has been condemned in numerous United Nations resolutions, and Western firms that do business there risk alienating customers and investors. And yet a $4 billion complex of offices, parks and hotels is rising at the confluence of the White and Blue Niles, complete with the new sail-shaped headquarters of Petrodar, a Chinese-Malaysian-United Arab Emirates oil partnership. Thanks to these investors, along with Kuwaitis, Saudis, Indians and Pakistanis, Sudan's petro-economy is flourishing. This year the economy is expected to grow 13 percent on the back of oil exports, most of which go to China.So Sudan's government feels it can ignore Western revulsion at genocide because it has no need of Western money. But the bigger question is why China, along with Sudan's other Arab and Asian partners, feels free to trample on basic standards of decency. China's economic model rests on access to Western markets -- access that can't be assured given popular resentment of China's growing trade surplus. Equally, China seeks acceptance at the world's diplomatic top table -- and thiscause is unlikely to be advanced if China is perceived to be complicit in genocide. Imagine the newspaper ads leading up to the Beijing Games in 2008: Human rights campaigners will call on the world to boycott the Genocide Olympics.

China recently demonstrated its leverage over Sudan, prevailing upon the regime to allow the embattled African Union force in Darfur to be supplied with better equipment. But China should join with the United States and others to broker a cease-fire in Darfur, without which even a beefed-up peace monitoring force cannot save civilians. In recent weeks, fighting has intensified in the region and spilled into neighboring Chad; refugees are fleeing to the Central African Republic, which is embroiled in its own internal conflict. A regional catastrophe is brewing that could be worse even than the past three years of killing.

an opposing view written in www.spiked_online.com. This site is usually critical about China but in this circumstance it can see the double standards and does not hold China as being responsible for the Darfur Crisis, but America.

The question is oil usa is trying 2 get back in?

The Pentagon has been busy training African military officers in the US, much as it has trained Latin American officers for decades. Its International Military Education and Training program has provided training to military officers from Chad, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Cameroon and the Central African Republic.

Much of the arms that have fueled the killing in Darfur and the south have been brought in via murky, protected private "merchants of death" such as the notorious former KGB operative, now with offices in the US, Victor Bout, who has been cited repeatedly in recent years for selling weapons across Africa. US government officials strangely leave his operations in Texas and Florida untouched despite the fact he is on the Interpol wanted list for money laundering.

Chad oil and pipeline politics
Condoleezza Rice's Chevron is in neighboring Chad, together with the other US oil giant, ExxonMobil. They've just built a $3.7 billion oil pipeline carrying 160,000 barrels per day from Doba in central Chad, near Darfur, via Cameroon to Kribi on the Atlantic Ocean, destined for US refineries.

To do it, they worked with Chad "President for life" Idriss Deby, a corrupt despot who has been accused of feeding US-supplied arms to the Darfur rebels. Deby joined Washington's Pan Sahel Initiative run by the Pentagon's US-European Command, to train his troops to fight "Islamic terrorism".

Supplied with US military aid, training and weapons, in 2004, Deby launched the initial strike that set off the conflict in Darfur. He used members of his elite Presidential Guard, who come from the province, providing them with all-terrain vehicles, arms and anti-aircraft guns to aid Darfur rebels fighting the Khartoum government in southwestern Sudan. The US military support to Deby in fact had been the trigger for the Darfur bloodbath. Khartoum reacted and the ensuing debacle was unleashed in full, tragic force.

Washington-backed NGOs and the US government claim unproven genocide as a pretext to ultimately bring UN/NATO troops into the oil fields of Darfur and southern Sudan. Oil, not human misery, is behind Washington's new interest in Darfur.
Here is another View from the Guardian written by Jonathon Steele
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jonathan_steele/2008/02/why_blame_china.html
The excitement over Steven Spielberg's withdrawal of support for the Beijing Olympics has helped to re-focus attention on Darfur. That is all to the good, especially if it leads his fellow-protesters to look more clearly at what is actually happening there and what moral responsibility China really has in allegedly failing to stop the war in Darfur. Brian Brivati wrote on this blog yesterday that "China is the key", but is that really the case?

