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BEIJING — More than a month before any gold medals will be handed out, China has already achieved one of its biggest Olympic triumphs: a victory over the organizers of an attempted boycott.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the most likely potential leader of the boycott, has now abandoned the idea and will attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics next month, according to French media reports Friday.
A day earlier, U.S. President George W. Bush announced that he, too, would attend the opening ceremony on Aug. 8, despite strong pressure from U.S. politicians and human-rights groups who wanted him to join the boycott.
China's Communist rulers, who weathered a storm of pro-Tibet protests in March and April, can now look with satisfaction at how their political manoeuvring has deflated the boycott movement.
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By giving minimal concessions to the Dalai Lama – two rounds of ineffectual talks where nothing was offered or agreed to – China provided a face-saving solution for Mr. Sarkozy, allowing him to claim that he gained something for Tibet with his tough rhetoric about a possible boycott of the Games.
The boycott movement is now in tatters, with no major Western leaders still on board. Only a few smaller countries – Estonia, Poland, Austria and the Czech Republic – have announced that they will not send any representatives to the opening ceremony in Beijing.
Several other leaders, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, are not planning to attend the opening ceremony, but they have made it clear that that they are not participating in a boycott.
The human-rights group that spearheaded the boycott campaign was outraged by the Sarkozy and Bush decisions Friday, calling them “a capitulation and a stab in the back for China's dissidents.”
The Paris-based rights group, Reporters Without Borders, is trying to organize an Olympic boycott to put pressure on China to release jailed dissidents and keep its promise to improve human rights. The group estimates that China is currently imprisoning about 100 journalists, cyber-dissidents, bloggers and internet users, despite its promises to improve human rights after it was awarded the 2008 Olympics.
When the Tibetan protests began in March, the boycott movement seemed to be gaining traction, with several Western leaders seeming reluctant to attend the opening ceremony. But that momentum dissipated after the Sichuan earthquake in May and the two rounds of talks between representatives of China and the Dalai Lama.
“Sarkozy and Bush are now depriving themselves of a means of leverage that might have led to the release of imprisoned journalists and human-rights activists,” Reporters Without Borders said in a statement Friday.
After the Tibetan protests erupted, Mr. Sarkozy said he might not attend the Beijing Olympics unless China agreed to hold talks with the Dalai Lama's representatives. Later, he said he wanted to see progress in those talks before he could decide whether to attend the opening ceremony.
On Friday, the French newspaper Le Monde quoted sources in the French presidency who said Mr. Sarkozy would soon announce that he will attend the Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing. It said the announcement would be made by Mr. Sarkozy when he attends the G8 summit in Japan next week.
But despite Mr. Sarkozy's demands for positive results from the talks, there were no signs of any progress in the latest round of talks between Chinese officials and the Dalai Lama's representatives this week.
Lodi Gyari, a senior envoy of the exiled Tibetan leader, said the latest talks were “one of the most difficult sessions” that the two sides have ever had since their first talks in 2002. He said he does not expect a breakthrough any time soon.
“I told my Chinese counterparts very candidly that if there is not seriousness on their part, it is almost pointless for us to waste each other's time,” he told reporters at the New Delhi airport Friday as he headed to Dharmsala, headquarters of the Tibetan government-in-exile.
Chinese officials were equally pessimistic about the talks. They said China would not agree to further talks with the Dalai Lama's envoys unless he showed “positive behaviour” by refraining from any actions that would support Tibetan independence, incite violence or “disturb” the Olympics.
Even before the latest talks began, China launched a vicious verbal attack on the Dalai Lama this week, denouncing him as a “flunky” and “the main manipulator” of violence in Tibet. “Don't talk to the double-dealing Dalai Lama!” shouted the headline of an article on the English-language version of Xinhua, the state-owned news agency in China.
The article condemned him as “a traitor” who “wants to sell Tibetan land to get support from foreign forces.”
