Pro-Tibet Activists Disrupt Olympic Flame Ceremony
The incident occurred as Liu Qi, president of the Beijing Organizing Committee, was addressing thousands of spectators, dignitaries and Olympic officials, minutes into a flame-lighting ceremony guarded by 1,000 police officers and commandos concealed in laurel groves.
The brief disruption was broadcast live by Greek national television but China state TV cut away to a prerecorded scene, blocking millions of Chinese views from watching the tumultuous start to their nation’s Games.
Authorities released no immediate details of the incident but the Athens chapter of the Paris-based media rights group Reporters Without Borders said three of its members had staged the protest stunt.
The French activists remained detained at a local police station and faced possible criminal charges for evading security, breaking into the ceremony’s ancient grounds and flashing a black banner depicting the Games’ trademark Olympic rings as handcuffs.
“We cannot let the Chinese government seize the Olympic flame, a symbol of peace without denouncing the dramatic situation of human rights in the country,” the group said.
Moments after the incident, a Tibetan woman doused herself in red paint and lay in the road before a torch runner while police arrested two other Tibetan protesters planning a peaceful demonstration about a mile from the ancient sanctuary at the birthplace of the Olympics Games.
“They were stalking me from the moment I touched down to Greece ,” said one of those protesters, Tenzin Dorjee, a Tibetan-American activist who arrived Saturday to help orchestrate the peaceful demonstrations.
“All we wanted to do was break into the torch relay and shout that this is a torch of shame as the Chinese government continues to kill hundreds of our people,” he said in a telephone interview from the police precinct in Ancient Olympia.
The activist said about 20 undercover police dragged him away from the central square in Ancient Olympia, detaining him with an accompanying photographer.
“ Neither of us were injured,” he said. “But I don’t know how long we’ll be in here,” he said as police cut off telephone connection.
The activist was arrested last April in Tibet for protesting China’s trial ascent of Mount Everest with the Olympic torch.
China’s leadership has faced a public relations disaster since a spate of demonstrations turned violent in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa on March 10, the 49th anniversary of a failed uprising against Chinese rule.
Beijing claims 22 people have died in the clashes but the toll, while Tibet’s exile movement said Monday that at least 130 Tibetans were killed. The claims are impossible to corroborate because Chinese authorities have restricted access to Tibet and other areas of China with Tibetan populations.
Earlier on Monday, Mr. Dorjee confronted the head of the International Olympic Committee at his hotel lobby, demanding that Tibet be removed from the Olympic torch relay, and that dignitaries stage a boycott of the Games’ Aug. 8 opening ceremony.
The idea, suggested last week by the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, touched off a firestorm when French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said the 27-member European Union was “considering” such a boycott.
He quickly back-peddled from his statement telling French media that it was “unrealistic.”
The Games, expected to attract 500,000 tourists and 4 billion television viewers, are being framed by many China observers as the country’s arrival on the world stage.
On Monday Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee,, told The Associated Press that he was engaged in a “silent diplomacy” with Beijing on Tibet and other issues but saw no credible momentum for a boycott.
The ceremony here marked the official countdown to the Games as Maria Nafpliotou, a raven-haired actress playing an ancient priestess, ignited the Olympic flame by the suns’ rays in a burnished-steel mirror mounted in the ruins of a sanctuary Greeks prayed during the ancient Games in 776 B.C.
From Olympia, the flame — an iconic symbol of the Games — will be carried through Greece for a week before taking a seat on a Chinese flight to Beijing where it will then take off for the longest and most ambitious relay planned ever; a 137,000 kilometer, 130 day route that will cross all five continents and climb up the summit of Mount Everest before finally arriving at the National Stadium in Beijing for the opening ceremony.
