With the Olympics just a month away, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said yesterday it was time for China to deliver on promises made seven years ago when it was awarded the Games.
Three major issues loom before the Aug. 8 opening ceremonies: Beijing’s choking air pollution, freedom for journalists to report the Games and finishing two subway lines and a rail line. Beijing’s 31 Olympic venues were completed months ago, said Hein Verbruggen, the senior IOC official who has guided preparations for the Games.
“Preparation time is over,” Verbruggen said at the inauguration of the Main Press Center and International Broadcast Center with Liu Qi (劉淇), secretary of Beijing’s Communist Party and the president of the local organizing committee, standing nearby.
Both men were shrouded in a gray veil of pollution, which skimmed the ground and limited visibility to a few hundred meters.
Verbruggen described the venues and organization in Beijing as “a gold standard,” but acknowledged “a very small number of open issues remain.”
“The city feels ready; it looks ready, with the stunning venues all completed,” he said.
Air pollution is supposed to be cleared up by a temporary, but draconian, plan beginning on July 20 that will remove about 2 million cars from Beijing’s streets and shutter dozens of factories.
The most difficult promise to keep, however, may be upholding a 2001 pledge to allow as many as 30,000 reporters to work freely as they have in other Olympics.
The IOC and television rights holders have been at odds for months with Chinese security officials, fighting to clarify the rights of satellite trucks to move freely around the city of 17 million. The broadcasters, the IOC and games organizers will meet today in Beijing.
“I think this free reporting will be a problem for everyone,” said Johannes Hano, East Asia bureau chief of Germany’s ZDF television.
Hano had a live interview on the Great Wall stopped last week when police barged into an interview that was being transmitted back to Germany.
“They will stop you even if you have permission. It will be the biggest problem. There is no freedom of press as they promised,” he said.
Meanwhile, dissidents and rights groups say Beijing is targeting Mongolians along with Tibetans and Uighurs as part of its pre-Games security clampdown.
“Recently the authorities have been getting increasingly paranoid,” said Enhebatu Togochog of the New York-based Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center.
Xinna, the wife of Inner Mongolia’s best-known jailed dissident, Hada, said police had intensified surveillance on her and other activists in the run-up to the Games.
“It’s white terror,” she said at a teahouse in regional capital Hohhot. “There’s a lot of fear.”
China defended its human rights record yesterday, accusing its critics of prejudice.
“China is making progress and everybody without prejudice will recognize this point, ” foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang (秦剛) said after Amnesty International published a letter to Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) urging improvement in human rights.
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