Wars always have at least two sides, and in the Darfur case that is an underestimate. There are around a dozen different rebel groups currently fighting the government. To put the blame on only one party makes no moral or political sense. The best way to stop the fighting and the humanitarian emergency that flows from it is to have an organised ceasefire and hold talks. This is what the Sudanese government did last October on the eve of the peace conference that the UN and the African Union held in Libya. Only a minority of the rebel groups reciprocated the ceasefire offer or attended the conference. They preferred to go on fighting, in part because they feel the one-sided approach of much of the outside world, with its exclusive pressure on the Khartoum government, helps their cause.

The point is slowly being accepted by many of the so-called Darfur support groups. Compared with three years ago, when the campaign started, their statements now show a greater willingness to recognise the rebels' negative role in attacking aid workers, stealing humanitarian supplies, and raiding government-held villages and towns. The latest atrocity in early February when Khartoum-backed militias burnt down two towns in Western Darfur was provoked by attacks by the Justice and Equality Movement, one of the main groups which rejects peace talks. The pattern is depressingly familiar from almost every counterinsurgency campaign in history - rebel raids, which produce a government over-reaction. But who is to blame? If the rebels went to the peace table, there would have been no impulse for the government to respond with force.

The support groups still seem not to appreciate that the humanitarian situation has changed. Claims of genocide were never accepted by the UN, but the events that gave rise to them occurred in 2003 and 2004. Today's Darfur is still appalling but not so bloody a place. In any case, the death rates of those years are heavily disputed, as is their cause. The victims of hunger and disease exacerbated by forced displacement are one-sidedly, and often deliberately, described by lobby groups as having been killed by government forces or their militias, as though they were executed.

Subsequent years have seen a huge deployment to Darfur of UN and other international aid agencies. They eliminated starvation and massively reduced death from disease. Displacement in overcrowded camps is no longterm solution and people need confidence and security to go home. But the need to bring in a more powerful UN peacekeeping force to help to ensure that should not obscure the fact that the humanitarian effort has already been one of the UN's most successful interventions anywhere.

Getting governments to fulfil their promises of troops for the new hybrid UN/AU force in Darfur, trying to obtain more helicopters, and building the peacekeepers' bases more quickly are important tasks. But, however well-equipped its force is, the UN cannot impose peace. That can only be done through a ceasefire and political talks. As Ban Ki-moon rightly said last week, "the deployment of Unamid will only be as effective as the political process it is mandated to support".

How does China relate to this? It helped to pass the UN resolution to set up Unamid. It has contributed several hundred military engineers to Unamid. What more can it realistically do? The idea that it can pressure Khartoum "to stop the killing", as Brivati wrote yesterday, is too simple. The killing is more likely to stop when the rebels come to the peace table that the AU and the UN (with China's help) have laid out for them.

[crobato]

SORRY NO POLITICS. THE SDF CANNOT BE POLITICIZED EITHER

[AssassinsMace]

If this was really about stopping genocide then why didn't the West do anything but stand by and watch what happened in Rwanda? They can invade Sudan right now. Let's give the US a break and say they have their hands full. What about the loudest voices coming from Europe that don't have their hands full?

You know how many genocides or massacres have come to pass since World War II and the West did nothing? So this ain't about, "Never again!" The slogan now is "Enough!" which tells you they never got anywhere with "Never again!" If they have to change their slogan because the one before reminds everyone how much of a failure they are, then they've pretty much ran out of credibility.

Sorry, I was writing my post when Crobato posted his warning.

[bd popeye]

Apparently Rising China has not read the rules reguarding the subject matter of this forum. The title alone is enough to warrant this thread to be closed. A warning will be issued to Rising China.

Guess what??

This thread is closed.

bd popeye super moderator