美國關心達佛人權議題的人士，包括影星Mia Farrow，從她發起施壓，大導演史匹柏辭去奧運開幕藝術總監，西方人士正利用奧運做為平台，將達佛人權議題引起國際注目，也對中共施壓。加上近來的西藏議題，更讓北京奧運成為人權團體展現中國人權問題的平台！
A rare opportunity to make Beijing sweat
By Ilan Greenberg
Saturday, March 29, 2008
On a morning in mid-February, the four staff members of Dream for Darfur sat in what they call their war room, contemplating posters of Beibei the Fish and her four fellow Olympic mascots taped to the walls.
In this cramped office on the 16th floor of a downtown Manhattan Art Deco building, Beibei smiled welcomingly, as did Jingjing the giant panda, Huanhuan the red Olympic flame, Nini the green swallow and Yingying the horned orange Tibetan antelope. Once the Summer Games begin in Beijing on Aug. 8, Chinese Olympic officials plan to sell millions of the mirthful mascots.
"I don’t know about the rest of you," said Jill Savitt, Dream for Darfur’s executive director, "but these cartoon creatures creep me out." Scattered on the floor around her were boxes overflowing with Dream for Darfur’s own media salvo: white T-shirts emblazoned with "Genocide Olympics?"
Savitt, a 40-year-old human rights activist, is the mind behind a long string of organizations conducting campaigns to pressure China to change its policies by threatening to tarnish the Olympic Games this summer. Dream for Darfur orchestrates a coalition of the believing - nongovernmental organizations committed to ending the violence in Sudan, but also groups concerned with government abuses inside China; Olympic athlete associations; organizations concerned about Tibet or China’s influence in Burma; and a spindly archipelago of other China-related causes.
"We are happy to walk into space that’s been created by the Darfur people, because they have created something fresh," says Mary Beth Markey, vice president for advocacy at the International Campaign for Tibet in Washington. "It’s been opportunistic for us."
But while Savitt’s many allies have adopted her strategy, Dream for Darfur still has just one goal: to convince China’s government that the Games are imperiled unless it halts its support for Sudan’s regime.
"China," Savitt told me proudly, "is looking at the entire world calling its cherished games the ’Genocide Olympics.’ "
Nonetheless, shaping world opinion is a tall order, especially with a staff of four; and the Olympics is not as easy a target as it might appear. Who isn’t rooting, at some level, for a successful Olympics, a precious two weeks set aside for idealism and newly minted heroes? Aren’t the Games meant to eclipse issues of the moment, aspiring to something universal and transcendent?
For those on board with Dream for Darfur, connecting the dots between the Summer Games and hundreds of thousands of African corpses is not complicated. The Sudanese government buys its weapons from China with the foreign currency it makes from selling China its oil. China, meanwhile, protects Sudan from excessive attention in the UN Security Council.
"The Olympics is a unique lever with the Chinese, and we’re not going to get another one - it ain’t happening again," Savitt said one morning in January.
But Savitt is keenly aware that her approach has to be nuanced, and in her speeches she is careful to say that she is a fan of the Games and that her organization is against a boycott.
The message to Olympic athletes has been so nuanced that it verges on abstruse: they should speak out on human rights issues but steer clear of politics; opposing genocide demands the ultimate in moral outrage from everyone, yet athletes shouldn’t jeopardize their medals. Speaking at a Dream for Darfur rally on Feb. 12 outside the Chinese Mission to the UN, the Canadian Olympic swimmer Nikki Dryden (1992 and ’96) put it like this: "China sullies everything the Olympics stands for because of what it allows to happen in Darfur, but I would never ask athletes to go outside their comfort zone."
Dream for Darfur asks that major sponsors like McDonald’s, Anheuser-Busch, Microsoft and Volkswagen take very small but potentially significant actions: to meet privately with Chinese officials to express concern over Darfur, for example, or to take a symbolic stand by calling publicly for officials from Sudan who have been accused of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court to be banned from attending the Games.
Savitt says that the sponsors are starting to take notice. Even executives at Coca-Cola have privately expressed anxiety about their association with the Games, according to Minky Worden, a veteran China specialist at Human Rights Watch. (On Tibet, Lenovo, the Chinese computer giant, recently said it was following the conflict there "with concern and regret.")
"Everything all these groups are doing has massive popular support from inside China, which isn’t understood here," says Worden, who is focused on internal Chinese issues and holding the Chinese government accountable for the promises it made to the International Olympic Committee in 2001. "Here is the thing: Our demands for internal human rights are not something that Chinese people don’t want, nor are they anything the Chinese government hasn’t explicitly promised to do. We’re pushing an open door.
"These companies are making a huge mistake in thinking the Chinese respect them for saying what they think they want to hear. Just the opposite. The Chinese government respects foreigners who repeatedly and reliably tell them the truth. How hard is it really for GE or Microsoft to push for something that the Chinese government already said it is receptive to doing?"
While the messaging to athletes and corporate sponsors is articulated diplomatically, Savitt’s overall campaign to bend the government of China to her demands remains straightforward. "Now we can really begin," she said with a wide smile on the day in mid-February when Steven Spielberg resigned as a creative consultant for the opening ceremonies.
The actress Mia Farrow, who has visited the greater Darfur region eight times, communicates daily with Savitt and works on nearly every aspect of the campaign. Farrow popularized the "Genocide Olympics" slogan in an opinion column - written with her son Ronan Farrow, a 19-year-old Yale law student - in The Wall Street Journal a year ago. Farrow had decided that for the director of "Schindler’s List" to have a role in China’s Olympics was unacceptable; she called him a "key collaborator."
