The International Olympics Committee will decide the site of its 2008 Summer Games in July. For now, an evaluation committee is carefully inspecting the five cities in the running. Four of them would make excellent and honorable hosts, we figure: Paris, Toronto, Osaka, and Istanbul, each a modern, democratic cosmopolis.
But the fifth contender is the capital of the world's only totalitarian superpower. So THE SCRAPBOOK hereby announces that it will boycott the games if they are held in Beijing -- and hopes that the Bush administration will use whatever influence it can to derail Beijing's application.
Two weeks ago the IOC's evaluation committee spent four days in China. "What we want them to see," said Jiang Xiaoyu, vice president of that country's Olympic bid group, "is the real Beijing." Whether they realized it or not, the IOC representatives did see the real Beijing. Run-down homes and businesses were demolished, and "undocumented" residents were expelled to the countryside. Critics of the regime were placed under house arrest by the police. Shan Chengfeng, wife of imprisoned dissident Wu Yilong, was shipped to a forced labor camp for threatening to appeal to the IOC on his behalf. And so on.
When he left Beijing, Hein Verbruggen of the Netherlands, chairman of the IOC evaluation committee, announced himself "most impressed with the level of professionalism of the bid committee." Verbruggen's only stated concern was China's intention to conduct the Olympic beach volleyball competition in Tiananmen Square, where hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators were massacred in 1989. Inappropriate? No, too far away from the Olympic housing complex China plans for the athletes.
Please, President Bush. Just say no.