Farrow travels with a MacBook containing her PowerPoint presentation - an affecting narrative of grim statistics and photos she snapped of displaced women and orphaned children with dancing eyes. She unleashes the presentation on TV chat shows and on her friends, like Barbara Walters, whom Farrow is currently lobbying.
In the car on the way to a radio interview, Farrow told me she wanted Walters to include Farrow’s plan for a "Live From the Camps" broadcast as a regular feature on Walters’s popular daytime gabfest, "The View."
"Live From the Camps" is envisioned, as the name suggests, as a live broadcast of Farrow from inside one of the camps housing Darfur refugees, to be transmitted as an alternative to watching commercials during the Olympics.
Dream for Darfur is giving a report card to corporate sponsors rating their actions on Darfur. Those who earn lower than a C will be the focus of demonstrations at their offices beginning next month. And a "Turn Off/Tune In" campaign will ask viewers of the Olympics to turn off the ads of flunking sponsors and watch Farrow’s broadcast from refugee camps.
"From start to finish, what we want China to fear is death by a thousand cuts," Savitt says. "China thought it would only face a ham-fisted boycott. It is getting something more sophisticated, more insidious."
By the end of February, indications that the Olympic campaign was making inroads with Chinese government officials began to surface in negative form: The Save Darfur coalition met with FBI agents to discuss what appeared to be cyberattacks originating in China.
Earlier this month, China sent a special envoy to Sudan, Liu Guijin, a senior diplomat. "Since last May, I have visited Sudan four times," Liu told reporters. "In the future, if it is necessary I will pay more visits. We have a good relationship with Sudan, we have some advantages in talking to Sudan, so we should use this as leverage"
Then Liu said something no Chinese official had ever said in the past: "We will persuade them in a direct way to work with the international community and be more cooperative," he told reporters, adding: "Concerning the Olympic Games, any advice or comments, even if it contains misunderstandings or criticism, we are open to and welcome this advice."
"We are willing to listen to any comments that contain reasonable elements," he went on to say, but warned that "for those few who attempt to tarnish the Olympic Games on the pretext of issues totally unrelated to the Olympics, like the Darfur issue, we are firmly opposed to such attempts."
Savitt was floored; it seemed that they were getting under China’s skin. The same week, Dream for Darfur began developing a more focused message to Olympics sponsors - several of which had now agreed to meet with Farrow - asking them to publicly call on the United Nations to fully deploy, at long last, the authorized multinational force in the Darfur region, with China taking the lead.
Dream for Darfur was now viewing the corporate sponsorship part of the campaign as more crucial than before. A significant point of leverage that could tip the balance: Olympic broadcasters and corporate sponsors account for 87 percent of Olympic revenue.
Microsoft, which is poised to become an even bigger player in China if its acquisition of Yahoo goes through, responded in a written statement that the company was "shocked and horrified by the violence and human rights violations in Darfur."
The company further commended Dream for Darfur and other organizations "for their leadership in casting a spotlight on this atrocity and the need for immediate international resolution. Microsoft will continue to support these organizations in their mission through technology assistance and other resources."
Sponsors of the torch relay that began last week, which include Coca-Cola and Lenovo, are especially vulnerable. The relay will traverse Tibet, where in mid-March the police cracked down on protesters, including monks, leading to at least 16 deaths. Indeed, the Tibetan conflict is threatening to supersede Darfur as the driver of the Olympic campaign.
Given the recent violence, Farrow is considering backing groups like Reporters Without Borders in attacking heads of state like Gordon Brown and George W. Bush, pressuring them to skip the opening ceremonies to signal a lack of support for China’s policies.
The way some activists see it, the opening ceremony is distinct from the rest of the Olympics and fair game for a boycott. But it is also possible that the Tibet situation could deteriorate to a point where the Darfur activists will feel they have no choice but to go along with a boycott.
As summer approaches and excitement builds for the start of the Games, no one knows how Chinese authorities will respond to an escalating "Genocide Olympics" campaign abroad or the actions of agent provocateurs at home. China watchers are deeply concerned about the ramifications of China’s massive installation of surveillance technology across Beijing.
The city-to-city torch procession that is a lead-up to the Games is a potential powder keg. Groups representing aggrieved minorities in China, like the Falun Gong religious sect and the ethnic Uighurs in China’s western Xinjiang region, hint at planned "street actions" almost certain to incite an angry police response.
Dream for Darfur has also publicized that it has a "secret plan" for drawing attention to Darfur during the Games but is staying mum on details for security reasons, according to Savitt. Another reason for the secrecy, however, might be that Darfur’s fate will be sealed months before, in April or in May. In order for Dream for Darfur to reach its goal of security on the ground for Darfurians by the start of the Olympics, UN-sanctioned troops will need at least two months to mobilize.
For Dream for Darfur, the consequences of the big street demonstrations planned during early April will be critical, especially an extended rally planned in San Francisco. The coalition of Darfur advocates wants these demonstrations, designed to garner maximum media exposure, to set loose a contagion of critical perceptions about the Olympics. The idea is that these demonstrations will put the words "Genocide Olympics" on tens of millions of lips around the world.
No matter how it plays out, the last day of the Olympics marks the end of existence for Dream for Darfur, which will disband after the Summer Games wrap up on Aug. 24.
China has eased its opposition to Security Council action on Darfur, including the joint United Nations-African Union force currently trying to patrol Darfur. But China is not going to convince Dream for Darfur that gradualism is the answer.
Ilan Greenberg, an adjunct fellow with the Asia Society, reported on Central Asia for The New York Times until last year.
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